BYJU's has cut off 800 employees.

Unacademy has cut off 600 employees.

Vedantu has cut off 400 employees.

So, I was curious to know why, suddenly every other edtech giants are going through a "cost cutting" phase. Why is this layoff being a hot topic in the industry? What happened? Why this urge to prioritize cost cutting; especially not caring about employee retention?The industry got extremely lucky in 2020-2021. They started to boom on a massive scale and when people realized its potential, more and more players joined the "easy" gamble. The market got saturated in no time. Now, whenever the entry barrier of an industry decreases, a sudden flooding of startups happen.

In 2022, the rapid boom got a hit when schools reopened and students were no longer glued to their screens 24/7. They went back to their routine life where after a 6 hour school, they take private tuitions or coaching for another 6 hours. They get drained out. Are in need of an escape. Usually, phones and digital platforms are the main media here. They scroll through social media, share a few relatable memes, go to sleep and this cycle turns into a circadian habit. So, naturally you cannot expect them to install an educational app to take another 3 hours of coaching from a digital tutor. What happens here is, this increases the customer acquisition cost for edtechs. Where, the customers are not able to get interested in interesting stuffs anymore. So, no matter how good a course is, catching eyes and getting into people’s bucket list is being harder than ever for the education companies. As a result, companies are forced to spend more into customer acquisition and conversion. And to save cost, they are going nuts with employee lay offs and food and coffee expenses.

But, can aggressive cost cutting actually save the companies? Although it can, it's not sustainable.

The solution here, in my opinion is to understand those circadian habits of your audience. You need to find out what interests them and who interests them. Right now, aggressive marketing with digital ads are just trying to feed 5 star food to un-hungry people. It's sort of unsustainable and uncertain. Digital marketing has reached its peak and social media will be saturated with similar/ competitive ads within this year. So, if you don't build personal (human led) brands, understanding and empathizing with human behaviour, you will be out of time in no time.

The cost of acquisition and conversion will keep increasing as the market will keep getting saturated with freebies and offline coachings will always be the front runners. You won't be able to convince people to buy something unless he/she is a firm believer of your brand. To do so, again, build trust, build persona, build powerful word of mouth. Prioritize human emotions, study human behaviour and then decide where to allocate your expenses and where to cut the costs.