Roundtable Recap: June 17 – Online Education Startups
Today’s roundtable was organized in collaboration with TiE Delhi, and had a special emphasis on the online education sector with three out of the five entrepreneurs presenting education businesses.
Ankur Mehra and his associate Aditya started off by introducing Guruvantage. Ankur and Aditya have determined that training managers at various Indian companies need help with vetting the quality, methodology and infrastructures of various training institutes, training vendors and such. In response to that, they are proposing a solution to do just that, both pre-hiring and post-hiring. Prior to hiring, for example, training managers need to assess where candidates have been trained, and what is the quality of training that they provide. In addition, there are additional training needs post-hiring, which training managers address often by hiring training vendors. The key question that Guruvantage needs to answer is whether training managers are willing to pay for the solution, or not. If the answer is yes, then the next question is how much are they willing to pay? What this leads us to is first, value proposition validation, then business model validation, followed by pricing model validation. Each stage of validation helps enhance the valuation of a company. And in 1M/1M, we always emphasize the best practice of building as much value, validation and valuation upfront.
In addition, we had a specific discussion about segmentation alternatives – based on size of company, vertical, and geographical. Guruvantage has a large vision of doing this kind of training assessment for a wide variety of sectors ranging from engineering to business to the arts. All very well, but they have to pick a segment to enter through. As I told them, by trying to cater to everybody, you end up catering to nobody. You HAVE to go segment by segment.
Devesh Verma was up next to present ARROW, a finishing school solution that helps college graduates become employable. Devesh addresses the issue that a large portion of the Indian college grads are not employable because of lack of essential skills, especially communication. Devesh has three colleges that have told him that they are willing to pay Rs. 150,000 for training 30 students on ARROW. He expects to be able to deliver a 30-student session within Rs. 130,000. Not bad. Now I want to know whether Devesh can find 100 colleges – tier B and tier C colleges, since the tier A colleges tend to have their own offerings – who are willing to pay Rs. 150,000 for ARROW. If he can, then there is a business worth building here. And pay attention to the segmentation of who is adopting vs. who isn’t … it will provide great cues to where the highest velocity entry points to the market are.
Devesh asked me, “Is the Indian education sector ready for something like ARROW?” My answer is: “A sector’s readiness is a function of the customers’ readiness. So by answering the question – will more colleges buy? – you will also be able to answer the broad question.”
Then Rahul Jain presented Global Experts, a community of business experts who will be tutoring, coaching and mentoring business students. Rahul has assembled a lot of content on business and management curriculums, and wants to use that to attract potential customers who will then pay to access more personal engagements with experts. In essence, he is proposing a Freemium model whereby he uses content to draw in users, and then try to convert a % of them to paying customers in the US. Well, the paid content model in the US has really imploded, so I have some skepticism about the viability. There are some competitors who seem to have validated the business model to a degree. [http://www.studentoffortune.com] So Rahul’s next step is to SEO-optimize the content he has put together and harness a group of users, and see if he can convert a % of them [average Freemium conversion rate is usually 2%] to paying customers. If Rahul can get to about 5,000 paying customers, paying $250/year, then he can get to the $1 million mark. The question is, can he attract 250,000 students with his free content and then convert 2% of those to paying customers at $250/year?
For these three and other online education entrepreneurs, I would like to take a moment and point you to some online education case studies on my blog. Take a look at Apex Learning, Archipelago Learning, KC Distance Learning, Revolution Prep, and Global English.
Next Vikas Hazrati and Narinder Kumar discussed Intelligent Monitoring. Vikas and Narinder have identified an interesting pain point that IT managers seem to have: a large volume of alerts from various IT monitoring systems without the ability to actionable correlation analysis. They have feedback from 3-5 IT managers, including one that is willing to pay them to build a solution. To them, my advice is to leverage as much of the “consulting” money that clients are willing to pay to solve the problem, and use that cash to bootstrap the business. I love this kind of customer intimacy through working closely with customers, and getting paid for it. If they can talk to 100 IT managers in the SME segment and get 10-15 to pay up, the entire product design and development process can be financed by customers! I referred them to the Bootstrapping To Billions case study in Entrepreneur Journeys, Volume One.
Up last was Hasnain Zaheer for Simplogy, who wants to offer marketing strategy and execution services from Australia. My advice to him is to zero in on specific marketing processes that can be offered in a remote mode, which could be email marketing, or SEO, SEM, web design – all those being highly competitive areas – but strategy consulting cannot really be sold online.
I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series. You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions.
The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.
This segment is a part in the series : Roundtable Recap
. March 25 – A Mixed Bag Of Advice . April 1 – Bootstrapping Tips . April 8 – A Focus On E-Commerce . April 15 – Small Is OK; The Goal Is Profitability . April 22 – The Original Runners . April 29 – Finding The Right Direction . May 6 – Defining Value Proposition . May 20 – Validation, Validation, Validation . May 27 – Is The Venture Worth Your Time? . June 3 – Defining Market Segments . June 10 – Efficient Targeting . June 17 – Online Education Startups . June 24 – Three Startups That Can Hit One Million Dollars . July 1 - Get Your Pricing Model Validated . July 8 - The EJ Methodology . July 15 - A Market Of Late Adopters . July 22 - Bootstrap Using Services . July 29 - Startups In Malaysia . August 5 - Paying Customers =>Validation =>Valuation . August 19 - Niche E-Commerce Is Great For Bootstrapping . August 26 - 85%-90% Of Search Traffic Comes From Organic Search . September 2 - Find High Velocity Channels . September 9 - Open Opportunities In Cloud Computing And Rural BPO . September 16 – 5 Cloud Computing Opportunities for Entrepreneurs . September 23 - Do Not Spray And Pray . September 30 - Investors Don't Fund Broad Ideas . October 7 - Try To Get At Least $2M Pre-Money In Seed Round Valuation . October 14 - Professional Investors Do Not Invest In $20 Million Markets . October 21 - Bootstrapping Comes In Many Flavors . October 28 – Convert Potential Competitors To Partners . November 4 - Premium Lounge Sneak Preview . November 11 - African Tech Entrepreneurs Emerging . November 18 - Not Coming To The Rescue Of Victory . December 2 - Niche Marketplace Businesses Can Be Interesting . December 9 - Where Should You Raise Money? . December 16 - Top 10 Tech Trends To Watch . January 6 - Top 10 Vertical and Social Web Trends For The Decade . January 13 - Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade . January 20 - Personalization Remains An Open Problem . January 27 - Non-Dilutive Financing Through Revenue Sharing . February 3 - Indian Entrepreneurs Are Maturing . February 10 - When Keywords Are Competitive . February 17 - Indian Company Plugs Gap In Google’s Enterprise Solution . February 24 - VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators – What Are You Doing With Your Rejects? . March 3 - Spotlight On The Northwest . March 10 - Spotlight On India . March 17 - Spotlight On Latin And Central America . March 24 - 75th Session Spotlights The Midwest . March 31 - Microsoft’s $100,000 India Startup Challenge Grant . April 6 - 1M/1M Announces Important Partnership With MAD Incubator, Malaysia . April 9 - 1M/1M Announces Partnership With TiE Chennai . April 16 - 1M/1M Partners With Indian Angel Network Incubator . April 17 - High-Octane Energy In Pune . April 21- Incubators Are Reaching Out To 1M/1M . April 28 - Guerrilla P.R. & SEO Most Profitable Customer Acquisition Strategies . May 5 - Ownership Matters . May 12 - Two Really Cool Companies . May 19, Making Money From Blogs . May 26 - Twitter, LinkedIn - Why Not Affiliates? . June 2 - 1M/1M And Incubators - What We Have Learned . June 9 - Silicon Valley . June 16 - Exciting Companies Lined Up For Microsoft Startup Grant Finals . June 23 - New Assessment Tool For Entrepreneurs . June 30 - Continued International Participation . July 21 - Crowd Sourced Funding Exchanges - An Emerging Trend . July 28 - Investors And Incubators Need To Look At Pre-Incubation . August 4 - How Do You Bootstrap Freemium Ventures? . August 11 - Menlo Park And The Silicon Valley Renaissance . August 25 - How To Use Twitter For Lead Generation . September 1 - Fall Call To Action . September 8 - A View Into Israeli Start-ups . September 15 - Do Your Homework First . September 22 - How Do You Catalyze A Region’s Entrepreneurship? . September 29 - From Poland To Argentina . October 6 - Dedicated To Steve Jobs, Reinforcing Mission To Restructure Capitalism . October 13 - FREE Is Not A Business Model . October 20 - Non-profits And For-profits . October 27 - Check Out Stanzr . November 3 - VCs Are Not Always Right . November 17 - Business Schools And Early Stage Entrepreneurship . December 1 - 1M/1M Premium Company Freshdesk Wins Funding From Accel Partners . December 8 - Three Open Opportunities For 2012 . December 15 - Web 3.0 And Social Dancing; Romania Emerging . December 22 - Free Apps, Ad-Supported Business Models => Dangerous! . January 5 - ERP Galore . January 12-13 - Spotlight On IIT Kharagpur, India . January 19 - Are Media Sites Fundable? . January 26th - Spotlight On Jacksonville, Florida . February 2 - YCombinator vs. 1M/1M . February 9 - Are You Fundable? . February 16 - What’s Happening In Turkey?
Hi Sramana
It was a pleasure interacting with you during the webinar yesterday. However, i have a feeling that probably the core proposition of Guruvantage.com may not have been fully exposed
.
At Guruvantage.com, we do NOT provide any trainings or training assessments or the like… We are the ‘facilitators’ that would help all the 5 T’s to converge onto a singular platform and contact, interact and transact their typical training requirments. For instance, as a trainee (proffessional), one would like to enhance his skill sets to meet the growing job market, however, to find a localised trainer/training institute is a disjointed affair, with limited search options such as – go google, talk-to-a-friend, word-of-mouth etc. We at guruvantage.com not only provide a wide array of localised search options, but also various add-on features such as – trainer rating, trainer calendar, trainer availability, trainer cost, trainer-to-trainer comparision etc. Not only this, but associated training material (books, publications etc), discounted course booking etc are also possible. AND, this is true for all the 5T’s of the Training Ecosystem (ofcourse with their respective pain areas – as in the ppt matrix).
Given the above scenario – would you still feel that we are close to following a spray and pray approach? or would recommend us to be as localised as possible yet wide in coverage of information?
It would be great if we could get a chance to interact with you in somewhat more detail to showcase http://www.guruvantage.com
It would be great if you guys could visit my blog about the training ecosystem @ –
http://www.guruvantage.com/blog/?p=145
Ankur,
First, you need to work on your pitch. I responded to what you said. You said you were solving the training manager’s problem of veting talent.
If you are trying to be a facilitator, I would pitch this as a vertical search engine / a web 3.0 portal for corporate training.
And yes, the same advice applies – do not spray and pray. Corporate training managers are not looking for dancers and musicians.
However, localized is not necessary, you can go national.
There is no further FREE interaction. Beyond the roundtables, all interaction is paid consulting.
1M/1M will have other paid offerings as well, but we’re not there yet.
First, I would like to say that Guruvantage.com seems pretty a pretty promising service! With a bit of fine tuning, you might really have something cool.
What is a bit disconcerting is the comment “Beyond the roundtables, all interaction is paid consulting” comment from Mr. Mitra. It was my understanding that the entire goal for the 1M/1M Ambassadors group was about sharing ideas and “education”. The roundtables are good, but as there are only (5) participants can pitch their business plan, there really should be an open forum for everyone else! I didn’t join to ‘pay’ someone for consulting, I joined to be involved in a community of entrepreneurs with a common goal and to share ideas freely.
Is that what this is all about? or am I totally out of line?
Dear Brian,
For over 18 months, I have provided free consulting to groups of entrepreneurs every week. This entrepreneur is asking for more of MY time, for free. I reserve the right to decline that. I don’t think you have any right to decide how I spend my professional time, and whether or not I give more free consulting than I already am doing. Note, this entrepreneur has not asked for your time or sharing of ideas.
1M/1M is a program through which we are trying to design a scalable system – education, network, content, community, commerce, etc. – to help the early stage entrepreneurship eco-system. I have funded 100% of it personally.
It is not a non-profit. Even though all services are free today, they won’t remain free in the future.
If this is a problem with you, I request that you disengage from this program. If you have accepted to be a 1M/1M ambassador and the 5-hour a week time commitment, then I assume you have been assigned an ambassador contact. He / She will help you get oriented to the program.
Please reserve such comments until you have taken the time to understand what we’re doing here. Without that, your comments have no credibility with me.
Thanks, Sramana
going through the comments above – btw, corporates are looking for various stress buster programs now-a-days. These initiatives do include dance and music hobby classes for their employees…
Vibha, Ankur -
The way to think about it is starting with Context. I believe what Ankur is trying to do is a Web 3.0 play in the context of Corporate Training.
Dance / Music as stress busting solutions, and dance / music to be studied by people who care to really excel in them are very different contexts.
As I discussed in the methodology section of the session, please study the Web 3.0 chapter (Section: Taking On Giants) of Entrepreneur Journeys, Volume One.
There’s also a Web 3.0 section on this blog.
In essence, from the above discussion, it seems to me that your venture needs to be framed with the formula I have provided, Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS), where Context = Corporate Training.
And when you pitch this venture, if you pitch it with this framework, it would be a lot easier to explain.
And as you think through your product strategy, where to focus, how to enter the market, if you put one user type in the center of the equation, and make sure the entire solution for that user is configured, you would be able to make decisions accordingly. For instance, the training manager for a BPO company needs accent training vendors, but training manager for an auto manufacturing company doesn’t. My recommendation would be to provide as complete a solution for each industry segment of training managers as possible, before moving on to the next. The ontology of the vertical search engine is what will differ as you build the system for an increasingly broader set of industries.
Good luck!
Sramana
Understood. I’m still new, and I only received my orientation document from Maureen this morning. You might consider adding this line to your initial pitch for this program, so that others aren’t confused:
“It is NOT a non-profit organization and future service / revenue generation plans will be rolled out as those plans are finalized.”
Excellent suggestion, Brian. We will do that.
ps. It’s done!