Taknik Ai

First500days

An idea, and twenty-five admissions a month

TaknikAI came to First500days at ideation with no product and no way to reach a student. Six months later it was a live, profitable AI school running on three platforms, with paid admissions coming in every month.

25

paid admissions per month, from zero

₹7L

per month, the business today

3

platforms: web, Android and iOS

6

months, ideation to profitable

The Clipverse user panel — where viewers watch content and earn from it.

In the founder’s words.

Shivam Pal

Founder, Taknikai

Shivam Pal is the founder of TaknikAI, the Delhi-based venture he describes as an AI school for New Bharat — structured, IIT-alumni-led training in data science, machine learning and generative AI. He brought the idea to First500days at ideation stage, before there was a product, a brand or a single student.

“ I had an idea about how AI should be taught in this country. I did not have a company — no structure, no product, no way for a student to even find us. First500days worked out who we were for and how the business would run, then built the apps and the panel, put the brand into the market and started the paid campaigns. We went from nobody enrolling to twenty-five paid admissions a month, and the business is profitable.

— Shivam Pal · Founder, Taknikai

The full distance, in six months.

TaknikAI is an AI school for New Bharat — a structured, IIT-alumni-led programme in data science, machine learning and generative AI, taught through live classes, hands-on projects and 1:1 mentorship rather than a library of videos nobody finishes. At the start of this engagement none of that existed. Ideation stage: an idea about how the teaching should work, and no business structure, no product and no route to a student. This is the widest brief in the portfolio — strategy, product and go-to-market, all three, over six months. First500days defined the business structure, the model and the ideal customer, then built the product across web, Android and iOS with an admin panel behind it, created the brand presence, and ran the performance marketing that brought the students in. Admissions went from zero to 25 paid admissions a month. TaknikAI is live and profitable, running at ₹7 lakhs a month.

Client

taknikai.com

Sector

EdTech — AI & data skilling

Location

Delhi, India

Stage at start

Ideation

Engagement

Strategy · Product · Go-to-market

Duration

6 months

Everyone is selling an AI course. Almost nobody finishes one.

Attention is the commodity every social platform runs on, yet almost none of its value returns to the people supplying it. Clipverse routes part of it back — advertisers pay for deliberate attention, viewers take a share, and creators supply the content that holds the audience in place.

That makes Clipverse a three-sided platform: each side needs the other two present for the model to work, which shaped what had to be built and in what order.

Nothing but the idea.

Three lines, all empty. This is as close to a standing start as an engagement in this portfolio gets.

Three empty lines is not three times harder than one; it is a different problem, because each gap makes the others harder to close. You cannot market a product that does not exist, or specify one without knowing who it is for. There is only one order in which this gets solved, and the whole engagement is that order.

Three gaps, closed in sequence.

Strategy, then product, then market. Each one is the precondition for the next.

01

Strategy

The challenge

There was an initial idea and nothing structuring it. In a category as crowded as AI education, an idea without a defined customer is indistinguishable from every other course being sold that week.

What we did

We defined the business structuring, the business model, the ideal customer profile, the go-to-market and the product — one connected set of decisions, made before anything was built.

02

Product

The challenge

No product at all. And for a paid programme, the product is not only the teaching — it is the thing a student browses, enrols in, pays through and returns to every week.

What we did

We built the working product: a user application on web, Android and iOS, and a web admin panel to run the school from.

04

Go-to-market

The challenge

No brand and no channel. A student deciding whether to spend real money on a programme looks the school up first, and finding nothing is an answer.

What we did

We developed the brand and built its presence on Instagram and YouTube, then ran the performance marketing that took admissions from zero to 25 a month.

A school a student can carry in their pocket.

User app — Android & iOS

Where a student browses courses, joins the live class, works through lectures and manages what they have paid for.

User app — web

The same school in the browser, for the sessions people would rather take on a laptop than a phone.

Admin panel — web

The operational back end: courses, cohorts, students, payments and the live-class schedule, run from one place.

Admin Panel

Where the company manages users, creators, advertisers, payouts and analytics.

Inside the app the structure is visible on every screen. Courses are browsable by category, priced and paid for in-app; the daily live classes have their own entry point, because the schedule is the product; and the profile carries what a paying student needs — enrolled courses and progress, wallet, cart, notifications and payment history.

Build the reason to trust it, then buy the traffic.

The brand came before the budget. A student about to pay for a programme looks the school up, and what they find has to answer the question the ad raised.

Brand development

Establishing how Clipverse presented itself to an audience being asked to try something structurally unfamiliar.

Performance marketing

Driving acquisition of the first cohort of users onto the live platform.

@taknikai

The presence built during the engagement: student testimonials, placement announcements, skills explainers and programme content, with highlight reels for data science, GenAI notes, certificates and masterclasses. A YouTube channel was built alongside it, carrying 30 published lessons on SQL, Excel, Power BI and web scraping.

3000

107

12 mo.

On numbers: no follower, subscriber, view or engagement figures are claimed for these channels — they are shown as the work produced. The verified go-to-market outcome is the 25 paid admissions per month. The placement and alumni claims that appear inside TaknikAI’s own posts are the client’s, not ours, and are not repeated as fact on this page.

Where the venture stands today.

paid admissions per month, from zero

per month, the business today

₹ 0 L

platforms: web, Android and iOS

months, ideation to profitable

team members

TaknikAI went from an idea with nothing attached to it to a live school with a product on three platforms, a brand in the market and paying students arriving every month. It is profitable. No completion rates, placement figures, student counts or funding figures are claimed on this page, and the curriculum and teaching are the client’s own work. The verified outcomes of this engagement are the strategy, the product, the brand, the 25 monthly paid admissions and the ₹7 lakhs of monthly business, stated as of August 2026.

Six months of difference.

Area

Before

→

After

Business

Ideation

₹7 lakhs per month

Product

None

Live and working, on three platforms

Go to Market

None

Digital presence and a reputation

Admissions

Zero

25 paid, every month

What this proves about doing all three at once.

TaknikAI is the only engagement in this portfolio that ran the whole distance — strategy, product and go-to-market — and it is the one that ends with revenue rather than a milestone. Those two facts are the same fact.

Order is the strategy

Structure, then product, then brand, then spend. Every one of those is cheap to do in sequence and expensive to do out of order — a campaign for a product that does not exist is the most reliable way to spend a budget and learn nothing.

Paid admissions are the only honest metric

Downloads, sign-ups and free trials measure interest, and in education they measure it badly — the gap between wanting to learn AI and paying to learn it is where most EdTech ventures fail. Twenty-five people a month clearing that gap is the number that matters.

Structure is what people pay fo

Recorded content is close to free and behaves like it. What a student pays real money for is the live class on a Saturday, the project that gets reviewed and the mentor who answers. Building the delivery of that structure into the product is what turns a course into a school.

Six months is enough to go from an idea to a profitable business — but only if you do the four things in the order that lets each one pay for the next. Every founder starts at zero — the first 500 days decide what you are standing on at the end of them..

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