Sramana: When did you reach the $5 million mark? Jerome Ternynck: We passed that mark some time ago. From a revenue standpoint, it hasn’t been our focus in that we really want to build a tool that people love using. Sramana: If you are a venture funded company, you must focus on revenue. Jerome Ternynck:
Sramana Mitra: It starts to get very tricky because we also have weekly roundtables, which are live sessions where people are gathering from all over the world. They are networking. It’s like a class. There’s instructors and students. There’s networking and relationship-building. All of that phenomenon can, to a degree at least, be simulated online.
Sramana Mitra: How many people showed up? Dan Hermann: We essentially got our friends and family to attend. We were gauging their reactions. Both of us wanted to dip our toes into the business. We had intentionally chosen a business that we thought we could try without having to spend a ton of money. The other thing
Sramana: Up to the point that you launched the professional version, how were you generating revenue? Jerome Ternynck: One of the advantages of SmartRecruiters is that in the workspace we have a store where customers can spend their recruiting budget. In that store you can buy services such as advertising job postings which can include
Sramana Mitra: That’s a big value proposition that is still part of society. When we were in university and college, there were certain social relationships that formed that ended up being valuable social relationships. A lot of people’s closest friendships get formed earlier in life and a lot of it is college friendships. These are
Sramana Mitra: When people show up for the class, what are they buying? When they’re buying tickets to attend these events, are they buying for just the class or the drinks as well? Dan Hermann: They’re buying a ticket to attend a class. We like to call it an event rather than a class. We
Sramana: What did you do after you sold your company? Jerome Ternynck: I moved to San Francisco because being an entrepreneur in Europe is harder than it needs to be. If you are going to try and solve a big global problem you need to do it from the US or from an area where
Sramana Mitra: The simple thing is if you give things for free, people just click on it and then move on. If they pay for it, there’s a lot more commitment. Peter Hirst: Low completion rate isn’t necessarily something that should be critical in relation to MOOCs, exactly because of what you said. People can