An online marketplace for peer-to-peer, face-to-face courses in your vicinity. An Airbnb for courses.
INVESTMENT SOUGHT: €79,000
Skooligo is an online marketplace for face to face group courses (not online) in your vicinity. Anyone can launch a course on anything they like.
The instructor launches a course, describes in detail what will be learned, selects a teaching space (can be a rented space, their workshop, their living room or open air), defines the price and the number of students as well as the dates of the sessions. Skooligo aims to help students find a course specific to their needs.
Skooligo is about finding someone to teach you exactly what you want to learn, within a community built on reviewed experience, knowledge and trust.
Quality assurance and fraud protection is automatically ingrained in the platform because instructors are only paid after the session occurs, giving the student time to block the payment if the instructor was not knowledgable about the subject or simply didn´t show up.
We are not aware of any platform in existence that really facilitates the forming of real-life learning communities to learn about any given subject. Skooligo intends to become the go to place for face-to-face education from experts and gurus in their field who wish to share and monetize their knowledge.
Everybody has something to teach and with Skooligo we will be providing the platform for instructors to find potential students. First time courses come with a 100% money back guarantee to ensure the quality of the course – this is designed so that nobody would bother giving a course if they feels he is not qualified and guaranteed to earn money.
We want to become the Airbnb for courses, widening access to a largely untapped resource.
85% of people interviewed said they were not completely satisfied with the courses they took because they want to customise their learning – we intend to be the platform to help with that.
80% of people interviewed said they want a masterclass but have no access to an expert in their desired field.
75% of people interviewed said they would love to share their knowledge if they had a platform to facilitate this exchange and make money in the process.
79% of people interviewed had taken a course in the past 2 years and 42% in the past year.
We estimate that around 500,000,000€ was spent in informal learning in the Spanish market last year.
Many education centres in Spain work with self-employed tutors who we believe are easy targets to attract to a platform that could allow them to make far more than what they are earning currently in academies.
– Completed the MVP and are ready to launch.
– Founder Institute Barcelona 2014/2015
– Database of 105,000 tutors in all of Spain (5,000 in Barcelona city centre)
– Preselected 125 courses to be launched and marketed at the outset
Our revenue model will be based primarily on commission. We intend to charge 9%+3% banking fees.
Apart from this we intend to pursue the possibility of taking commission for featured and highlighted courses.
Affiliate marketing will be our third potential source of revenue, by selling material related to the course such as books and other learning material as recommended by the instructors themselves.
A final source of potential revenue will be via advertising since we hope to be able to keep a very active community thanks to the integrated Learning Management and Chat system we intend to incorporate into the product.
Initially we need the funds to:
1. Make the site responsive for mobile and tablet use
2. Implement the resources and chat learning environment within the platform
3. Hire a UX expert to upgrade and fine tune our platform
4. Create the chat and instant messaging system API for the platform
5. Contact and setup the 150 initial courses
6. Market the intial courses to attempt to get maximum attendance and define the metrics we will need to develop the business
7. Operating costs for the first year
8. Office rental
9. Hiring a sales/marketing team
Directors, founders and advisors will NOT be receiving any monetary compensation from these funds.
Initially we will be focusing on technical and info tech courses, and we will be handpicking the instructors to give the first 150 courses on the platform. Currently the technical education market is exploding without sufficient instructors for the amount of students.
Our market focus will be on the European market, with an initial focus on the Spanish market whose workforce is in a current state of flux due to the need to learn new skills for better employment possibilities.
Expansion plans will then be developed for the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
We estimate the Spanish market of informal learning to be at 500,000,000€ with more than 10,000,000 courses given are mainly imparted across Spain. The great thing about the Spanish market is that 55% of the instructors involved in giving these courses are self-employed meaning we believe they will be very easy targets to attract to our platform, given that they already have the teaching material and skills and that we will be cutting out the middleman that takes the bulk of the educational fees.
If we look at Europe we are speaking about a market that we estimate to be close to 7 Billion € in which there currently is NO major or even low-key player that we are aware of in the peer-to-peer learning industry. We want to be the first to market.
Our marketing strategy will be to contact influencers and people that would make great instructors and that already have a following in terms of readers, blog subscribers or twitter followers. We also intend to invest heavily in SEO to become the European leaders in the market.
Apart from this we also plan to invest in social media marketing and search engine marketing as well as direct contact with potential students through referrals.
One of our key selling points is our Learning Incentive Program whereby the more students enroll in a class, the lower the price becomes. This discount is returned in the form of credit which the student can then use against the purchase of future courses. The Learning Incentive Program is intended to increase social shares of the course by incentivising the students to save on their tuition costs.
Our main competitors at the moment are fairly traditional clasifieds adverts and online education platforms.
There is no doubt in our mind that our platform will offer a more immediate, trustworthy way to book your face to face course than a simple classified ad, eliminating the need to contact the tutor, find out about dates, prices class size, what will be learned, etc.
In terms of online education, it has been demonstrated that up to 95% of students DO NOT finish their course. The ones that do are usually the people who were already highly educated and motivated. We believe online education has its role but only as a part of the solution. There is no real replacement for face to face education with group work and social interaction. We plan to partner with an online education platform to allow students of online courses to then book a face to face course to go deeper into the subject with the instructor.