Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now revenue-wise? How far along are you?

Adrian Ridner: As a privately-held company, we don’t share specific financials, but we’re definitely in the tens of million range.

Sramana Mitra: What trends do you see out there right now that you think are interesting trends that are worth discussing in this conversation?

Adrian Ridner: There are a few that tie in that I think are really important. One is the shift to lifelong learning. The idea that information is at the tip of your fingers and with smartphones’ unlimited access to anything you want, the world is evolving quickly. Anything you learn becomes obsolete very quickly. It’s no longer the way you need to interact with the world around you. In the knowledge economy, the ability to learn and learn new things quickly is the most >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said you that you rank in the first three search results for survey software. As you said, there is lots of competitors. Why do people buy your software over your competitors? What is the key positioning point that you win on?

Christian Vanek: We serve two markets. The first market is definitely price sensitivity for function. We’re not the cheapest. Over the last 10 years, it’s also about building name recognition. Early on, there weren’t quite as many competitors as there are now. That helped us. The only ones that did appear had problems. One of the things we heard early on was that the name of the survey software mattered because they wanted people to take them seriously. >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about how you sell. Whom were you selling to? What was the sales decision making cycle?

Guy Mucklow: Our main target audiences were e-commerce businesses. Another really important learning and a key theme that underlines and underpins our whole business is about choosing your routes to market very carefully. Most of our competitors tend to congregate in certain channels and markets. We made a conscious decision to power our own furrow – to be a business that went against the grain. One of my first trade shows had around five or six of my competitors there.

Being the sixth or seventh conversation, it didn’t matter how well differentiated our technology was to everyone else’s. When you’re the sixth conversation in that chain, everyone is thinking exactly the same about you. Everything tends to merge into one. What we did was we chose a number of specific trade shows to >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: For eight years, you did the advertising-based model. What kind of numbers of users did you reach? What level of monetization were you able to achieve with advertising? As you know, content is very difficult to monetize with advertising.

Adrian Ridner: Yes, that is one of the things that we also realized, especially when we shifted to video. The investment into the advertising was not as good as it could have been to allow for continued scaling. We were probably at about 10 million to 12 million visitors a month. Even at that level, we were getting multi-million visitors per year. This is probably a lesson for me if I were going to go back in time. It’s far superior from that perspective. >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was about to ask you about the commercial terms that you negotiated with the company that was giving you all this input about what to build. How did you structure the terms?

Christian Vanek: The terms were very simple. It was a gentleman’s agreement to be honest and we still are upholding it today. That organization could use SurveyGizmo for free forever, provided that they kept the “Powered by” byline. All of those other individuals that I was introduced to worked for organizations all across the United States, from very tiny market research firms to large publishing firms. These folks also had that same deal: Help me build the software and you get the software. They were so excited about the prospect that they were very involved in it and helped develop all of the initial features.

Sramana Mitra: Who was your first paying customer for the service customer? >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the focus? What drove the process of determining where you were going to focus?

Guy Mucklow: One of the things that we had done in trying to get PCA off the ground was to look at a piece of technology, which actually is very prevalent in the UK, around capturing data really quickly and simply. In the UK market, we have the benefit of an incredibly grand database, which is managed by the Royal Mail for the purposes of improving the efficiency of the postal delivery service. It’s got 29 million records in it. It contains pretty much every single address that exists in the UK. It’s updated very regularly.

Most people in the UK know their postcode. From a single postcode, you can get to a list of 20 to 30 addresses. One of which is likely to be yours. The Royal Mail had recognized that there was a market opportunity for them in being able to license this data to a technology community to enable them to build services around provisioning that data. The data itself, as provided by the Royal Mail, comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s actually a real nightmare to deal with. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You described a bunch of different use cases. Could you roll back and take me through the business models of these use cases? For example, if people are taking courses on your platform to make up for credits that colleges are accepting, are the students or parents paying for these courses to you? If so, what is the price point?

Adrian Ridner: All of the plans are monthly subscription models. Our basic package for basic access to our platform and not for test prep costs $49 a month. That inlcudes access to all 3,000 courses. You can have unlimited use of the library as well as our mobile app. For test prep for premium users who want the practice exams with the adaptive learning functionality, the price is $59 a month. The college plan is our high-end plan,which costs $199 a month. It includes all of our >>>

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at this?

Christian Vanek: I stayed at it for two and a half years before I ran out of money.

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2001?

Christian Vanek: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do next?

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