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Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed « Avichal's Blog
I co-founded PrepMe in 2001. We were one of the first education companies online and the first purely online, personalized platform. We were acquired in 2011 by Providence Equity-backed Ascend Learning. In the last month, I’ve had 3 VC firms bring me in to chat with their partnership about education and 6 independent entrepreneurs reach out to me about their new education startup. This is a summary of what I tell them in person.
Skill Marketplaces Make Anyone a Teacher
You’ve got the skills, but are you using them to your best possible advantage? That’s what the recent crop of skill marketplace startups are hoping people are asking themselves, and there’s a resounding sense that people are indeed looking to mine their own expertise to generate extra income, especially as troubling economic clouds continue to gather. Basically, anyone with a skill can sell their services online either doing that thing or instructing others in how best to do it. General-purpose startups like TaskRabbit , Exec and Zaarly allow people to sign up to basically answer any requirement, but others are taking more targeted approaches, by focusing on specific niches or approaching things strictly from a teacher-student class-based angle. Take Skillshare .
Start Your Marketplace Engines – GenuineVC
At NextView Ventures, we have a number of companies in our portfolio which are “marketplace” businesses, where buyers and sellers meet to exchange a good or service. And along the way we’ve met with or observed a larger number of seed-stage startups attempting to start them. All of these companies face the challenge of the marketplace cold-start problem : simultaneously attracting both sellers and buyers to generate enough liquidity so that meaningful transactions can result . Without enough buyers in the system, it’s not worth it for the sellers to show up; without enough sellers present, buyers don’t have anything to purchase.
The freemium flaw: The challenges faced by freemium - TNW Insider
Close your eyes, and cast your mind back to the first dotcom boom in the late 90s/early 00s.The Complete Guide To Freemium Business Models | TechCrunch
Editor’s note : This guest post was written by Uzi Shmilovici , CEO and founder of Future Simple , which creates online software for small businesses . The post is based on a study done with Professor Eric Budish, an economics professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. It also includes ideas and comments from Peter Levine , a Venture Partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and a professor at Stanford GSB