Mumbai: Premier student housing brand, your-space has announced two major appointments in their top management. Venayak Saran Gupta, an ex-BCG consultant who joined the company as Head of Growth & Business in 2019 has been promoted to Chief Revenue Officer. He has overseen rapid growth in the company’s footprint from 1000 beds in 4 cities to more than 6000 beds in 10 cities.
your-space has also brought on board Shaunik Sachdev as Chief Marketing Officer, who brings over ten years of industry experience. Shaunik has worked with multiple real estate brands across the globe and was also responsible for building the WeWork marketing team in India. He has spent time working with media and digital marketing houses like RepIndia, Dentsu Webchutney.
your-space CEO, Nidhi Kumra said, “One of the interesting shifts post-COVID for the student housing segment has been that customer discovery and acquisition has moved entirely online. We have seen 50%+ m-o-m growth in the number of users on our website over the last 10 months with 95% of our leads being acquired through digital channels, and ~50% of them acquired organically. We feel Shaunik with his deep domain expertise is well positioned to help us leverage this shift in consumer behavior. With Venayak it was a planned transition into a larger role. He has been managing the B2B partnerships and property acquisition verticals over the last two years. Given our outlook for rapid growth, we felt it was the right time to move him into the CRO position and build out the sales, property acquisition and marketing teams under him.”
Talking about his role Venayak Saran Gupta said “The journey with your-space has been very exciting. We’ve gained ground during the last 15 months, expanding from 2300 beds pre-COVID to ~6000 beds post-COVID. With a revenue per bed over ~1L, we are there or thereabouts as the second-largest student housing player in India (in terms of revenue). The last two years have allowed me to put together a fantastic property acquisition and sales team. Now with Shaunik coming on-board we’ve got a great leader to grow the internal marketing team under. I believe now is the time for us to put our foot on the gas and grab market share in our key cities.”
Commenting on joining your-space Shaunik Sachdev-“with life slowly resuming back to normal and students eager to get back to colleges with necessary precautions, the student housing sector is something I am extremely bullish about. Our consumer’s journey is primarily online, which allows us to grow our presence and create unique touchpoints in an otherwise relatively offline industry. Having traversed a similar path of hyper-growth with WeWork, I am keen to use my experience in the growth of your-space. The vision of our founders along with the dynamic leadership team gives me confidence that there is only one direction for us.”
