Dutch Student Entrepreneurs Building a Large Scale EdTech Marketplace: StuDocu CEO Marnix Broer (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

Marnix Broer: This was in 2014. That was the moment we tried to see if we can go abroad. At that moment, we had two challenges. One was, can we make a business out of this? The main goal is to help students all over the world. As a company, you have to be healthy to survive. We needed a business model.

We’d launched in all universities in the Netherlands. Now we had to broaden our audience and expand our market. We did that. We implemented a premium system. That’s where the business model came in.

The premium system is quite easy. It works as a freemium model. Most of the content is freely available. We have premium documents. They are locked and you have to unlock them to view them. You pay a fee – around €4 a month. You also have the option to upload your own resource. If you upload your own resource, you can get access. In that way, we made it possible for students who don’t have money or don’t want to pay to be able to access these notes.

On top of that, we’re also here to level the playing field. In order to do so, we wanted to keep a lot of the content freely available to anyone. 80% of the documents are still freely available. Only 20% of the content is marked premium.

It’s sort of Spotify, but you can also upload your own songs to get access to the rest of the songs. This model worked really well. We can help a lot of students in this way. At the same time, we have decent revenues to maintain a team and servers.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your 200,000 students moved to the paid subscription?

Marnix Broer: That’s a tough one, because it didn’t happen overnight. Especially because it’s freemium, people could use the website for six months and only then decide to go premium. At the first moment, I was surprised that we had a paying user after 20 seconds when we switched the code on. I was really surprised. It also released pressure from our shoulders that we found something that could actually work.

The same happens to the uploaders. People started uploading. Percentage-wise, it’s difficult to say. Today, we are helping more than 26 million students every month. It’s just a tiny bit of users who are paying for the subscription.

Sramana Mitra: Freemium has very low conversion numbers. 4% is considered very high.

Marnix Broer: I agree. The nice part is that superusers are signing up for premium. You can see that in the feedback we get from both free and paying users. They love us and are spreading the word.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to 2014. You have turned on this paywall. You have also decided to expand beyond the Netherlands. Where did you go next?

Marnix Broer: We went to three places. We went to Belgium, which is our neighbor. Why Belgium? Because they speak Dutch. We also went to Spain because it was a language we all didn’t speak. It was tough to go there.

We were very interested whether we could launch the product in a different language which we didn’t speak ourselves. UX was speaking for itself, so we didn’t need many explanations. We chose Spain to see if we can go to countries where we don’t know the language. Thirdly, we went to Australia. Australia speaks English, but it’s very far away.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Dutch Student Entrepreneurs Building a Large Scale EdTech Marketplace: StuDocu CEO Marnix Broer
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