Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Are you saying that you have opened up your platform to software developers who want to augment your platform that you then offer to your 40,000 sites?

Greg Smith: Yes, we’re doing that. We have some people who have been doing that for quite some time. We are opening it up more and more to others. The other thing that is a great way for entrepreneurs to get started is to start with services.

We have this network of partners and network of clients. We can say, “If you have services to offer, we can connect you with clients or if you have clients, we can bring them in.” Through offering services, you can learn what those needs are. That’s the way we got started.

Sramana Mitra: We have a whole set of curriculum called Bootstrapping Using Services. It’s part of our core bootstrapping methodology. We are familiar with that. What about analytics? Is that a big category of application on your platform?

Greg Smith: That is also an opportunity for sure. We’re doing some of that ourselves but there’s a ton more. I can think of one or two partners that’s been doing more and more on providing analytics.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to the second part of the question which is what categories are yielding successful businesses on your platform?

Greg Smith: It’s shocking how specific and niche and how weird and novel the categories are. There’s a lady in Australia who teaches hula hooping. There’s another one here in Vancouver. It’s a corporate finance institute that’s creating amazing stuff around teaching people in the corporate finance industry.

One interesting genre in there that’s really interesting is the crafts and skills for the empty nester. It’s interesting because that group has disposable income and the technology.

They still consider themselves lifelong learners and they’re not done learning. They might even have a bit more free time to take on new things. They are going online to learn these new things. We’ve seen multi-million dollar businesses being built around things like sewing, knitting, and crafting. That’s another exciting space.

The core stuff you see online is around health and fitness and career development. The other thing I would encourage people is often, people would get afraid of competition. My own personal course is in the LSAT space. It’s one of the most hyper-competitive spaces for the market with big players. My course does exceptionally well.

Finding competition doesn’t mean that it’s not a great opportunity. You just have to figure out where you fit within it. Looking for competition in courses can be a good way to identify opportunities. Another thing is, it’s one thing if it’s a business. It’s different with courses. You need a level of expertise.

Unless you’re going to hire the expert to serve a need you’ve identified, I encourage people to start with what they are good at and passionate about. You still need to validate that there’s a market out there for it.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific
1 2 3 4 5