Thought Leaders in Online Education: Tim Broom, CEO of ITProTV (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You have 100,000 users and 50,000 paying subscribers. What is the size of the IT learner market? What percentage of that is learning on your platform in this mode?

Tim Broom: That’s the great news of this business. About $50 billion a year is spent in the learning space. Pluralsight does $400 million and Lynda does $200 million. We’re going to do $12.5 million this year.

We’re still $600,000 of that billion-dollar space with half of that being spent on classroom training. There are still a lot of people in the classroom. We really have such a small market share. The opportunity for growth is crazy.

Sramana Mitra: Who is adopting? Do you have any kind of segmentation to understand who the most likely customers are? What are the nuggets of adoption drivers?

Tim Broom: We have members in 170 countries all around the world, so it’s not necessarily specific to the country. It does tend to be English-speaking because we only have English videos. In a lot of areas, people look at us as English immersion. They may use our videos for that. It helps people from that perspective. We don’t have to translate as much.

We do have everything fully transcribed. The transcriptions are searchable, which makes it easier for people in other countries. I will say that if you’re a new user to IT, you’re getting to IT, or have been in IT for a couple of years, we have a very high level of success rate with those people.

If you’ve been in the business for five to ten years and have a very high skill level, we have a very high success rate. People can watch our videos. They can watch what they need, and then they can move on. We try to get that middle part where it’s helpful, but they might not be used to doing online because they’re in the typical classroom.

Sramana Mitra: What’s happening with these typical classroom scenarios? In K-12 classrooms, there’s this sage-on-stage to guide-on-the-side where the teachers are embracing digital learning. They’re using a lot of technology in the classroom. Do you see that happening in the classrooms in your world?

Tim Broom: We do. We have a lot of organizations that are licensing our content to supplement instructor-led training. As a learner, the classroom was good. Online is good, but if you put those two together, it’s much better. My kids do a lot of the Khan Academy. The same thing happens in our space. We have a lot of online universities or physical universities that will license ITProTV for their students.

Sramana Mitra: What do you see as open problems in your world? If you were starting a company today, instead of running this company, what kind of company would you start in the interactive learning world?

Tim Broom: I really love what we’re doing. I started in the classroom training business. We evolved to web-based online. The story that I tell is that we would have to speak to a hundred people to enroll one person. There were 99 people that had an interest or a need. They couldn’t enroll because of either cost or geography.

We saw the opportunity to start ITProTV. Now we have people in 170 countries that we help 24 hours a day. Our content is engaging, interactive, and conversational. One of the ways that we create that is we bring what’s best about the classroom experience to the convenience of video-on-demand.

One of those things that are great is where you ask a question that I haven’t thought of yet. We naturally and organically create that because as we create content, it’s streamed live. We have people in the chatroom that are able to ask questions.

We have that dialogue. It’s not a script-reading format. From that perspective, I think we’ve hit a home run. If I were to do it all over again, I can’t think of much that I would change.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Tim Broom, CEO of ITProTV
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