From a village to a $710M company (Udemy)

Udemy was founded in Turkey by a guy from a small village.
He managed to grow Udemy from the ground up to a $710 million company.


The first 10 steps were the hardest, but in the end, succeeded. Here's how:


1. In 2007, Eren Bali launched the first version of Udemy in Turkey. But he failed.

2. In 2010, 2 other guys joined Eren Bali and decided to give Udemy another shot. But this time they packed their bags and moved to Silicon Valley.

3. In February 2010, the founders pitched their idea 50 times to various investors and all 50 times they were rejected.

4. They sighed and decided to bootstrap the development of the product.

5. In May 2010, they launched a new version of Udemy. But they had zero content: 0 courses, 0 coaches, 0 students.

6. In parallel, for 6 months, they were cold calling instructors, asking them to put courses on their platform.
Result: 0. Nobody wanted to join an empty platform.

7. To solve the content problem, they used 2 strategies:

7.1. They handpicked 100 top creative commons-licensed (free legal) courses, uploaded them to Udemy and said they had come from prestigious universities like Stanford, Yale, and MIT.

7.2. They created and uploaded their own paid course "Raising capital for startups".

8. Using the "free courses from prestigious universities" strategy they pitched press and attracted the attention of Mashable and TechCrunch.

8.2. In addition to that, they hired data miners in the Philippines using Odesk (now Upwork) for $3/hour to generate leads.
Results:
+ first 10,000 users.
+ their own course generated $30,000. They used this case as a success story to motivate instructors to upload their courses.
+ first 1,000 instructors uploaded 2,000 courses.

9. This success attracted attention of investors.
Result: $1 million in venture funding.

10. Then they just scaled their success.

Source: thehustle.co


Cheers,
Charlie Patel ;)



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