In 2015, when we were working on our first startup iPleaders, we needed to hire very good lawyers to train our students because we were trying to build the world’s best legal education company. But it became impossible given the tiny budget we had.
Good lawyers earn a lot. Why will they come work for us? Even if we could match their earnings they did not want to leave their thriving career and practice to work with us.
And to top it all, we had very little budget as a bootstrapped company. Big law firms were paying the kind of lawyers we wanted to hire 2 lakhs per month. Our budget was Rs 25000 per month, which we could stretch to Rs 30,000, but no more.
On top of that we were a small unheard of company, running out of a tiny office. People did not work with a company that had no brand name.
So what would we do? Will our dream become a nightmare? Were we going to fail?
It was hard to match the budget of funded startups and large companies.
We were spending a lot of time hiring – we spent hours interviewing and speaking to talented candidates about our company and the future, many would not join as they would not be convinced about the future of the company.
Many of our hires would quit after they realised that they are expected to take a high-level of ownership and responsibility – it is not like working in a big company.
Many people left after getting trained with us, for brand name jobs with reputed employers that paid them 2x-3x of their current salaries.
How can we grow if this keeps happening?
This is how it is for most early stage startups.
Nobody wants to work with them.
When they are successful everyone wants to work for them.
How did we solve our hiring problem?
That is when we decided to try and hire work-from-home women remotely.
We realised there were women who quit their legal practice or career despite being very successful, because they wanted to be more available for their families.
They didn’t want to go to an office everyday, commuting for hours. But they were ready to work from home, only such jobs back in 2012-2018 were very hard to find.
We decided to narrow down our focus on hiring women who wanted to work from home due to family reasons.
Not only teaching law, we decided to hire from that background in all areas of our company – from customer support to tech, from marketing to sales.
This strategy worked exceedingly well, as women working from home went on to build teams and lead the expansion of our work.
Today, Addictive Learning Technology Private Limited owns 3 brands – LawSikho, Skill Arbitrage and DataIsGood. We employ over 600 full time employees and consultants, located in 8 countries and 4 continents!
We are a listed company thanks to a blockbuster IPO in January 2024. Since we launched Addictive Learning in 2018, we have doubled or tripled our revenue every single year, despite no outside funding till we did our IPO!
What is our secret?
Work from home & hiring women from small towns.
We have around 62% women in our workforce, 60% from small cities. Not only women, we now hire men also who want to work from home!
We are able to be very picky today about who we hire. We get 100 applications or more for every open position. We can insist on hiring the best of the best in a relatively lower budget because we can work remotely while most of our competitors cannot.
Do you still think that working from home is inferior to working from an office?
LawSikho was recognised as the #1 legal edtech company globally by Tracxn in 2023 amongst 135 active competitors.
The 2nd and 3rd ranked companies are in New York and Brazil, and stand nowhere close to us.
Here is media coverage in Economic Times:
In December 2022, we started Skill Arbitrage to enable Indian professionals to benefit from remote work and talent arbitrage.
We launched training programs across 12 professional and categories, including work from home women, which is amongst our most successful programs.
Here is coverage of Skill Arbitrage placements in the first 6 months itself!
In the last 12 months, we provided work worth INR 4 crores to our learners.
In August last year we had acquired DataIsGood, an edtech company which delivers data science courses, whose founder had a track record of plac
In January this year, we did an IPO on the NSE SME board, and it was massively oversubscribed by more than 270 times!
At the time of writing this, our market cap is 461 crores.
Work from home women led this growth.
You might have read the journey of work from home moms, Komal Shah & Priyanka Karwa that we sent earlier. Here’s a link in case you missed it.
Here are women who have been pillars to the growth of our company
Shweta Devgan was studying with her husband for the UPSC exam. Her husband cleared the exam and became an IAS Officer but she was unable to clear it despite reaching the interview stage. She decided not to attempt the exam again so that she could be with her family.
Initially, she had taken up an office job while he was posted in a big city but later had to shift to Himachal Pradesh.
She worked remotely with us as she lived in Shimla and other districts of Himachal for several years, building the test prep division for our legal brand LawSikho. She was key to building our testprep vertical and set it up from ground zero. She now works in the online dispute resolution domain, still remotely, with a Bangalore based startup.
The team is now headed by Garima Chopra, who also reached the interview stage for the judiciary exams, but she prefers to work from home in Raipur so that she can live with her family. She did not find equivalent in-office opportunities locally, and finds teaching and enabling other lawyers to become judges much more inspiring than being a judge herself!
Our judiciary course is anchored by Resham Rana, a former judge in Delhi, who married an army officer and had to quit her job – she now works from Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan!
Women are working in almost every department in our company, leading extremely effective teams that contribute to thousands of our learners every month – from content creation, evaluation of our students’ assignments, delivery, quality check, and even finance & HR!
Rashi Jyotishi was working at BSE India when she got married and had to quit her job. In 2019, she was looking to find remote legal opportunities, she even taught pro-bono at an Army School, and eventually joined us as an evaluator.
Today, she leads the team which performs a quality check of nearly 5k assignments submitted by our learners every month!
Meet Sapna Sarda, a professional who was working in Pune but had to shift back to Nagpur to live with her family. As she could not find well-paying jobs, she started creating courses with us. Today, she heads our student success team of 10 people, which is one of the three teams that obtain freelance opportunities for our learners.
After her marriage she shifted to Bangalore but continues to work remotely with Addictive Learning Technology Limited!
Here is Sonali Parashar, who joined us as an associate in the content team, and now heads the content creation team that writes course content for 85+ courses at Skill Arbitrage & LawSikho, from Sagar, a Tier 3 location in Madhya Pradesh near Bhopal! She lives with her husband who works at SBI.
Here is Priyanka Sinnarkar, an Indian professional who got married to a techie who works at a major car manufacturer in Italy and lives in a small town in Italy!
As she has an Indian qualification and cannot work in Italy, she would have had to give up her career or work part-time at a restaurant, where she could not utilise her full potential.
She instead chose to work remotely at Skill Arbitrage, and heads a vertical of several courses at Skill Arbitrage!
It has been about 4 years since she joined, and she and her husband have pooled their earnings to a villa in a small beachtown in Italy!
Even the finance team is led by Abha Saxena, a woman who lives in Pune with her husband and 2 kids. She joined us remotely as a finance executive when we started Addictive Learning Technology Limited in 2018 with an initial capital of just INR 10k!
She could not pursue office jobs there as she had to take care of her family.
She has 2 daughters and is the Deputy Director for Finance at Addictive Learning Technology Limited.
Here is Harman Kaur, our Chief People Officer. She is an HR professional from the hospitality background but had to work from home to support her husband, who also works in the hospitality sector and her two children.
She has scaled our organisation from 135 to 600+ strength in almost 3 years and maintained extremely low attrition!
She leads our HR team of 15 people! She was earlier working from Ahmedabad but has now moved to Bangalore owing to her husband’s work but continues to work remotely with Skill Arbitrage.
Most of the people who joined us have grown about 3x to 5x in 4-5 years, and some of them have even secured equity that is worth a few crores after our IPO!
This problem is not just in India but all over the world!
Meet Olena Demirel, our Facebook marketer, who lives in a small town in Turkey and manages all our Facebook ad campaigns remotely! She does not have equivalent opportunities accessible to her locally.
These are just a few of the women who are pillars of our success – there are many more!
We are tremendously grateful to all the women who are working with us for their contribution.
Here are 5 unique traits that we noticed about work from home women:
- They worked harder and were more productive than many people who were working from offices despite working from home
- They had superior problem-solving skills
- They were more customer-focussed than the usual talent available in the market
- They were open to taking additional responsibilities without reference to their existing degrees or qualifications
- On a day-to-day basis, they frequently went beyond their immediate role to create customer delight, which enabled us to have raving fans & supporters rapidly and grow faster
Today, of course, although we are able to attract talent, we prefer to hire people from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and countries where the costs are lesser in remote positions, especially work-from-home mothers.
However, we are sad that this opportunity is not available to others because in India the remote work revolution did not last longer than the pandemic and it was quickly rolled back.
We know what a force of nature you are, and once you get the opportunity you will change the world.
What can we do to create a world where you have equal opportunity?
That is why we dream of a day when no Indian woman will have to sacrifice her career in order to raise a family, or struggle in low-paying jobs – because they will have so many lucrative remote work options available.
Remote work has made it possible for Indian women to work remotely with international clients, where you have a cost advantage.
Today, less than 20% of Indian women of working age are able to participate in the workforce due to absence of lucrative opportunities in the domestic market, personal reasons, discrimination, unequal pay and glass ceilings, and of course, the compulsion to work from office!
We visualise a day when Indian women, including work-from-home mothers, single parents, people who quit their jobs, or never had the opportunity to work, will be the pillars of growth for global startups, SMEs and professionals all over the world, powered by remote work, talent arbitrage and AI-driven tools.
It is now easier than ever before, and even more necessary.
The AI revolution is accelerating this transition.
Can you imagine what will happen if 1 lakh Indian women are able to work for global startups and assist them with AI-driven automation remotely from their homes?
The time is right. The stars have aligned.
This will be the ultimate disruption.