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To me personally, this is the best comment I've read in my time on HN since 2011 or so. I am also building a learning platform as potential lifestyle business,

To me personally, this is the best comment I've read in my time on HN since 2011 or so. I am also building a learning platform as potential lifestyle business, having been a user of such platforms and worked in large corporate I fully understand that the groups you identify are absolutely true. One important point is that you can make successful business helping people prepare for the certificates without being the issuing party - not VC level, but still. This way you can cover some of the checkbox checkers and self-motivated learners at the same time. Self motivated learners who will be willing to pay you can also be groupped in a few groups - the ones seeking future employment in tech sector, looking to understand the technology better and showcase it on their resume with some projects that your platform will allow them to complete and ones doing this purely for fun or to keep up, I believe the latter group is very small. Platform alone, even with tons of learning materials will not be enough to get this off the ground, you will either need to leverage your existing audience, bringing us back to the fact that everything is an attention economy now, or, you'll need to be very advertisement heavy on YouTube, which you can bruteforce with VC investment, see skillshare for example. NordVPN took off the same bruteforce way, although in a different product category. My platform will combine technical learning with in-material challenges, sort of a sprinkled leetcode if you will. The idea to implement a LLM side-tutor also crossed my mind.

mrandish 2y ago
I was thinking of mentioning that I believe a lifestyle business in edutech is totally doable but my post was getting pretty long. Assuming much more modest requirements for revenue and growth, I'm actually fairly bullish on this scenario. The one proviso is that, in my experience, you need to structure the new business to survive a (potentially) very long period before reaching break-even. K-12 sales cycles can be glacially slow to close full district deals. If you can structure your product and pricing model to also generate some faster (though smaller) revenue from individuals, parents, private schools and single-classroom teacher-directed funds this can help provide some partial life support during the long winter before your first harvest. Assuming you're able to (or maybe even enjoy) optimizing a business to operate for a few years on hand-to-mouth revenue and can get to product-market fit with few iterations then the AI buzz will make for an especially good entry window for new product offerings in edu. Most of your customers are already aware of AI and open to the possibility it may change things for the better. This should make getting classroom pilots easier. The final thing I'll share is something I'm sure you already know (but I'll mention for others). It's pretty rare for long-term, lifestyle-scale, edutech businesses to get "good" exits by normal tech startup standards. Think around 1x to 3x trailing twelve month revenues with the higher end of that range only for those having proven consistent multi-year profitability.

mrandish 2y ago

I was thinking of mentioning that I believe a lifestyle business in edutech is totally doable but my post was getting pretty long. Assuming much more modest requirements for revenue and growth, I'm actually fairly bullish on this scenario. The one proviso is that, in my experience, you need to structure the new business to survive a (potentially) very long period before reaching break-even. K-12 sales cycles can be glacially slow to close full district deals. If you can structure your product and pricing model to also generate some faster (though smaller) revenue from individuals, parents, private schools and single-classroom teacher-directed funds this can help provide some partial life support during the long winter before your first harvest. Assuming you're able to (or maybe even enjoy) optimizing a business to operate for a few years on hand-to-mouth revenue and can get to product-market fit with few iterations then the AI buzz will make for an especially good entry window for new product offerings in edu. Most of your customers are already aware of AI and open to the possibility it may change things for the better. This should make getting classroom pilots easier. The final thing I'll share is something I'm sure you already know (but I'll mention for others). It's pretty rare for long-term, lifestyle-scale, edutech businesses to get "good" exits by normal tech startup standards. Think around 1x to 3x trailing twelve month revenues with the higher end of that range only for those having proven consistent multi-year profitability.