After the IPO: PhysicsWallah learns to live with the market watching

The morning after an IPO is rarely quiet. Screens flicker, WhatsApp groups hum, and the temptation to check the share price creeps in, even among those who swear they will not. At PhysicsWallah, the education company that recently made its public market debut, that moment of spectacle appears to have been deliberately short-lived.

“The euphoria lasted a week or ten days,” says Satish Sharma, chief marketing officer at PhysicsWallah. “Just before the IPO, our CEO (Alakh Panday) told everyone, it’s done. Go back to work. There are kids waiting.”

It is a line that neatly captures how the company wants to frame its post-listing life. PhysicsWallah is now a publicly traded entity, under sharper regulatory and investor scrutiny than before, yet it is determined to behave as though the classroom, not the stock exchange, remains its centre of gravity.

For Sharma, the IPO where the company raised Rs 3480 crore, does not represent a pivot so much as a stress test of a model the company believes was already conservative by edtech standards.

Same playbook, tighter margins for error

Sharma is clear that the company’s identity has not shifted with its listing. What has changed, he says, is the margin for casual language and casual claims.

“Before IPO, it is relatively easy to talk about success. Post-IPO, it becomes difficult,” he says. “The legal ecosystem is watching you.”

That ecosystem includes market regulators and advertising watchdogs such as ASCI, whose scrutiny of education advertising has intensified after years of exaggerated outcome claims across the sector.

Sharma says PhysicsWallah was always careful, but the checks are now more formalised. Advertising copies go through audits. Claims are reviewed and sometimes rejected, even when they perform well.

“There are places where the ad copy performance is high, but we stop it and say no, we can’t say this,” he says.

This caution has not been universally welcomed internally. Sharma admits that performance-focused teams can feel constrained. Yet he argues that the impact evens out at an organisational level because PhysicsWallah does not depend on any single campaign to drive enrolments.

“If a child wants to study with me, it will not come from one single campaign,” he says. “It will come from one of the other campaigns, or even organically.”

That diversity of entry points, Sharma suggests, gives the company insulation from short-term marketing trade-offs that become unavoidable once a company is listed.

Marketing without the megaphone

In an industry where advertising budgets often rival venture capital rounds, Sharma offers an understated view of spending. PhysicsWallah, he says, has never believed in marketing as a blunt-force growth engine.

“My marketing spends are lower than the customer acquisition cost of some competitors,” he says, making the point without naming rivals. “Because my top of the funnel is not paid.”

That funnel, according to Sharma, is built primarily on teaching. PhysicsWallah runs hundreds of YouTube channels across subjects, exams and languages, many led by its most senior educators. Some of these teachers, he notes, do not teach paid batches at all.

“For us, that is marketing,” Sharma says. “That is trust building.”

The idea is simple but demanding. Teach at scale, for free, with enough consistency that students choose to pay later. Sharma describes this as a relationship-first model where conversion follows credibility, not the other way around.

“This is not advertising-led accessibility,” he says. “This is teacher and student trust.”

It is also why Sharma believes PhysicsWallah avoids the trap of overpromising that damaged the reputation of much of the edtech sector during its rapid expansion phase.

Ethics, trust and the shadow of edtech’s past

The conversation inevitably turns to the turbulence that education technology companies have faced in recent years. Aggressive growth targets, loan-driven sales and uneven delivery have left parents wary and regulators alert.

Sharma does not apportion blame to specific companies, but he is candid about what went wrong structurally.

“Decisions were not keeping the interest of the child at the centre,” he says. “You were selling by overpromising, influencing families to take loans, and the delivery quality could not keep up.”

PhysicsWallah, he argues, took a different path by remaining top-of-the-funnel driven. Trust is built first, through content and teaching. Business outcomes follow later, often with long lead times.

“In our case, I build a relationship with a child two years back, and he becomes my customer today,” Sharma says.

This delayed gratification shapes how the company thinks about predictability. By observing engagement patterns across regions, languages and exams, PhysicsWallah claims it can anticipate where paid adoption will emerge without pushing sales teams into high-pressure tactics.

“We are not a sales drum,” Sharma says. “First build trust. That trust will translate.”

Language as strategy, not translation

One of the clearest post-IPO growth levers for PhysicsWallah is language. What began largely as Hindi-led instruction has evolved into a complex multilingual ecosystem.

The company now runs content in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Odia and English-only formats, alongside hybrid vernacular-English offerings. Dedicated batches support these languages, rather than relying on subtitles or surface-level localisation.

“Language was a concern earlier,” Sharma says. “We have addressed it well in the last one and a half years.”

Southern India is now a key focus, bolstered by PhysicsWallah’s acquisition of Kerala-based platform Xylem, which brought an existing student base and operational familiarity with the state. 

PhysicsWallah (PW) is steadily increasing its stake in the Kerala-based edtech firm, acquiring more shares in a phased plan to eventually gain full ownership, most recently raising its holding to 77.27% with a Rs 122.9 crore investment in December 2025, solidifying its South India hybrid learning strategy. 

The initial partnership began in 2023 with a Rs 500 crore investment for a 50% stake, making Xylem the foundation for PW's Southern expansion and multilingual offerings.

Sharma also highlights strong adoption in Kashmir and the Northeast, where Hindi and local language content coexist.

“Our penetration in some states is 45 to 50% of the total addressable market,” he says.

For 2026 and beyond, Sharma says the company will double down on the southern belt, which includes Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Odisha and Maharashtra. Growth in these markets, he adds, is already outpacing expectations.

The CMO’s job, demystified

Asked what it takes to market an education company effectively today, Sharma resists generalisations but outlines a clear framework.

First, he says, delivery must precede distribution. No amount of marketing can compensate for unmet promises. “If you are not doing it, you cannot market it,” he says.

Second, the modern CMO must understand the mechanics of marketing, not just strategy decks.

Sharma stresses familiarity with performance advertising, CLM (Customer Lifecycle Management), SEO and attribution, even as he acknowledges that attribution in education is inherently complex.

“Even if the position is high, you should know what is happening on the ground,” he says.

Finally, he points to credibility as the ultimate differentiator.

PhysicsWallah often features successful students and their families, letting them narrate outcomes rather than relying solely on brand voice.

“My job is to record that work well and distribute it well,” Sharma says. “The work of making them doctors is already done.”

Post-IPO priorities: reach, retention, repeat

Looking ahead, Sharma says the company’s priorities are both expansive and inward-looking. On one hand, PhysicsWallah wants to reach students it has not yet touched, particularly those outside its strongest geographies. On the other hand, it wants to serve its existing base better.

Between paid learners, free users and those accessing content across platforms, Sharma estimates that tens of millions of students engage with PhysicsWallah annually. Metrics such as attendance, engagement and continuity now sit alongside traditional marketing indicators.

“For me, attendance in a batch is also a marketing metric,” he says.

The IPO, Sharma insists, has not altered that mindset. If anything, it has formalised it.

The bell has rung, the market is watching, and the scrutiny is real. But inside PhysicsWallah, the lesson plan, at least for now, remains unchanged.