How Udemy got its first users?

Udemy started in 2007 as a software for a live virtual classroom. 3 years later Udemy was officialy launched. Udemy wasn’t too popular yet so there was courses on the platform. The founders decided to make their own one. Their course was called “Raising Capital for Startups.”

Gagan Biyani (the co-founder) had hosted a conference with Udemy’s investors and used its fragments as his course’s content. The video contained the speakers’ speeches and their slides. That course generated $30,000.

Then, Udemy’s team used it as their case study to lure instructors. Gagan outsourced people via oDesk. They researched stuff and looked for potential instructors on the web for $3 per hour.

The data miners searched phrases people could search when they wanted to learn something (“learning Python,” and so on). They emailed the authors of the sites they founded. Hundreds responded. Later, Udemy emailed instructors who hadn’t finished creating their courses on the platform to offer them a discount. That encouraged a lot of instructors to come back to the platform and finish what they started.

Udemy succeded because their stuff went above and beyond to make creators' experience as seamless as it was possible. They did everything for them to get their course on the platform.

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