Ali Hasan
Introduction
WhiteHat Jr is an Indian startup that was started by Karan Bajaj in 2018. He started this online educational company with a focus on training coding skills in children. Later the company was itself acquired by BYJU’s for a whopping $300 million and as a result, was integrated into BYJUS’s as their coding teaching division.
Everything was going good and from the outside, WhiteHat Jr looked like a normal startup that was emerging as the next big thing. It had raised funding from various investors and was later acquired by a bigger fish. But the good times were over very soon as something fishy was happening in WhiteHat Jr.
A major controversy erupted when they placed ads all over the internet claiming that a young child named “Wolf Gupta” aged 6-14 got placed in Google by learning to code and was given a package of more than Rs 100 crores.
When many people tried to investigate the matter by searching about him on the internet, they found nothing. Moreover, his age was different in various ads and the package that he received was also different. This was an alarming situation as people were confused about what’s true and what’s false.
Today we will talk about the entire controversy along with what’s up with the startup and see what the future holds for them. Read along to know more about them.
Early Days – Karan Bajaj is the founder of WhiteHat Jr and before starting this venture he worked for multiple companies such as:-
- Procter & Gamble,
- The Boston Consulting Group and
- Kraft Foods.
In 2016, he moved to Mumbai as the CEO of Discovery Networks, where he headed many channels such as:-
- Discovery Channel,
- TLC,
- Animal Planet and
- Discovery Kids in the region of South Asia.
But he later left discovery networks and started his own venture aka WhiteHat Jr. He is an MBA from IIM-Bangalore and also has a BA diploma from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra.
WhiteHat Jr Marketing Strategy
Over this website, we often talk about how brands market their products and services but this time, I am confused about how to tell you about the marketing strategy of WhiteHat Jr as it’s really complicated.
Their marketing strategy was aimed at young kids and conveyed a message of how important coding skills are. They wanted to tell parents that if their child could learn coding at a very young age, he could be the next genius in the making.
This wasn’t bad in any manner as coding is an essential skill in the future and will serve its purpose when millions of jobs will be gone due to AI and the people with coding skills will still thrive.
But then a young child named “Wolf Gupta” created a lot of controversies as they claimed he was working at Google earning millions of dollars. This was a clear case of false marketing as no such child existed and no such employee was working at Google either.
Overall, their marketing strategy was misleading and it backfired. It created a lot of controversy and people were not happy. The matter became the talk of the town.
WhiteHat Jr Funding
WhiteHat Jr received a total of $11.3 million in funding over 2 rounds from 3 investors.
The investors are as follows:-
- Omidyar Network
- Nexus Venture Partners
- Owl Ventures
Revenues – WhiteHat Jr was acquired in less than 2 years of starting operations. Their revenue run rates are as follows:-
- June 2020 – $75 million
- July 2020 – $150 million and
- August 2020 – $220 million.
Due to the lockdown, they saw significant growth and were doubling on revenues month-on-month. As per the CEO, they went from Rs 1 crores to Rs 10 crores in revenues.
In terms of revenues, 50% comes from India – with non-metros contributing about 65% and 35% from metros – and 50% from the international markets of the USA, UK, and Australia. WhiteHat Jr also recently expanded to Singapore and New Zealand.
The userBase of WhiteHat Jr
WhiteHat Jr has over 4 million subscribers globally, of whom around 100,000 students are paid subscribers, with the maximum traction being seen from Grade 1-9 and focus on building Grade 10-12.
Acquisitions – WhiteHat Jr didn’t acquire any other startup as they were in business for only 18 months and were later themselves acquired for $300 million by BYJU’s.
Controversies
This is the most important section of this blog and I recommend that you must read it.
The story begins like a movie, once upon a time, there was a child named “Wolf Gupta” who secured a packaged of millions at Google at a very young age. The reason for his success? He knew Coding.
But in reality, there was no such child. It was an imaginary character like Santa Claus and by mistake, WhiteHat Jr forgot to tell us this point. But, the story isn’t over yet. On the internet, there were many ads by WhiteHat Jr claiming different salaries and different ages for the same child.
People were quick to notice and pointed out the web of lies that WhiteHat Jr was claiming. These were the differences in their ads:-
- In an ad, he was 12 earning a salary of Rs 1.2 crores,
- In an ad, he was 13 earning a salary of $1.2 million or Rs 8 crores,
- In another ad, he was 13 and earning a salary of Rs 20 crores &
- In yet another ad, he was 9 and had a ridiculous salary of Rs 150 crores.
- In one ad, they stopped calling the child “Wolf Gupta” and called him “Ryan Venkat”.
All I want to say is, “will the real Wolf Gupta please stand up?”
This is a clear case of false advertising aimed to mislead people and extract their money. After a lot of research by a software engineer named Pradeep Poonia, it was known that there’s no such kid. He couldn’t find a single video, blog or article written upon him. If there was such a kid, he would have been the talk of the town and multiple news outlets must have covered his story but there was simply nothing.
Mr. Poonia made a video about the curious case of Wolf Gupta but the video was taken down very soon by WhiteHat Jr when it had just 10-12 views. Then he messaged a kid on Instagram who had commented on the official page of them. He asked why he was following them. The kid replied to learn to code. Poonia offered the kid some knowledge about how he could learn coding free of cost from some online platforms.
Later the kid asked him whether he gets a job in Google worth millions if he learned coding from them. This made Poonia think that false advertising is playing with the minds of these young kids as they are influenced by earning money which wasn’t even true in the 1st place.
Poonia also stated that we should teach our children how to search for stuff on Google as it’s freely available and a lot can be learned from it. But these companies don’t want students to surf the web as it will hamper their paid products and services.
He also stated that these companies have given a free hand to their salesperson who will claim anything just to get a customer on board. Once he talked to a sales representative about children learning to code and the representative replied that if the child learned coding from them, he will be able to make a full-fledged app in just 6 months all by himself which is practically impossible.
He further asked whether it will be a demo app or a fully working app. The representative replied – it will be a fully working app. This is a huge problem as the people who don’t have the caliber to understand the technicality will fall for it and lose their hard-earned money.
Poonia tried to post the wrongdoings of WhiteHat Jr on every platform possible but they banned or deleted his posts. His posts weren’t the only ones that were deleted. He reported that they had deleted various posts from other people as well.
Following is a list of censorship upon his posts across various platforms:-
- His 17 YouTube videos were taken down,
- 2 YouTube channels have been closed,
- 2 Reddit accounts have been closed,
- 1 Quora account was suspended temporarily,
- The Twitter handle has been closed
- 3 articles on LinkedIn were taken down,
- The LinkedIn account was suspended 2 times.
According to Poonia, they were taking down 100-200 videos and articles each and every month. They were also hiding the user reviews of the parents who complained that their course wasn’t as valuable as they claimed.
He makes a very compelling argument that if a company now becomes successful by false advertising and misleading claims, then other companies will also try to do the same in the future. He believes that today it’s difficult to stop these companies but tomorrow it would be impossible.
In return, Poonia was sued in a defamation case of Rs 20 crores. Later the CEO said that their marketing was wrong. But, Poonia claimed they did it only after they were exposed and surrounded on all sides and the defamation case was simply a tactic used by them to get out of the case clean-handed.
He also claimed that this had a major impact on many parents as they were even ready to take loans for securing a bright future for their children. This can trap a family in debt as their child won’t get a job of millions, as promised in the ads.
ASCI found that 5 of the company’s commercials were in violation of the advertising code, which includes making misleading claims, following which, the company had to pull down the commercials.
Conclusion – Concluding things, all I can say that we need more awareness among the general public and stricter rules for advertising. We also need to protect and respect people like Pradeep Poonia who stood firm and didn’t lose his ground.
We also need to admire that every child is different and not every kid is made for coding. While it’s no doubt that it’s an essential skill that makes an individual valuable, there are many other skills that might suit your child in a more sophisticated way.
Don’t force your child to do something. Every child has his/her own time to blossom and we must remember that every child is unique.
