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I'm looking for a bit of advice on a company my partner and I have started. Our website is here: http://skillflip.com/ Basically, the idea behind the site is that it's a booking system for people who have a skill or hobby they want to share with others, and earn a bit of money doing it. The site aims to make this easy for the person doing the teaching, so they don't need to worry about their own website. So the teacher creates a profile and creates a class listing, and Skillflip takes a 15% commission of each student's class fee in exchange for administrating the marketing, booking and payments side of things. Students can then review and comment on the classes they take. In order to generate a bit of traffic and interest in the site, we assisted a friend who is a pastry chef to establish some cake decorating classes. We contacted a coupon website and organised a deal with them to promote the classes. For these classes, we handled the bookings, negotiating a deal with Scoopon, organised the kitchen space where the classes took place, even managed to get a sponsorship deal with a fondant and a flour manufacturer which covered the cost of some of the ingredients in the classes. Basically, we organised everything and all the chef had to do was show up and run the classes. While this has so far has gotten about 500 students through the cake classes, it was a lot of work for us to do all the organising and for the amount of work it took, we (Skillflip) didn't end up making a lot of money. But it's gotten the class off the ground and now the reigns have been passed onto the chef and he will be doing all the class and kitchen organisation from now on. Skillflip will still manage the bookings, payment system and customer helpdesk side of things. Now we are at a bit of a loss as to where to go next. We'd like to get more people running their own classes in order to help the site grow but we're not sure how to go about it. We've discussed a couple of options such as branching into online classes and courses as well, but ultimately we feel a bit like we're spinning our wheels here and need to find a direction to go in. Any ideas or advice would be greatly appreciated, I think we could use a bit of outside perspective at this point!
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Aug 23, 2013 04:20
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Thanks for all the great responses everyone.snagger posted:Sorry to bring some rain to this parade. Yes. We know the Groupon thing is not sustainable and don't want to stick to that model. It's just something that we happened to organize for a friend. But it's not where we'd like to compete or get into. snagger posted:Those seeking piano or art lessons will always hit Craigslist or ask their social networks, and there's no room for a middleman. Cooking classes and the like are date activities and not things that bring in recurring revenue. Now this is a very interesting idea. This last week we've been talking about a pivot into having online video classes as well. But the real-time help for money idea like Popexpert and Google Helpouts has got me thinking. I'll get back to that below. swyys posted:bee-- how are you different from Skillshare and Udemy? Skillshare is probably our biggest direct competitor (as if we're competition yet! ha!) but I've noticed over the last year that they've gone through a few pivots. They started off very much as the same concept with in real life classes, and the idea of "anyone can teach anything to anyone". However they've since been pushing online video classes more and more to the point where now it all seems to be online, and only experts get to present. My guess is that since they do have some funding they're under pressure to scale, and online classes scale so much quicker than real world classes which are geographically bound. Udemy is very similar to Skillshare in that the classes are very "vocational". Web design, business mentoring, SAP, etc. It's where you learn stuff for boring things like work. What makes Skillflip different is that we want it to be more fun and social oriented. Think of it as where can I learn to do all the things on my bucket list?. More "feel good" than "business". We also definitely believe there is value in real life interaction. As a student you can get instant feedback on things: "No, you're mixing that all wrong - here let me show you". And you get to ask questions which are not necessarily covered in the curriculum. Also, there's so much competition for the vocational type stuff that I think it's getting a bit overcrowded: lynda.com, Khan Academy, 2tor, Udacity, Pathwright, StraighterLine, TED Ed, Course Hero, etc If I can wax on about end game: we were always hoping that this could become a very informal and social exchange of skills (hence the skillflip name). I can teach you to play chess. You can teach Ben to play guitar. Ben can teach me how to surf. And for nominal fees. And you build a reputation in your skillset through reviews and recommendations. Basically a social network of people's skills. Everybody is good at *something*!  However building such a two-sided marketplace is obviously hard. So the idea was to try to actively recruit people who already teach as our early adopters - and hopefully the more social informal teachers would grow organically. However: Our offering to people who already teach is not exactly super inspiring or adding much benefit to them. We're learning this now, hence we're pretty sure we need to do a pivot. But pivot to what? |Ziggy| posted:Online training for most things is easy to find. Just search youtube for thousands of free videos for cake decorating or learning the piano. Some people even leave their contact info so you can ask questions. It's a good idea, but may be more successful if you find lessons that people need to learn, but is not as easily accessible as youtube. This is true. However I'd still argue that online video classes with high production values do have a place. An interesting case I came across is creativebug.com. They seem to be doing extremely well but focuses on a very specific niche (crafty etsy-like stuff). I'm starting to wonder if a combination of things here might be the go. - Create online video classes or howtos which are completely free. Put them on youtube with links back to the skillflip.com listing. - Back on the website, offer extras: * access to the teacher to ask questions * access to class extras such as example files, study guide, handouts, recipes, etc. * real time tutoring ala popexpert for a fee * ability to book and take a real world class * upload your project to get feedback from teacher and other students (ala skillshare) Offer the website access as a subscription eg $20 per month get you access to all the teachers and extras. Revenue share with all teachers based upon number of views and interactions etc. Thanks for reading everyone!
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Aug 25, 2013 04:51
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^^^ My partner is a software dev currently working on a start up with another dude in the clean energy industry. How he met this guy was they both attended a conference on start ups and new technologies and basically just bumped into each other and got talking and discovered that they gelled. Perhaps attending a conference in the industry your idea is related to might be helpful for networking and finding someone.
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Jun 29, 2014 08:58
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Hello thread, I have a question about startup marketing. I'll give some background, I hope it's not too wordy. My partner co-founded a software startup. The product is a cloud-based business reporting program that pulls data from Excel and other SaaS suites like Xero, ServiceM8, Unleashed, MYOB etc and integrates it into a live report. Our website is here: http://winkreports.com/ At the moment, I'm running the social media marketing. I'm about to complete a master's degree in organisational psychology but apart from this, I have next to no marketing background or experience. Everything I've learned about marketing has been on the job. We have a twitter, facebook, instagram, linkedin and Google+ page, and these are mostly used to share content related to SaaS and fintech. Over the last six months, we've built a small social media following. It's still growing, but very slowly. We receive roughly 95% of sales leads through our listings on cloud services directories and websites, for example the Unleashed add-on directory or review sites such as the Xero add-on marketplace. So I'm focusing my efforts on contacting our customers and asking them to leave us reviews in exchange for a discount on their next billing cycle, and looking for other suitable websites that we can get listed on. However, the managing director (who is not my partner) seems very preoccupied with writing blog posts for our website, posting things on all the social media channels, and doing other "cutesy" things like temporarily changing our company profile picture on holidays and special dates (for example, making it green on St Patrick's day). Personally, I think this is a waste of time as so little traction is coming from those areas. It's using a fair amount of my time and effort to be doing all these little things and I think it's not an effective use of time or effort. However, the MD seems to think that it's worth pushing as hard as possible. We can't afford to hire a dedicated marketing person at this time. We used to have one, but he got too expensive and I don't feel like he really did anything mind blowing that increased our sales. But the MD has bought up giving up some of his equity in the company to the ex marketing guy to get him to work with us in lieu of a paying contract. I think this is a terrible idea. In particular, MD wants a concrete marketing strategy to be created for us which involves a social media plan/strategy. So this leads me to my question - how critical is it for our startup to have a marketing strategy, in particular in regards to social media at this point in time? I'd really appreciate some outside perspective, thanks!
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Mar 28, 2017 03:18
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zmcnulty posted:You yourself said most of your sales leads come from elsewhere, why are you wringing your hands so much over an Instagram feed? As I said, I look after the marketing but I have zero background in it and essentially, I'm just taking orders from the director on what he thinks needs to be done. I guess the director sees Xero posting a million things a day on Twitter/Instagram/etc and thinks we should be doing that too? I don't agree with him, but I have no prior knowledge of or experience in marketing, so I don't know whether my thoughts on the social media aspect of things being a waste of time are justified.
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Mar 28, 2017 07:51
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