Scholaride: Building a Research and Consulting Venture from Scratch
Co-founded and scaled a research and consulting venture, running client acquisition, research design, and delivery end-to-end.
Swastik N.
Private Equity Intelligence - Junior Analyst at Gain
From their time as
Co-Founder
Scholaride • 2023 - 2025
Overview
Swastik co-founded Scholaride at 19 with a clear mandate: build a research and consulting venture that could deliver real outcomes for clients, not just reports.
The Story
Swastik co-founded Scholaride at 19 with a clear mandate: build a research and consulting venture that could deliver real outcomes for clients, not just reports.
He built the team from scratch, eventually scaling to 30-plus members and establishing international collaborations. The client acquisition process was entirely his: identifying prospects, reaching out, converting them into paying clients, and scoping each engagement before delegating work to the team.
His research methodology was structured from the start. For each client, he designed a custom questionnaire to capture objective metrics before any conversation took place. He then conducted a one-hour founder interview to surface the qualitative dimensions the questionnaire could not reach. The combination gave him a complete picture of the business before any recommendation was formed.
One engagement stood out. A digital services startup founded out of IIT Bombay was helping T2 and T3 city businesses establish an online presence. They had traction, but their revenue model had gaps: some streams were consuming more cost than they generated, and others they had not tapped at all. Swastik mapped their total addressable market, segmented it, and identified the specific digital channels and ad streams that matched their customer base. He rebuilt their revenue model and presented the findings across two structured calls with the founding team.
The founder was initially resistant. He had tried digital marketing before and it had not worked. Swastik's response was to show him that the problem was not the channel but the execution: the wrong streams, the wrong targeting. Once the founder understood the diagnosis, he adopted the new model. Revenue increased 15% in the following quarter, and the model has remained in place since.
Across 10-plus clients in 10 months, Swastik maintained a 100% client satisfaction rate. Final deliverables included pitch decks for market strategy, Excel-based scenario models for revenue projections, and internal project briefs to keep the team aligned.