In Turkey, a man from a small hamlet created Udemy.
From nothing, he was able to build Udemy into a $710 million business.
The first ten steps were the most challenging, but we eventually accomplished. This is how:
- In Turkey, Eren Bali introduced the original Udemy in 2007. But he fell short.
- Two more men joined Eren Bali in 2010 and chose to try Udemy once more. However, this time they moved to Silicon Valley after packing their belongings.
- The creators presented their proposal to investors 50 times in February 2010; each time, they received a negative response.
- They sighed and chose to bootstrap the product’s development.
- They introduced a new version of Udemy in May 2010. However, they had no content—no coaches, no students, and no courses.
- In parallel, they cold-called instructors for six months to ask them to add courses to their platform.
Finding: 0. An empty platform didn’t appeal to anyone.
- They applied two ways to address the content issue:
7.1. They uploaded 100 of the best creative commons-licensed (free legal) courses to Udemy and claimed they were from esteemed institutions like Stanford, Yale, and MIT.
7.2. “Raising capital for startups” is a premium course they developed and posted.
- By pitching the media with the line “free courses from top colleges,” they got Mashable and TechCrunch’s attention.
8.2 In addition, at $3 per hour they employed data miners in the Philippines through Odesk (now Upwork).
Plus the initial 10,000 users.
plus their own programme brought in $30,000 + first 1,000 educators uploaded 2,000 courses; they utilised this example as a success story to encourage instructors to publish their courses.
- Investors were interested in this success.
$1 million in venture capital as a result.
- They simply scaled their success after that.
Source: thehustle.co