Thread by @shreyans512

Today's newsletter is about a unicorn startup with zero revenue.

It's about Apna.

This is their incredible story👇👇

LinkedIn is a job platform for white-collar employees(coders, designers, etc).

But what about blue-collar employees like receptionists and drivers There are 300 million such employees in India.

Why is there no job platform for them?

This was the question facing @Nirmit_Parikh , a Stanford MBA and former employee of Apple and Intel.

So Nirmit decided to build one himself.

But he soon realized that he knew nothing about the blue-collar market.

So spent many days at a manufacturing site in Ahmedabad, working undercover as a factory worker, so he could better understand this target audience at a deeper level.

While working there, he had an insight: factory workers wanted more than a job platform. They wanted a place to connect with and learn from other workers.

Nirmit found his eureka moment and @apnahq was born!

(fun fact- the name is derived from the phrase "Apna time aayega" from Gully Boy)

Initially, Apna was just a job platform for blue-collar employees where they could find jobs.

Soon, they added a professional networking feature so that people could learn from their peers.

Today, Apna has over 16 million users from India’s emerging working class. Over 150,000 Indian companies including Swiggy, Zomato, and Delhivery use Apna to hire, and over 18 million job interviews take place every month.

But they're not stopping: they are adding upskilling courses inside the app so that workers can learn new skills and apply for better jobs.

Read more about Apna in today's newsletter: shreyanssingh.in/p/the-unicorn-…

Follow @shreyans512 for more insightful threads like this🙌

If you enjoyed reading this thread, please retweet the first tweet so that more people can read this thread👇

https://twitter.com/shreyans512/status/1442003251386142723