SIFF: PARIKSHE, THE EXAM CHANNEL

Parikshe had 7,000 subscribers the day I started and 100,000-plus the day I left. It has passed 250,000 since, on the systems I built.

• whatGrowth for Parikshe, a bilingual Kannada and English channel for Karnataka's Class 10 board exam students.
• my partAudience research, content strategy, and every system the channel ran on.
• result7,000 to 100,000+ subscribers on YouTube, 1,000 to 50,000+ on Instagram, and an audience the company started selling courses to.

What I walked into

SIFF Ventures ran three YouTube channels: Western Vocals for adult singers, a piano and keyboard program, and Parikshe. None of them had much of a system. Content went out whenever it went out. I started on Western Vocals, ran the audience research and a long diagnostic on what was actually driving growth there, and found the demand wasn't big enough to build on. Parikshe was where the audience already was, so that's where I moved.

Then I asked the students directly. I ran a poll that came back with 1,401 responses and sat down with smaller groups on top of that, asking what they were actually stuck on. Cheat sheets came up over and over: quick, condensed reference content to revise from. I built a whole content category around it and it became one of the most-watched things on the channel. The same data killed work too. Hashtags were doing 0.0% of the channel's traffic, so I stopped spending time on them.

What I built

Then I built the machine that ran it:

• A ClickUp-gated upload pipeline, so nothing published before it cleared review.
• A six-step community-post workflow: ideation, day-wise plan, cross-check, design QC, Kannada translation, schedule.
• A comment system: two hours a day, replies drafted in batches with AI, every one read by a human before it went out.
• 15 KPI dashboards, so every format had a number attached to it.
• Biweekly A/B tests on titles, thumbnails and formats.

The comment system is the one I'd defend hardest. Two hours a day for months, and eventually students started answering each other before I got there. I ran a focus group with 30 SSLC students, most of them already using Parikshe to prep, and built separate WhatsApp communities for teachers and for students off what they told me. Community posts were running around a 12% engagement rate at their best.

On the side I wrote SIFF's Beginner's Keyboard Course, five chapters, with posture and hand position sequenced before any theory. Competing courses skip that part and lose people in week two.

What it did

YouTube went from 7,000 to 100,000-plus while I was there. Instagram went from 1,000 to 50,000-plus over the same stretch and is past 95,000 now. The audience proved the market. SIFF went on to sell courses and paid study material off the back of the channel.

I came in with content ideas. I left with documented workflows.