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How to Build Online Education Startups with Sramana Mitra
Rating: 4.6 out of 5(110 ratings)
615 students
Created bySramana Mitra
Last updated 4/2023
English

What you'll learn

  • How to identify startup opportunities through in-depth interviews with successful founders in the online education space.
  • What the trends, new innovations and business models are for online learning startups.
  • When to bring on a team to build an online education startup.
  • When to start raising funds for an online education startup.
  • How to scale an online learning startup.
  • What the exit options are for an online education startup.

Course content

3 sections • 38 lectures • 16h 5m total length

  • Introduction1:34
  • How to Build Online Education Startups12:17
  • Dutch Students Build a Large EdTech Marketplace: StuDocu CEO Marnix Broer36:18

    We’ve done a lot of EdTech case studies and also a lot of 2-sided Marketplace Case Studies. Here’s one from The Netherlands that compares/competes with CourseHero and Quizlet. Terrific story!

  • Building an European EdTech Unicorn from Austria: GoStudent CEO Felix Ohswald30:15

    This is a terrific story of a European EdTech venture that has raised $600 million dollars and is scaling extremely well after 3 years of not finding a monetization model.

  • Student Developers Bootstrap w/ Paychecks to 1M Users: TryHackMe CEO Ben Spring26:14

    Ben and his co-founder are two techies who started by bootstrapping with a paycheck. With zero marketing budget, they have scaled TryHackMe to a million users and significant revenue.

  • Bootstrapping to $5M: Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker26:38

    Facebook gets a tremendous bad rap for its many nefarious side effects. Numerous small businesses, however, have been possible because of Facebook’s incredible Ad engine.

  • Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig on Bootstrapping and EdTech Company to $10M26:23

    Mary and her husband, Eric, have been scrappy bootstrappers through a decade-long journey building Boom Cards. Awesome story!

  • Blaine Vess Bootstrapped StudyMode To $20M With Freemium Conversions31:19

    Blaine Vess, Co-founder of StudyMode, discusses how he made multiple business model shifts, and eventually scaled his company to $20 million in revenue with a sub 1% freemium conversion rate.

  • Student Entrepreneur to $100M in Revenue with Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer38:54

    We first interviewed Andrew Grauer in 2014 when Course Hero was at around $10 million in revenue. In 2018, the company’s website had 300 million visits. Revenue is approaching $100 million. And as for comparables, Pluralsight has gone public and has validated the business model of all-you-can-eat subscription-based online learning.

  • Bootstrapping an Online Education Co. to $16M with Aaron Skonnard, Pluralsight31:04

    Aaron Skonnard, Founder and CEO of Pluralsight, one of the few EdTech ventures out there that are scaling at Unicorn levels, discusses his journey during this conversation from 2015. Aaron bootstrapped Pluralsight to $16 million in revenue before raising a $27.5 million Series A at almost a $100 million valuation. This corporate e-learning company went public in 2018. I’m also including our 2012 interview for you to read.

  • Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India54:04

    Cuemath CEO Manan Khurma’s professor parents in Amritsar didn’t want him to be an entrepreneur. Now, he is changing the trajectory of Math education around the globe by leveraging an underused workforce: stay at home moms with strong mathematics background in India. Brilliant story!

  • Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship with Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath27:35

    Bongo has turned a ~$1M investment into $6M+ in annual revenue with a compelling growth projection in the next couple of years.


  • Learning House CEO Todd Zipper on Scaling to $50 Million37:34

    The white-labeled education services business is scaling rapidly, and institutions of all sizes are building online programs. Learning House operates in the small, regional college and university segment, and has built a nice business. Learning House CEO Todd Zipper talks about scaling this educational services business to $50 million.

  • EdCast CEO Karl Mehta on Building a Fat Startup in Corporate Training32:43

    Serial entrepreneur and EdCast CEO Karl Mehta is applying consumer education models from MOOCs and such to the world of corporate training. Very interesting spin on online learning.

  • Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship With Magoosh CEO Bhavin Parikh28:57

    Bhavin Parikh and his now departed co-founder Hansoo Lee have built Magoosh with textbook diligence and great discipline. Along the way, Hansoo died of lung cancer, a tragedy that hangs over the company both as misfortune and as inspiration. Read this wonderful story of young Berkeley students pulling together a great business and executing with straight up common sense.

  • Spotlight on EdTech with Betsy Corcoran, Co-founder of EdSurge56:16

    During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Betsy Corcoran, Co-founder of EdSurge, for a lively discussion on EdTech.

    We then went on to discuss another one of my startup ideas from 8 Startup Ideas for the Post COVID World: Startup Ideas for the Post Covid World: K-12 Education

  • Future of Higher Education with edX CEO Anant Agarwal28:03

    Anant Agarwal is CEO of edX and my former professor at MIT. We have a wide ranging and comprehensive discussion on the future of higher education, complete with startup ideas and analysis of entrepreneurial ventures within education. Definitely worth a look at how a non-profit is operating in this space. This conversation took place in 2015, and I’m also sharing my two previous interviews with Anant as external resources for you to read.

  • Funding for Online Education Startups with Deborah Quazzo, GSV Ventures34:20

    Deborah Quazzo is Managing Partner at GSV Ventures, a fund focused on Online Education ventures. This is a very good discussion on patterns of success and failure in the sector, and what investors are gravitating towards.

  • More Case Studies of Online Education Startups3:45

    Here are several more case studies of online education startups for you to learn from:

    • Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, Build an EdTech Unicorn from Canada: John Baker, CEO of D2L

    • Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns

    • Cyber Security Education with Felix Odigie, CEO of Inspired eLearning

    • From High School Drop Out to $20M in Revenue: Brad Lea’s Journey with Lightspeed VT

    • Scaling an Educational Services Business to $50 Million: Todd Zipper, CEO of Learning House

    • Bootstrapping an Education Company: Tod Browndorf, CEO of Coggno

    • Building a $10M Company Proctoring Exams Online: Don Kassner, CEO of ProctorU

Requirements

  • The only requirement for this course is an open mind and a willingness to learn.

Description

The 1Mby1M Methodology is based on case studies. In this course, Sramana Mitra shares the tribal knowledge of tech entrepreneurs by giving students the rare seat at the table with the entrepreneurs, investors and thought leaders who provide the most instructive perspectives on how to build a thriving business. Through these conversations, students gain access to case studies exploring the alleys of entrepreneurship. Sramana’s synthesis of key learnings and incisive analysis add great depth to each discussion.

Online Education and EdTech were big trends before Covid. But Covid has driven this trend to exponential adoption levels.

One of the bottlenecks in the adoption of online education previously was that people were required to change their learning habits. Well, Covid has created a Tsunami of habit-changing across the board, especially in online-learning.

Investors and entrepreneurs have noted. The time for doing new, creative ventures in online education has never been more favorable.

All the methodology building blocks you have been learning through Sramana’s entrepreneurship fundamentals courses apply. You can, for instance, bootstrap an EdTech startup with a Paycheck or with Services, then raise money (or not). You can build a Unicorn (or not). You can do your venture as a solo entrepreneur.

In addition, you will learn domain specific lessons from entrepreneur case studies and thought leader interviews. You will also listen to investor perspectives on marketplace ventures and new trends they (and Sramana) have identified.

Online Education and EdTech still have numerous open problems. Therefore, entrepreneurs looking for ideas to develop as new startups would do well to study the trend and the opportunities thereof. In the interviews, Sramana always spends time with practicing entrepreneurs exploring what open problems they see in their domains, from their respective vantage points. These serve as excellent pointers for entrepreneurs to go dig in fertile soil in search of pain points around which to build new startups.

In addition, discussions around Sramana’s own ideas are also included in this course.

The 1Mby1M courses are all heavily based on interview-based case studies on Innovation, Business Models, Go To Market Strategies, Validation Principles, and various other nuances of an entrepreneur's journey. We offer extensive opportunities for entrepreneurs to learn the lessons from the trenches from successful entrepreneurs who have done it before and Investors who support their ambition.

Who this course is for:

  • Ambitious entrepreneurs with limited resources who want to pursue business opportunities in the online learning space.
  • Engineers who want to turn their tech knowledge into multi-million dollar revenue businesses by becoming startup founders rather than remain employees.
  • Aspiring founders who want to increase their chances of getting accepted into a top startup accelerator such as Y Combinator, Techstars, or 500 Startups.
  • Any entrepreneur who wants to learn from successful entrepreneurs who have done it before and from the investors who have supported them.
  • Professors teaching technology entrepreneurship courses anywhere in the world.

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