The Start:

Udemy, an online learning platform, was founded in 2010 by Gagan Biyani, Eren Bali, and Oktay Caglar.

The idea began when Bali built a software prototype for a virtual classroom in Turkey and teamed up with Biyani and Caglar in Silicon Valley to launch the platform, aiming to democratize education by providing accessible learning opportunities worldwide.

The Problem:

The founders of Udemy identified a significant problem: traditional education systems were inaccessible to many due to high costs, geographical limitations, and rigid structures.

They saw a gap in the market for affordable, flexible, and diverse learning options that could empower individuals to gain new skills and advance their careers at their own pace, irrespective of their location or background.

Getting their first customers:

Gagan spent the first six months of the company cold calling instructors and asking them to put courses on their platform. But no one signed up.

His roommate was working on Startup Digest: A newsletter that had around 50-70k subscribers at the time.

He piggy-backed off their name and launched Startup Digest University: an offline paid event where founders can come and learn more about the mechanics of launching a startup.

He asked his investors to create content with concrete examples, data, and actionable insights. Gagan categorized these recorded talks, launched them on Udemy to create his very first courses.

With the case study in hand, Gagan created a 3 step funnel to find potential instructors & convince them to use Udemy. Gagan needed a huge amount of leads.

He accomplished by outsourcing the lead gen process for $3 an hour to data miners in the Philippines using Odesk. In the past, Udemy used college interns but switched to outsourcing to increase efficiency. Udemy had 5 to 10 outsources working on lead gen at any given time.

What did the outsources do? The lead gen teamed searched “learn python,” “what is python,” and any other search term related to a learning python (or any other topic Udemy wanted a course on).

When the data miners found a relevant site, they’d copy/paste the web page author’s email. This amounted to 100’s of emails a day that the outsourcers would put in a Google doc.

Once they had the emails, the data miners would email, one by one, each address. Gagan didn’t used Mailchimp or any other mass email service because it looked sketchy.

The outsources sent a a variety of emails Gagan wrote beforehand and tracked which emails received a response.

After 500 emails or so, the team would switch to the winning email. Udemy emailed any instructor who didn’t finish creating their course and said “Hey, we wanna run a promotion for your course in 3 weeks…can you get it down by then?”

This email increased convinced instructors to finish creating their course in a few weeks. It also increased the conversion to get people to create a course in the first part.

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