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Gagan Biyani
How Udemy got its first Instructors: At first, we had a massive cold e-mail operation (involving interns) that reached out to instructors who already had online presences. In the beginning, it completely failed. Nobody serious wanted to teach on Udemy until we had users. We convinced some no-name instructors to put up courses, but those courses never got any real traction. This got us enough instructors to do our seed round, where we had shown enough traction to raise funding - but nothing more. (For the record, at the time we were thrilled with the results. It is only in retrospect that I realize how ridiculously that strategy failed).
The second step was far more successful. I was seriously fed up that most people we pitched didn't understand the value of online courses. So, I decided to prove to everyone what a truly good online course would look like by creating one ourselves. Luckily, we happened to be roommates with Chris McCann, one of the founders of StartupDigest, so we pitched him on co-hosting an event called "Raising Capital for Startups," and Chris was in. We hosted a 3-part event series in Palo Alto that delved into raising capital - you can see it here: http://www.udemy.com/raising-cap.... We filmed the events and promoted them through StartupDigest and Udemy. We later did 2 more courses in the same way (http://www.udemy.com/attracting-... and http://www.udemy.com/social-mark...).
This was a smashing success - as you can tell by looking at the course page (see # of subscribers).
From there, we used the success of these 3 courses as a case study to get new instructors - basically by cold e-mailing people and by getting introductions.
Just 1.5 years later, we have thousands of instructors in verticals such as Computer Programming, Entrepreneurship, Photography, Yoga, and many more subjects.
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How Udemy got its first Instructors: At first, we had a massive cold e-mail operation (involving interns) that reached out to instructors who already had online presences. In the beginning, it completely failed. Nobody serious wanted to teach on Udemy until we had users. We convinced some no-name instructors to put up courses, but those courses never got any real traction. This got us enough instructors to do our seed round, where we had shown enough traction to raise funding - but nothing more. (For the record, at the time we were thrilled with the results. It is only in retrospect that I realize how ridiculously that strategy failed).
The second step was far more successful. I was seriously fed up that most people we pitched didn't understand the value of online courses. So, I decided to prove to everyone what a truly good online course would look like by creating one ourselves. Luckily, we happened to be roommates with Chris McCann, one of the founders of StartupDigest, so we pitched him on co-hosting an event called "Raising Capital for Startups," and Chris was in. We hosted a 3-part event series in Palo Alto that delved into raising capital - you can see it here: http://www.udemy.com/raising-cap.... We filmed the events and promoted them through StartupDigest and Udemy. We later did 2 more courses in the same way (http://www.udemy.com/attracting-... and http://www.udemy.com/social-mark...).
This was a smashing success - as you can tell by looking at the course page (see # of subscribers).
From there, we used the success of these 3 courses as a case study to get new instructors - basically by cold e-mailing people and by getting introductions.
Just 1.5 years later, we have thousands of instructors in verticals such as Computer Programming, Entrepreneurship, Photography, Yoga, and many more subjects.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
