← Back to portfolio
Case study · flagship work

How I built the operational backbone of an EdTech 0→1.

Company: Gamify EduTech, Hyderabad.
Role: Founding member & Ops Manager · reported to CEO · 2022 - 2026.
Scope: Team building (0→20+), process design, automation, founder offloading, multi-crore ARR ops.

0 → 20+
Team built
3-day → 3-hr
Onboarding
10×
Learner growth
95%
Automation success rate
1 · The chaos
Q1 2022 · joining month
  • 3 manual workflows running in 3 separate sheets - sales, content, delivery - none reconciled.
  • Onboarding a new student took 3 days end-to-end (credentials, materials, kickoff).
  • No hiring funnel - every new role started with a blank doc and ad-hoc interviews.
  • Founder spent ~12 hrs/week on ops triage that wasn't decision-making.
2 · The system
Q2 2022 - Q4 2023 · 18-month build
  • Designed a single source of truth: one Google Sheet master with normalised IDs across student, batch, content, team.
  • Built a Sheets → Apps Script → WhatsApp Business API pipeline that ships credentials, batch links, and reminders automatically - 95% delivery success.
  • Wrote SOPs for hiring (intake form → 4-stage interview → 30/60/90), onboarding (template ladder), and quarterly performance reviews.
  • Stood up a CRM (HubSpot) + Slack handoffs that let sales close without pinging delivery, and let delivery resolve issues without pinging the founder.
  • Created the Founder's Office cadence: weekly investor update doc, monthly board prep, quarterly OKR rollup.
3 · The outcome
2024 - 2026 · ongoing
  • Onboarding cycle: 3 days → 3 hours. 24× faster, with fewer escalations.
  • Team scaled 0 → 20+ across sales, content, support, delivery - using the hiring funnel I built.
  • Learner network grew ~10× (≈2k → 20k+) in the same window - ops was no longer the bottleneck.
  • Founder reclaimed ~10 hrs/week of decision-making time - measurable via calendar audits.
  • Multi-crore ARR scope managed without ops breaking - through Series A.
  • Workflows are still running two years after I designed them. They outlasted my involvement, by design.
Stack used
Google Workspace · Apps ScriptHubSpot CRMWhatsApp Business APINotion · Slack · AsanaZapier / Make automationsSQL · basic analytics

What I'd do differently

  • Invest in proper data warehousing earlier - by year 3 the Sheets master was 40k+ rows and queries got slow. A Postgres + Metabase rollout in year 2 would have paid off.
  • Hire a second ops person at 10 teammates, not 15. Single-threaded ops is a bus factor risk.
  • Document decisions, not just processes. The 'why' behind a SOP is more useful than the SOP itself when the situation changes.

Building a YC-backed or Series A startup and need someone to run this play for you?

Book a 30-min chat