Some of you know I’ve been running my own company now for about 8 months. Click here if you want to check it out.
It’s been really neat to see this company get started, and proving some of the concepts around skills, skill-based education, and how it can be applied to a workforce that needs to rapidly modernize to even just meet the minimum requirements to walk into a job at a company. Or start their own side gig and provide services as a 1099.
Here is where we are at, at the end of 8 months.
External course development contracts:
One has been signed and is in pre-execution stage
One did not get through the contract negotiation stage, the NDA and Non-Compete were excessive and I would have been in trouble less than a second after signing it.
1,103 students (138 students per month rounded up)
29,205.39 minutes taught, All Students (26 minutes per student for all students, so need to work on that)
187 Active Students (157 minutes per active student)
17% of all signed students started the class
Average Conversion Rate 12% (Number of people who land on the page, and sign up for a class)
Number of classes offered: 8
We’re profitable today.
I’m super happy about this right now. All the numbers are in an ok range. Need to fix out the number of minutes taught and have some ideas about that.
But the idea works, skills based tightly focused education works. The four hands on classes are super popular, while the lecture classes need a little more support to make them more hands on.
Solidly in line, Google Cloud, AWS and Azure courses are popular, while Jira is doing ok. Anything blockchain is super popular right now and are carrying the main bulk of our students right now.
Blockchain as a technology is doable but given all the issues with Fraud and FTX and others, the interest in blockchain has waned.
AI, ML, and Data are turning into super popular but crowded fields.
There are subsets here (secret sauce) that will work as the next 12-month direction for the company.
Future plans for the company include adding in industry certification so that students take a proctored exam for some content so that it can be transferred to other colleges. This means moving to a different LMS and pricing model for those courses.
We test on uDemy for popularity, then cross sell on our own web site the certificate course owning the whole idea process without hitting any of the exclusivity issues with uDemy.
It’s a good day.