| Fellow Hackers, I'm a startup founder, and a little over a year ago I set out to build a "Wikipedia for courses". I ended up building a publishing platform - the idea was to make it extremely easy for anybody to produce highly interactive, online courses (without, and then easy for anybody else to learn from them). Pensieve: www.pensieve.net From an infrastructure standpoint, the platform has been quite mature and powerful - anybody can come to the site, and immediately create interactive courses, and put in assessments, assignments ... etc. We generally receive solid approval of our product. However, our success at programming has been matched by our inability to gain traction. Users don't come for infrastructure, they come for content or because of your brand name - without either, nobody will come. Since then, Coursera and EdX rose, and due to their names, academic relationships, excellent funding, and access to a large body of quality content - they are growing at an insane pace. The last thing I would want would be to be a "me too" type of company. The thing is, that I believe the we still provide a major value which I haven't yet seen replicated. I've seen lots of content distributors, but I haven't seen a platform which makes it possible (and easy) for you or me to make a course that is more than just a youtube video channel / wiki. I've tried several things (most promisingly targeting the corporate training market), but I'm interested in your opinions - how would you move forward and get traction? |
I am newbie founder, also trying to gain traction, so I am trying to share guesses here, not knowledge.
Actually, I am trying to deliver value, not gain traction. "Growth hacking" must be done just after the product/market fit, and I still don't have it. If yours "solid approval" means prod/mkt fit, than you can start to build some features to hack growth. But I would keep it at small scale. I would say, work hard to keep the course creators coming back to create new courses. Use cheap adwords (that you pay) to attract users to their courses (not to your platform).
But for this to work, your course creators must have an audience. Something you can do is attract common people that publish courses on Youtube and already have small, but regular viewers. If you provide enough value for these "amateur professors", they will bring on their audience. This will demand a great effort of research, to cherry pick the right teachers.
Don't try to create a exponential growth from day zero. Don't be Formspring or BranchOut. Think hard about traction, but a solid, relatively small one. Don't compare yourself (yet) to these big names.