Quick rundown 📕
While we hear about ed-techs spending millions on advertising and going unprofitable, it's worth revisiting how Gagan Biyani organically grew Udemy to a $4B ed-tech empire.
Early failure ☀️
In 2010, Gagan spent 6 months cold calling instructors to create courses
But, he failed to onboard even one since Udemy had zero credibility
The credibility hack 🧑🏻💻
Gagan's friend was working on 'Startup Digest', a 50k subscriber newsletter.
He leveraged the brand name to launch 'Startup Digest University'
But, still he had no content ✍️
He needed content that was not just another conference talk anyone can find on youtube.
Where did Gagan go?
Beg, borrow, steal, but get content 🌀
1️⃣ Eren Bali created a crawler that pulled YouTube videos of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates in the Udemy landing page
2️⃣ Gagan begged their investors to create video content and use their personal brand to bring in more users
3️⃣ They leveraged Startup Digest Newsletter's existing brand to bring in credibility
Tough luck 🤯
Udemy needed high volume of content to attract a large user base, which didn't happen through the above hacks.
Turnaround 🌪️
Instead of shutting down, Gagan Biyani gave one more shot by creating a 3 step funnel to generate and nurture leads
1️⃣ Data: He hired data miners from Philippines to extract emails of all the instructors visible on google search 'what is python'
2️⃣ Reach: The freelancers manually sent thousands of personalised emails to all the instructors to start creating courses
3️⃣ Last push: The instructors got started on creating courses, but couldn't finish. This is when Gagan personally mailed “Hey, we wanna run a free promotion for your course in 3 weeks…can you get it down by then?”
🏁 and voila, now Udemy has 64 million learners, 210K+ courses, and 75K+ instructors!
If you are struggling to get customers, you might be just one cold mail away.
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