Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ in Revenue Without Dropping Out: Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: That’s actually great. We love these stories of student entrepreneurs who didn’t drop out. Going back to the subscription model, how did the revenue ramp?

Andrew Grauer: It ramped really well in terms of growth rate but we were starting on a really small figure. I don’t remember the specifics. I do know that in 2010 we eventually got to a million dollars in sales. Then, we doubled every year after that. That was about $2.5 million in 2011, $5 million in 2012 and over $10 million last year. We hope to do between $15 to $20 million this year.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get to a bit more granular detail about how you built that revenue up. Talk to me about the highlights of customer acquisition and conversion rates during the early times. It sounds like the advertising revenue was a non-event. >>>

Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ in Revenue Without Dropping Out: Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Explain to me the value proposition of your concept.

Andrew Grauer: The best way to understand it is to think about tutoring. The first version of this was a content version of tutoring – getting supplemental help for people to learn and succeed effectively in their specific course at their school. We really started out at Cornell and then extended to a number of other schools. We thought about it a lot like Airbnb – letting people rent space anywhere in the world that has an address and is recognizable by the Google Maps API. We wanted some thing where you can upload your educational resources and tag it to any course at any school in the world.

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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ in Revenue Without Dropping Out: Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

We love student entrepreneurs who have managed to not only build successful businesses but have done so without dropping out of school. We also love entrepreneurs who have the discipline to get to a strong and sustainable monetization model early on in their evolution. Andrew Grauer scores on all fronts, and there is much to learn from this entrepreneur’s journey.

Sramana Mitra: Andrew, let’s start with your personal beginning. Tell us where you were born, raised, and in what circumstances. What’s the back story of Course Hero?

Andrew Grauer: I’m from the Bay Area of California. I grew up there my whole life. I went to college in Ithaca, New York at Cornell University. After graduating at Cornell, I came back to the Bay Area and continued working on Course Hero here.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Momchil Michailov, CEO of Sanbolic (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the company now, revenue wise?

Momchil Michailov: We’re at $8 million right now. We’ve been selling the product commercially for just over three years at this point. This quarter we’re moving the product into additional markets. We’re very excited about some product releases that are coming up at the end of the quarter. We have about 15 people here in Boston and about 35 in Sofia, Bulgaria strictly in R&D.

Sramana Mitra: You self-financed the company?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Momchil Michailov, CEO of Sanbolic (Part 6)

Momchil Michailov: To the earlier discussion around big data and analytics, it would be awesome to be able to run the on-premise big data applications and then move that data into the public cloud. Then, rent cheap analytics and cheap compute from the public cloud vendors to do the analytics tasks that are CPU-intensive. They are not as storage-intensive. There are some very compelling arguments around doing that and being able to create a hybrid. Our focus right now is running platform on premise. Our platform does run both on premise and at the public cloud. We can certainly span that. We are very much looking forward to getting the infrastructure in place to be able to deliver these types of architectures to customers.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Momchil Michailov, CEO of Sanbolic (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m also hearing from everywhere that hybrid cloud is a big trend. Are you suggesting that hybrid cloud transition is not well managed and there’s not a lot of infrastructure supporting that right now?

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