Friendship Day 2021: A journey of 10 years of friendship from College Canteen to building Yocket

New Delhi : True friendships are not made on purpose, they are made by the bond which one individual shares with another. A friend is one who not only stands for another friend but owns every responsibility for that person very bravely. 

Every year we hear some phenomenal friendship stories and just like that today we have three friends, Sumeet Jain, Kashyap Matani and Tumul Buch co-founded Yocket out of a burning mutual passion. They are known to not only respect each other personally but support each other's decisions professionally. It is the reason they have created a humongous impact in the industry owing to their commitments, friendship values, and loyalty. From spending college days till working together as fellow mates is always an imaginable task and indeed Co-Founders of Yocket have made it true in the lives of thousands of students dreaming to study abroad for higher education. In an exclusive conversation with NewsHeads, Sumeet Jain, Co-founder at Yocket talk about his fruitful journey with Tumul and Kashyap along with Yocket’s growth.  Excerpts:

1) Please throw some light on how the three of you met each other for the first time. And how did the journey start?

Before being fellow co-founders, we have been engineers from the 2011 batch of Dwarkadas Jivanlal Sanghvi College of Engineering, one of the premier institutes in Mumbai, where we first met each other. It was during our college days that we decided to launch something together. We started our journey with Stupidsid which transformed into Yocket in 2015 and today it is India’s largest platform for study abroad aspirants. We have faced the issues which we were trying to solve by Stupidsid and Yocket. The journey started as a bunch of friends coming together and enjoying, which became a full-blown thriving business later.

2) Apparently, whose idea was it to start a venture like Yocket that helps so many study abroad aspirants?

I still remember spending time together, discussing ideas and suddenly one idea came to our mind of a study abroad platform. We never used to sit in a room and thought about what to do, we used to travel and brainstorm ideas together on our trips to accomplish the best of the best. Honestly, we were not very academic-oriented students, so one day we all were sitting in the canteen and there we came up with the idea. So indeed, it was a team effort because we were blessed to have our friends to help us validate the idea. Today through Yocket, we offer one-stop solutions to students planning to study abroad. We do provide services to the students right from GRE to shortlisting to VISA applications to a soft landing. It also includes help with Loans, Forex and Accommodation. Notably, we have a team of 120 talented minds and we are looking to hire 300 employees by the end of 2021. We have registered more than 4,00,000 students unlike other players in the industry and tied-up with 150 international universities from the US, Canada, UK & Hong Kong.

3) How much was the initial investment for the startup by you three?

We put a great deal of time into the organization. We remember investing just the sum of less than Rs 10,000 for hosting the website, owning a domain and getting started. It was a couple of hundreds for each individual. But we followed one rule, whatever money we generated from our company we invested it back and that was the road to success.

4) How do you all envision Yocket in the future?

Today, Yocket has grown so faster that we have achieved high-end results of one year in just one quarter. If 100 students are going abroad, then 70 students belong from Yocket. Our strong R&D and the process of guiding students in shaping their study abroad dreams are the biggest strengths of Yocket. We have witnessed immense growth and uncountable interest from students willing to study abroad than last year. So, every year Yocket is growing and will continue growing as no other player has a similar data and community like us.