Amit Ratan.

My work with India's coaching ecosystem did not begin in a boardroom. It began in 2016 in Allahabad — now Prayagraj — watching individual coaching teachers struggle with the same problem, day after day. They were brilliant at teaching. They were invisible at marketing.

The contrast was stark. Big coaching institutes had advertising budgets large enough to reach every student in the city — but their faculty was often mediocre, and their fees felt like extraction. The individual teacher next door — a genuine subject expert — could deliver the same outcome at one-tenth the price. But almost no one knew he existed. Referral and word-of-mouth were his entire marketing channel.

I lived this firsthand. I was a student of G.N. Singh, a Polity teacher in Prayagraj. He was an outstanding educator with a structural problem he could not personally fix — he had the teaching, but not the reach. Watching him made me realise something larger: this was not a "G.N. Singh problem." It was every individual educator's problem across India. And someone had to build the missing layer.

Big coachings had marketing budgets but mediocre faculty. Individual teachers had brilliant teaching but no reach. Both sides knew it. Nobody had built the bridge.

— The 2016 observation

In 2018, I officially founded AllCoaching. The first version was a simple two-page website — a coaching directory. The home page listed Prayagraj's coaching institutes by category. Click a coaching name, and a clean profile page opened with everything a student needed: institute name, address, mobile number, banner, batch schedules (when each batch starts, when it ends), and an embedded YouTube demo video. Educators could update everything themselves from a dashboard.

My friend Mangal Yadav and I went to work. Within months we had listed over 90% of Allahabad's coaching institutes on AllCoaching. Educators started receiving leads. The directory was working — the missing discovery layer existed, in primitive form, for the first time.

Then it collapsed. The developer I had hired refused to continue building. I did not know how to code the system myself. The site fell apart. AllCoaching v1 ended in 2018 itself — not because the idea was wrong, but because I lacked the technical resilience to keep it alive.

What did not collapse was the underlying mission. From 2019 onwards I helped individual educators with digital marketing in any way I could — running ads, building landing pages, advising on conversion, handling distribution. Every educator I worked with reinforced the same insight: the bottleneck was never teaching quality. It was always distribution.

Then COVID hit. India's educators all went online at once. Personal-app vendors — companies selling each teacher a private branded app — moved fast and dominated. By 2021, every serious educator had been sold a "your own app" story. By 2023, India had over 3.5 lakh isolated personal teaching apps. Most students gave up trying to find good educators across all those installs. The mohalla coaching problem had successfully digitised — just bigger, and worse.

I watched this happen for four years. The personal-app paradigm was a tactical fix to a pandemic emergency. But the industry had crowned it as the strategic answer. Nobody was building the marketplace layer — because the companies positioned to do so were also the companies whose business model depended on selling more individual apps. The fix had to come from outside that model.

From 2021, I committed every ounce of capacity to building the real AllCoaching. I failed hundreds of times. Each prototype taught me something the next had to fix. I did not want to release another "okay" platform into a market already drowning in them. The goal was to launch India's masterpiece educator infrastructure — or nothing.

Five years went into product development. Five years of architectural decisions, AI-recommendation tuning, payment infrastructure, anti-piracy work, marketplace ranking algorithms, branded educator spaces that sit on top of a shared discovery substrate. In 2026, India's first edtech marketplace — AllCoaching — went live in its final form.

It carries every lesson from the last ten years inside it. The marketplace solves the discovery layer that v1 attempted in 2018. The branded educator space solves what personal-app vendors get right (identity ownership). The AI recommendation engine solves what neither does — automatically getting an educator's content in front of the exact students that content was made for. The educator's only job is to teach. Everything else — discovery, payments, compliance, infrastructure, distribution — AllCoaching handles.

Coaching ka astitva marketplace me hi sambhav hai. Personal apps mohalle ki coaching ka digital version hain — bina marketing ke usar nahi aate, aur fragmentation se students gum jaate hain. AllCoaching is the architecture that fixes both — at the same time.

— The 2026 thesis

That is what I have spent the last ten years working on.
That is what AllCoaching is.