Skillshare- my dream start-up
Damn it!! They stole my start-up idea!! Argghhh.. I think i need to go kick myself!
That was my reaction what I chance upon Skillshare.com. I am always into technology and into education, so when I was dreaming up start up ideas, the concept of enabling millions of teachers/experts teaching millions of students over the web came up. But it stayed there- in my dreams. While the founder, Michael Karnjanaprakorn (sounds like American Thai I think) already got $6M of seed money! So much for inaction on my part.
So when Michael offered a class called “Launch Your Startup Idea for Less than $1,000” for US$20, I signed up for it. I want to learn from this guy how he did it and how he is running his site. I want to know how he gets the traffic and how he recruits the teachers. I want to know how he got the funding and how the hack he can get this off the ground!
As it turns out, after the first lesson, I realized I have been asking all the wrong questions. The first question we need to ask ourselves is “WHY”. Why do we want to start something. Because without a strong “WHY” behind, thing will fall off the wayside pretty fast. He recommended this talk on TED. Titled “How great leaders inspire action” by Simon Sinek. Good stuff. Simon advocate all of us to start from inside and ask “Why”, follow by “how” and lastly “what”. Normally, “Kan-jion” people like me will jump into the solution and products for the business, bypassing the most important “WHY” question. That may be one of the most important reason why so many of us fail to have any action.
The other key takeaway was that in any business idea, we always need to start small. Test the viability of the biz concept with a small group of people before spending tons of money to code or develop apps. The example he gave was about his start-up. He told his partner that they will NOT write a single line of code until they can get customers that are willing to pay money for their classes. I thought that idea is brilliant. This idea can be applied to all businesses. Not limited to web biz only.
He classes are conducted over a few weeks. And there will be project work, discussion work and reading material to complete from week to week. Even if you are not able to participate LIVE (like me) I can always log back in to do a play back. So I think their structure is task orientated but yet very flexible.
Keeping in line with his principle of keep cost low, all of his video playbacks and lecture notes are posted on public sites! So if you know what you are looking for, you essentially can go through the class without paying! This give me an opportunity for me to share his video to all of my readers and let all of you learn first hand from Michael on how to get your biz idea started. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
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