My Work-experience

on working with “This is Marketing” team of Passionately Curious

Where to even start? I have learnt so many things, in this not so short but also not so long span of 2–3 months while working with Saurabh Mithal, the founder of Passionately Curious.
Passionately Curious, is an educational brand, focusing on providing personalized guidance and mentorship to college-student aspiring to do MBA.

I’m currently working with him on the marketing front of Passionately Curious. Currently our Marketing goal is to take 30–50 admissions for the graduating batch of 2023(college students who are going to graduate in 2023), and to make that possible we are working on to make our organization visible to audience that we want to reach, top college students, who are ambitious.
It might sound very simple that since we have certain end-goal, we are working for meeting that endgoal, but the story is not that simple. From identifying what we want to do, to taking action steps to make our goal reality is an effort-consuming but rewarding process.

Having a clear idea that what we want, identifying ways to make ‘what we want’ possible and thus defining an end-goal is an indispensable part of process that we employ at “This is Marketing” team of Passionately Curious.

In case of Passionately Curious, Saurabh does not want to keep selling the MBA preparation — he want to make Career Design a product that he can sell — because this is what he want to do. And for making it possible, firstly he need to have financial security so that he won’t have anxiety about not having money, while developing and delivering the Career Design product. Also, he need money so that he can keep on learning, keep on becoming better so that he can keep teaching his students better and practical stuff, that they actually need in today’s world, to be truly independent. For earning that money, he have a system that is helping students with MBA preparation, offering profile and portfolio building with it and doing Career Design as side-project. Thus currently, the end-goal of Passionately Curious is to sell MBA Mentorship program to those 30–50 students, who resonate with us, who are open-minded and ready to trust Passionately Curious and learn from Saurabh.
Now let’s take a look that how we work at Passionately Curious which is more or less, what I have learnt while working –

Removing the Ambiguity

By Removing ambiguity what I mean is taking a idea, identifying what are the steps needed to make that idea turn into reality from a possibilty, going deep into what each step need and thus making that step tangible, something that we can do rather than something that we are thinking. In a nutshell removing ambiguity from a certain task means, having a clear idea of what we want(I think it is fine if sometime we do not know what end-product looks like, but we do have a sense of direction where we are heading) and identifying tangible action-steps to achieve a certain goal.
For example — At Passionately Curious, we have decided to take all the admissions needed for 2023 batch till the month of December at the starting, then we had this idea of trying to get all this needed admissions till September. And we found that this step is actually actionable if we try to find proper ways to present our service before an audience that have great possibility of being our customers that we can resonate with.
Thus came this idea of Bootcamp (from Shourya, an student at Passionately Curious). We thought of doing this 2-week Bootcamp, instead of doing a 1-hour/45 minutes, every Sunday. So that we can interact with our leads for a longer duraction and interact with them properly and can have a closing with them.
From Sunday workshop, the result wasn’t the one that was desired, thus there was this change in approach, since we have a safety net to fall back, even if new-approach doesn’t work as desired, we can always go back to previous approach or try out an new approach embodied with learnings of our failure.
To make this bootcamp possible, we started with removing ambiguity, writing down all the thoughts that were there on mind, identifying what we need.

Lead Generation

We found that promoting the Bootcamp in proper manner would be our priority as we have the content that is unbeatable but since we were not able to promote our workshops properly, the registrations and thus attendance for weekly workshops were quite low and thus our visibility among potential customers was quite low. From our previous workshops, we have identified that if placement-cell or any society of our college promotes our workshop within student body then the attendance in workshop is quite a number. So for bootcamp promotion we reached out to placement cells of different colleges and coordinated with them to promote the bootcamp between the student body.
Next step(more of an integration to first step of Lead Generation) was to ensuring that we are directly connected with our leads (the students who have registered for bootcamp). For keeping the track of leads and for connecting with them and sending the resources and messages, we are primarily using Ontraport( and WhatsApp to some extent).

Next come the idea of identifying priority, what is needed to be done and what is irrelevant

Prioritizing

This is a concept that has helped us make our working hours effective. Having our priorities straighten out, make us focused. For example, let’s say, priority for day is to making program details for our website then, whole focus is on identifying how to present what we do in our progem, on our website. We are not saying that since we have identitified that how to present stuff then let’s send email to all leads about what we do(obviously we can also do that), because sending email to all leads is not our priority right now.

Empathizing with our Customers and potential customers

All the stuff that I have written earlier, is possible only when we empathize with the people that we want to work for, our target audience, the potential customers.
In the book “This is Marketing”, written by Seth Godin, empathy is shown as one of the biggest pillar of marketing. Empathy works like guiding star on our way of doing marketing. What we know about Empathy is being in other person’s shoes and seeing the world as they see, but empathy is more than that, it is about hearing their voice, and having a system which can create more value than they know they need.

Soul of Passionately Curious marking team, lies in empathy. The founder, Saurabh Mithal has a very clear idea, that whatever we are doing should be in best interest of students and he does those things for students that no one had guided him upon when he was a college student. And thus he creates the value, that is actually helpful. Like what he sells is only MBA Mentorship program, but it also includes the career design classes, which helps students to understand career and take steps towards creating their own career.
Empathy is about guiding them on a path that is not at all easy, it is even scary, but necessary for their own betterment. It is like, birth of a new phoenix from the ashes of older one.

Not hesitating in doing experiments or investing in making our customer’s experience better

This approach is a part of empathizing with our customers and potential customers. When we do not hesitate in investing in their growth, our own growth increases leaps and bound.
For example, Saurabh keep investing in his learnings so that he can provide international-level stuff to his students; and the result is he himself have started working(and) for his Career Design book, that he had thought about writing for a long time. And this is just a single example.Saurabh had started using Basecamp for Marketing and Content work 2–3 months back I think, and after some days he introduced it among his students, because he had identified that it will be of great help for student to interact and have a personal space of their own. So, we started using Basecamp for all fronts of Passionately Curious — Marketing, Content, Studying, Teaching etc. And right now if you ask from any of the students to remove basecamp from passionately curious, they will definitely not agree.
And the result of this investment in learning and sharing is that we start becoming better at practically applying the learnings, using the software in a manner that will be productive and make things structed.

The Experience that we want our customers to have

I feel it is the integral part of our marketing, a deep and integral part of our approach. Since one of the fundamental idea at Passionately Curious is to treat students as human beings and not sheep, thus their is this idea of having “Personalized Guidance and Mentorship”. This idea of giving a particular kind of experience to our customers, help us create the culture that we want to create; it defines the boundaries that, who we will serve? What will be the price? What all things we can do for our customers? How to provide that value? What will be the medium of interaction and so on.