Zero users. Zero revenue. Ten people who said yes.
That's the honest starting point.
The ten people — Mruja, Dhvani, Prajval, Sumi, Pranita, Vishal, Srishti, Shraddha, Sumit, Puskar — are the first users. Not beta testers in the abstract. People we know, who trust us, who will tell us the truth about whether this is actually useful.
Everything else in this GTM plan is built on top of whether those ten people use it every day.
The first thing we do is not launch. The first thing we do is sit with those ten people and onboard them personally.
Not send a link. Sit with them. Set up their timetable. Watch them use it. Ask what's confusing. Fix it that day.
This is slow. This is the right kind of slow. The feedback from ten people using the product with a founder watching is worth more than a thousand anonymous downloads.
Goal at the end of Phase 0: 10 people opening Studex every day without being reminded. Not downloads. Daily opens.
The Class Representative is the most underused distribution channel in Indian college GTM.
Every section has one. Their job is to push information from faculty to 50–80 students — on WhatsApp, managing a group, re-sending things people missed, absorbing chaos that should have a structure.
Studex gives the CR that structure. A place to push announcements. A place to drop files. The CR's job gets easier. One CR = one section. One section = 50–80 students through a single relationship.
Approach: know CRs personally at the beachhead college. Approach them as collaborators, not users. "We built something that makes your job easier. Help us make it right."
One college. Ramaiah University, Bengaluru.
Not because we can't think bigger — because density matters more than breadth at this stage. We know this college: the timetable structure, the CR culture, the WhatsApp group dynamics, the portal everyone ignores.
We don't move to the next college until the first one works. "Works" means daily opens, low churn, and at least one or two people mentioning it to a friend unprompted.
No big launch. Launching in ten publications doesn't create daily habits.
No paid ads. Not until we understand which user retains.
No institutional partnerships yet. Bottom-up adoption is faster, cheaper, and more durable.
Daily opens.
Not installs. Not registered users. Not session length. The person who opened Studex this morning to check what they have today. That's the unit of success at this stage.
Kill signal: fewer than 5 of 10 original users opening daily after 4 weeks = rebuild or stop. No ego, no sunk cost.