Skip to main content
Past student? Your session recordings are still online.
Access Recordings →
LUCADEMY · LUDIFU Academy · 2020–2023

Three Lakh Leads.
Six People.
One System.

Between May 2020 and December 2023 we ran an EdTech company that processed over 3,00,000 leads and converted 6,000+ paid students across 10 subjects. The core team was six people — one founder, one freelance designer, ten professors and three rotating interns. This is how that was possible.

15 May 2020 – Dec 2023Operating period
Mumbai, IndiaBase of operations
3,00,000+ leadsProcessed end to end
Times of IndiaPage 2, Aug 2020
3,00,000+
Leads processed
6,000+
Paid students
10
Subjects taught
6
People on the team
As featured in The Times of India Page 2 · Mumbai Edition · 25 August 2020
The Scale

What Three Lakh Leads
Actually Means.

Three hundred thousand people raised their hand over three and a half years. Every one of them had to be captured, tagged, messaged, followed up, and either converted or closed out. That is the number most EdTech case studies quietly leave out.

~235
Leads entering the system every single day, for 1,300 straight days
50,000
Leads per team member — if it had been split evenly across all six
30
People a manual operation of this size would ordinarily require

"At three lakh leads, automation stops being an efficiency play. It becomes the only reason the business exists at all."

The Team

Now Count the
People.

Three lakh leads. Six thousand paid students. Ten subjects running in parallel for three and a half years. Here is the entire operation that carried it.

1
Founder
Operations, marketing, sales, professor relations, intern management, product and support. One person sat at the centre of every single one of these.
1
Freelance Designer
Every creative asset for every campaign, across all ten subjects. Not full-time. Not in-house.
10
Professors
Subject experts teaching live cohorts. Each one coordinated directly with the founder — scheduling, content, student issues, everything.
3
Interns at a time
Rotating every three months, on-site from late 2020 once offices reopened. Three people, permanently in training, permanently being replaced.
Core team at any given moment
6
handling
Leads processed end to end
3,00,000+
The Multiplier

And Then There Were
Four Thousand More.

The six-person core did not find three lakh leads on its own. Over three years, LUDIFU ran a remote internship programme that more than 4,500 people passed through.

They were spread across the country. They learned outreach, marketing and communication by actually doing it — carrying LUDIFU's name into colleges, communities and networks the core team could never have reached from Mumbai.

Running a distributed group at that scale is its own operational problem. Every cohort had to be onboarded, briefed, tracked and supported. That coordination ran through the same automation built for students — and through the same one person.

4,500+
People through the internship programme over three years
~4
New interns onboarded every single day, on average
1
Person coordinating all of it, alongside everything else
The Founder

One Person Was
the Entire Middle.

Most companies grow a management layer. LUDIFU never did. It had a founder instead.

Look at the structure again. Ten professors, none of whom worked with each other. A freelance designer, external. Three interns on rotation, always new. Four and a half thousand remote interns, scattered across the country. Six thousand paying students expecting live classes to start on time.

None of those groups talked to each other. Every one of them talked to Puneet Rawat.

Professors
Designer
On-site interns
Remote interns
Students
Payments
Marketing
Support
↓
One founder

Class schedules, content sequencing, professor availability, student escalations, payment failures, campaign briefs, intern onboarding, lead follow-up. Every department in a normal company — coordinated by a single person, all day, for three and a half years.

"He didn't build a company that could run without him. He built systems so it wouldn't need anyone else."

This is where the automation stops being a technical story and becomes a survival one. Every process handed to a system was a process removed from one person's day. Not to save money — to make the thing possible at all.

By the time it closed in December 2023, LUDIFU Academy had taught over 6,000 paying students, been featured in the Times of India, and run for three and a half years — without ever hiring a manager.

The Context

Built Inside a Lockdown.

In May 2020 the country shut down, classrooms emptied, and a generation of learners suddenly had time but nowhere to spend it.

The idea did not arrive as a business plan. The pandemic had stalled the family coffee table book printing firm — a business as old as the founder himself — and the photo album work alongside it. Looking for what to do next, founder Puneet Rawat found the answer inside his own house: his mother had been learning Excel from a tutor, and his wife suggested teaching Excel and PowerPoint online.

The first live workshops went out on 15 May 2020, mid-lockdown, priced between ₹200 and ₹1,799. Within three months there were over 400 students, most of them under 23.

We started LUDIFU Academy with a simple premise: online learning did not have to mean watching a pre-recorded video alone. Every session we ran was live and interactive — a real instructor, a real classroom, real questions answered in the moment.

Around that core we built the things that actually make learning stick: weekly doubt-solving sessions where students brought their stuck points, assignments that forced application rather than passive watching, and hands-on projects that gave every learner something real to show at the end.

Course fees ranged from ₹1,000 to ₹15,000 depending on depth and duration — deliberately positioned so a college student and a working professional could both find something that fit.

Data AnalyticsPython CodingPower BI Digital MarketingGoogle AdsExcel SQLTableauInterview & CV SkillsEnglish Communication
The Arc

Three and a Half Years.

15 May 2020
Day one
Excel and PowerPoint, live on Zoom
The first workshops launch mid-lockdown at ₹200–₹1,799, taught by his mother's own Excel tutor. Everything — registration, payment, reminders — is handled by hand.
Late 2020
The bottleneck
Manual stops scaling
Demand outgrows the team. Chasing leads, sending links, confirming payments and answering the same questions consumes the entire day. It becomes obvious that hiring more people is not the answer.
Aug 2020
Press · 400+ students
Featured in the Times of India
Coverage in the Mumbai edition on live e-workshops as an emerging pandemic business model. By this point over 400 students had come through, and the plan was already to expand the subject list outward.
2021 – 2022
Build phase
Automate the entire journey
Lead capture, registration, payments, class links, reminders, student and professor communication — each step is systematically removed from human hands and handed to automation.
2022 – 2023
Scale
Six thousand paid students
Ten subjects running in parallel with a core team of six. The systems, not the staff count, carry the load.
Dec 2023
Close of chapter
The lockdown cohort moves on
With classrooms and offices open again, the conditions that created the opportunity had changed. The systems and learnings carried forward into everything LUDIFU builds today.
The Core Result

A Team of Six Doing
the Work of Thirty.

Three lakh leads. Ten subjects running in parallel. Live cohorts with fixed schedules. Every person had to be found, informed, registered, paid up, reminded, taught, supported and followed up. Done by hand, that is roughly a thirty-person operation.

We ran it with six.

Manual equivalent
30
People needed to run lead management, registrations, payments, reminders and support by hand
→
What we actually ran
6
Core team, with automation carrying every repeatable step of the student journey

"The moment a task repeats itself more than twice, it stops being work and starts being a system waiting to be built."

The Engine

What Actually Got
Automated.

This is the part people ask about. Not the marketing, not the funnel — the machinery. Below is every process that was taken out of human hands between 2020 and 2023, and what replaced it.

01

Lead Capture & Marketing Automation

Every enquiry — from ads, social posts, the intern network or word of mouth — landed in one system automatically. Tagged by source, by subject interest, by stage. No lead sat in an inbox waiting to be noticed, and no lead was worked twice by two different people.

Lead routingSource attributionAuto-taggingDuplicate detection
02

WhatsApp Automation

The single highest-leverage system in the business. India runs on WhatsApp, so the entire student conversation lived there — course details, schedules, payment links, session joins, reminders and follow-ups, all delivered automatically and at scale. An instant WhatsApp reply consistently outperformed a considered email sent hours later.

Broadcast messagingAutomated repliesDrip sequencesTwo-way routing
03

Registration & Payment Flow

A student could go from first enquiry to enrolled without a single human conversation. Self-serve registration, automatic payment link generation, reconciliation on receipt, and instant access to the class group and materials once payment cleared. Failed payments triggered their own recovery sequence.

Self-serve signupPayment linksAuto-reconciliationFailed payment recovery
04

Class Notifications & Reminders

Ten subjects running in parallel, each with its own cohort, schedule and instructor. Session links, timing changes and reminders went out before every single class without anyone pressing send. Attendance rose measurably once reminders became automatic rather than remembered.

Session linksPre-class remindersSchedule change alertsCohort segmentation
05

Assignment Tracking & Nudges

Assignments were where students quietly dropped off. Automated nudges flagged pending submissions, chased overdue work and reminded students before doubt-solving sessions so they arrived with actual questions. Completion is what turns an enrolment into a testimonial.

Submission trackingOverdue nudgesDoubt-session promptsProgress flags
06

Certificate Generation

Six thousand paid students and thousands more free-workshop attendees, each expecting a certificate with their own name on it. Generated and issued automatically on completion — same day, no queue, no manual design work, no one typing names into a template at midnight.

Auto-generationSame-day issueName personalisationBulk delivery
07

Professor Coordination

Ten subject experts, none of whom worked with each other, each needing schedules, cohort details, attendance and student escalations. Systems handled the routine flow so the founder's time with each professor went to the things that actually needed judgement.

Schedule syncCohort handoffAttendance reportsEscalation routing
08

Intern Network Management

Four and a half thousand remote interns over three years, joining continuously, spread across the country. Onboarding, briefing, task assignment and tracking all ran through the same automated backbone built for students — which is the only reason a network that size was manageable by one person.

Rolling onboardingTask distributionActivity trackingCohort comms

Eight systems. One founder. What remained human were the two things that could not be automated — teaching well, and handling the exceptions.

The Honest Numbers

From 3,00,000
to 6,000.

Most EdTech case studies show the top-line number and stop there. The more useful story is the shape of the drop — because it is brutal, it is normal, and it is the entire reason the operation had to be automated. Figures below are approximate, based on the ranges we tracked throughout.

LeadsSomeone raised their hand
~3,00,000
100%
Registered30–50% never completed this step
~1,80,000
~60%
Attended the demo30–50% of registrations never showed up
~1,08,000
~36%
Stayed to the end15–20% dropped off midway
~87,000
~29%
Paid studentsThe only number that mattered
6,000+
~2%

Why this matters: a 2% conversion is not the interesting part — that is roughly industry standard. The interesting part is that the other 98% still had to be captured, contacted, reminded and followed up. Two lakh ninety-four thousand people who never paid us a rupee still consumed operational capacity. Handling that with six people is the whole story.

What We Took Away

Five Things That
Actually Held True.

01
Headcount is not capacity
Adding people to a repetitive process adds coordination cost, not output. The same six people handled ten times the volume once the repeatable steps were automated. The constraint was never how many hands we had.
02
Drop-off is not failure
A 2% conversion sounds alarming until you accept it as the baseline and build for it. Once we stopped trying to fix the percentage and started feeding the funnel properly, the absolute numbers moved.
03
Speed beats polish in follow-up
An instant automated reply consistently outperformed a thoughtful human reply sent four hours later. Attention has a short shelf life, especially when someone is browsing five options at once.
04
Live is the differentiator
Recorded content is a commodity. What people paid for was a real person, in real time, answering their specific question. Everything else could be automated precisely because the teaching could not be.
05
The demo is the product
More than half the funnel resolved before anyone saw a payment page. The free session was not marketing for the course — for most people, it was the entire basis on which they decided.
→
Where it went next
The automation thinking from these years became the foundation for Clicarity and WA.Expert. And the printing business that the pandemic paused is still here — it is LUDIFU PhotoBooks today.
In the Press

Page Two of the
Times of India.

On 25 August 2020 the Times of India ran the first story in a series on Mumbaikars who had found a new line of work during the pandemic. LUDIFU opened the series — on Page 2 of the Mumbai edition.

Printed from THE TIMES OF INDIA

Pandemic throws up germ of a new business model: Live e-workshops

Sharmila Ganesan · The Times of India · 25 August 2020 · Mumbai, Page 2

The story followed a Worli-based entrepreneur whose family coffee table book printing business — a firm as old as he was — had been stalled by the pandemic.

Rather than wait it out, he looked around his own home for the next idea. His mother had been learning Excel from a tutor. His wife suggested teaching Excel and PowerPoint online.

"Innovation is the answer to every difficult situation." Puneet Rawat, Founder
quoted in The Times of India
Puneet Rawat (37) started PowerPoint and Microsoft Excel workshops in May

The first live workshops launched on 15 May 2020, mid-lockdown, priced between ₹200 and ₹1,799.

By the time the article ran three months later, more than 400 students had come through — most of them under the age of 23. The plan, even then, was to expand the subject list outward.

First in a series on Mumbaikars who discovered a new line of work during the pandemic Read the full article on timesofindia.com →

Summary in our own words. Full article © Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. — read it at the source above.

The Curriculum

Ten Subjects.
All Taught Live.

Every one of these ran as a live cohort with a real instructor, weekly doubt-solving, assignments and a hands-on project at the end. Fees ranged from ₹1,000 to ₹15,000 depending on depth and duration.

📊
Data Science with Power BI
Dashboards, data modelling, reporting
🐍
Python for Data Analytics
From first script to real data pipelines
📈
Performance & Growth Marketing
Campaigns, funnels, measurement
🎯
Google Ads Specialist
Search, bidding, ROI optimisation
🗂️
SQL
Querying, joins, real database work
📐
Tableau
Visual storytelling from data
📉
Data Analytics using Excel
Formulas, pivots, dashboards
⚙️
Macros / VBA
Automating repetitive Excel work
💼
Interview & CV Skills
CV building, mock interviews
🌐
English Grooming Skills
Spoken, written and professional English
For Past Students

Your Recordings Are
Still Online.

Every live session we ran was recorded and uploaded to our Thinkific library. If you studied with us between 2020 and 2023, your sessions are still there — no expiry, no extra cost.

Missed a class, joined late, or want to revise something years later? Log in and watch at your own pace, as many times as you need.

Open Recordings Library →

Hosted on Thinkific · Free for enrolled students

📊
Power BI
30 hrs + 60 bonus
🐍
Python Analytics
30 hrs + 54 bonus
📈
Performance Marketing
30 hrs + 60 bonus
All 10 subjects have recordings — every session, every bonus hour, one library.
Still Available

Training on Request.

We are not running open public batches at the moment. We do still arrange live sessions for companies, teams and groups — with the same instructors who taught these subjects through 2020 to 2023.

📊
Power BI & Analytics
Dashboards, data modelling and reporting — taught the way we ran it for hundreds of working professionals.
📈
Digital Marketing
Performance marketing, Google Ads and the practical landscape, for teams who need to actually run campaigns.
🐍
Python & Data
From first script to real data work. Suitable for complete beginners or teams upskilling into analytics.
Send a Training Enquiry →
From Our Students

Six Thousand People
Came Through. Some Said This.

"The Power BI course completely changed how I present data at work. My manager noticed the difference within the first week. The live Zoom format kept me far more accountable than any recorded course I'd tried before."
R
Riya Shah
Data Analyst · Mumbai
"I was switching from a sales role into data analytics with no idea where to start. The Python course gave me both the confidence and a real project for my portfolio. I got my first data role two months after completing it."
P
Priya Tiwari
Jr. Data Analyst · Bangalore
"I joined a free workshop just to see what LUDIFU was about. Enrolled in the full course the same week. It's genuinely practical, not theoretical — I was applying things at work from day one."
K
Karan Mehta
Marketing Executive · Pune
"What surprised me most was how accessible the instructor was — questions answered during the live session, follow-up after class. That kind of attention is genuinely rare, and at this price point it was exceptional."
A
Arjun Nair
Business Analyst · Delhi

Need Training for
Your Team?

Our instructors are still with us. If your company or group needs live training in any of these subjects — or you just want to talk funnels and automation — send us a note.

Send an Enquiry Explore LUDIFU