Online Marketplace for Courses is Looking for Seed Funding

Opportunity Snapshot

  • Country: India India
  • Industry: Education, Training
  • Stage: Seed
  • Investment size: $100,000 / min. $100,000
  • Type of investment: Equity

Investment Opportunity

We are looking for a seed fund of around $100,000 for product development with the aim to get 50 courses and first 1000 paid customers for next 6-7 months.

Looking at the growth of online education, we see a huge potential in developing a platform that can address real needs of the learner and the experts.
We envision a device independent platform that can connect world class experts of varied skillsets with students from around the world.

1. Opportunity

Provide structured and comprehensive information on skill development, hobbies and academics to the learner at an affordable price.

• Open an entirely new revenue source for experts and empower them with a robust authoring tool to make great quality of content.
• Engage and motivate the learner via immersive pedagogy tools essential for effective self-learning.
• Become a huge catalogue of structured & updated information on various topics along-with seamless integration of multiple content-media types like text, video, games etc.

2. The idea:
• An online marketplace for Masters and apprentices, serving everybody’s pure need of “being good at something”.
• An online learning platform, independent of language, geography, device and time with a huge catalogue of amazing content, created & marketed by world class experts.
• We envision ufaber.com as an ecosystem of thousands of experts, millions of courses and billions of students, continuously spreading the circle of skill-expertise and employability
The platform’s name is Ufaber.

3. How it works?
• Educators, domain experts, content managers are attracted on Ufaber platform to create & market their own content. Ufaber empowers them with tools to feature their content in a sellable structure.
• The courses are created in a standard skeleton on a proprietary authoring tool designed by Ufaber, where experts can transform their existing content in to an interactive digital book.
• The experts retain the copyright of the course content while the price of the course is decided upon by the expert in consultation with Ufaber.
• Ufaber shares the revenue with the expert in a ratio of 65:35, on the course subscription fee,
• Experts utilize Ufaber’s customized marketing tools to attract students for course enrolments and subsequently generate revenues.
• Experts can make money by selling courses to increasing number of students and also by selling special engagement plans like 1to1 interaction or e-workshops.
• An integrated points-based mechanism keeps the learner immersed in the course content and drives him/her to explore more courses.

4. Current Focus
Ufaber being a marketplace of knowledge, shall open up several options of revenue models after reaching a threshold of content, experts and learners.
Ufaber is an online market place of courses for skill-development, hobbies and academics, connecting experts and students from around the world, on a unique adaptive and interactive course delivery system.

The long term business model will evolve as the product takes shape hence the focus in the first six months will be on following innovation areas:

• Develop an immersive learning experience tool for learners.
• Empower experts with a library of applets and teaching tools to reach high quality standards for their courses
• Attract & Engage best of the experts to develop & market courses on our platform.
• Curate a good catalogue of courses to address variety of skill development needs.

Competitive Advantage

Our competitors are all paid and free MOOC platforms, like coursera.org, udemy.com, lynda.com, codeschool.com etc. do not provide such a wide scope and range of learning methods.

Main USP:
Course delivery system: Ufaber’s system is in the form of an interactive book where courses are structured in the form of chapters, and lessons and each book is an amalgamation of text, videos, images, audio and interactive applets. Moreover, every course is complemented with a smart algorithmic, which feeds real time information from the web. The system will be by far the most pedagogy enabled system in online educations since:
• It will offer extensive interactive learning through its library of applets
• Courses will be dynamic for evolving unlike a pure video course.
• Live feeder would keep the info-factor of every course up to date

Other USPs:
• Multiple language for courses, and transcripts for videos
• Inclusion of project in every course
• Inclusion of assessment and certification in every course
• Building every student's professional resume profile, where it is curated from Linkedin or other professional platforms and updated for every course/skill acquired on the platform
• Providing an open questions-and-answers arena where students can seek advice and get doubt solve from experts on Ufaber.

Use of financing

Ufaber is looking for a seed funding of USD100K.
This money will last for 6 to 7 months and shall be utilized in following manner:

• UI Design: $3,000
• Technology Team: $24,000
• Expert, Course acquisition: $25,000
• Catalogue management team: $12,000
• Hosting & software charges: $2,000
• Office expenses: $6,000
• Management Salary: $5,000
• First 1000 customer acquisition : $10,000
• Misc.: $12,000

Looking for similar investment opportunities