Emversity acquired students almost entirely through paid media — Google Search, PMAX, Meta — at a blended CAC of ₹70K–₹90K. 80% of leads came from paid channels. The model was expensive and left no room for organic compounding.
Field discovery involving 40+ teacher interviews revealed a signal: Teachers were already informally referring students for free, with zero visibility and no trackability. This was a decentralised, untracked, completely unmonetised channel waiting for infrastructure.
This was the core insight: an affiliate distribution channel already existed in the wild — decentralised, informal, and completely unmonetised. It just had no product. We identified three distinct problems to solve: Trust (payout transparency), Fraud (KYC), and Attribution (truth of source).
Founding PM end-to-end. Started with 40+ field interviews with teachers and consultants — not to validate a solution, but to understand why the channel hadn’t formalised on its own. Identified trust as the single biggest blocker. Made the call to build a product-led affiliate engine rather than a manual incentive programme. Designed the PLG loop — seed, refer, earn, compound — and embedded every mechanic into the product itself. Defined the entire platform architecture, owned trade-off decisions on what to build in v1 vs v2 (gamification, leaderboards, multi-level networks were all deferred). Led cross-functional execution with sales, finance, engineering, and operations.