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If you approach experts asking them to provide content for your startup - for an indefinite amount of time and with no upfront pay - you can’t imagine many positive responses. But this was the battle edtech platform Learnerator fought for about nine months when asking high school Advanced Placement teachers to develop content for the test prep site.
Learnerator’s tipping point finally came in January 2014 when the site launched its interactive, in-depth content for about 17 AP prep subjects. The content for these subjects were developed thanks to CEO Luke Liu’s sales pitches to hundreds of teachers the previous summer. He ended up onboarding 26 of them.
“At that point, we had no idea how it would go,” Liu said. "It took a lot of salesmanship to get them to buy in. It's about dealing with a lot of people, a lot of personalities.”
Now over 70 teachers are supplying content for over 20 subjects to Learnerator; the teachers get paid royalties when the content is used. Learnerator is now even getting some inbound requests from high school teachers looking to supply content.
Although content started to build up more easily since January, profit didn’t necessarily. That’s because Learnerator was, and still is, utilizing the freemium model, which takes a while to get off the ground. The platform acquires users for free (who mostly come to the site via organic searches about a particular subject) and then reels them in via a built-in paywall to get the most in-depth answers to test prep questions. The inspiration for this economic model came largely from education giant Lynda.com, Liu said.
“The paywall to see a question’s full explanation works really well because it’s all about what happens after you answer the question,” Liu said. “That ‘ah-ha’ moment gives the most value to users.”
With the help of a $300,000 seed round at the end of May (which finally gave Liu and his team a salary), Learnerator expects to break even around the end of next school year. By that point, Learnerator will have content for about 45 test subjects and will be on the path to expanding beyond the test prep market.
“We started with test prep because it was the most immediate path to monetization,” Liu said. “But we want to expand to Common Core, college courses and more - while still getting deeper and deeper into our existing products.”
In the meantime, the three-person Learnerator team is moving into a new office space in Catapult next week and is looking to add a fulltime content director to the team. This content director will ensure Learnerator’s longevity because, at this point, Learnerator’s content is what is driving the company forward, not its technology. (Liu pits this against Benchprep’s strategy of providing a high-tech platform with licensed content.)
“The quality of the content is everything; part of the reason we launched is that we wanted to build the content from scratch,” Liu said. “As far as developing content, we defer to the expertise of our teachers. The innovation is really the way we publish the content and the way we work with our teachers, not in our technology.”
Learnerator only works with nationally-certified teachers, AP leaders and high school department chairs. These experts are responsible for constantly updating the content as AP requirements evolve: “We have a pretty ambitious vision: we can develop content at a bigger scale, with better quality. Essentially, we are a new-age publishing company.”
