This post is a bit different from our normal deep dive into a platform topic. In it we want to achieve two things. First, we want to convince you that you should enroll in the new course we are going to run in October on building and investing in network effects businesses, or at least, share the information about it with someone who might. (Spoiler alert: we have a special price for our Substack subscribers that you will find below). And second, we will explain why our course is part of an interesting shift under way in the adult/executive education space that is being powered by platforms.
The course
Put simply, if you enjoy reading our Substack articles, you will love our course.
Participants in the course will learn how to rigorously evaluate the prospects and defensibility of businesses with network effects. To achieve this, we bring to bear over two decades of academic research, as well as practical experience from having consulted with a dozen large corporations and angel invested in over 200 startups. The course will cover the perspective of investors considering businesses with network effects (e.g. marketplaces or products featuring data network effects), of founders building such businesses, and of executives working at established companies and considering product-to-platform transformations.
We will go in much greater depth and breadth than our articles. Participants in the course will have the opportunity to interact with a live cohort of investors, startup founders and senior executives, as we apply our frameworks and concepts to a wide range of examples, including their own businesses or investment targets. Guest speakers will include a venture capitalist who is focused on investing in network effects businesses, a founder who is building such a business, and an executive who has implemented a successful product-to-platform transformation.
All of this will take place in 5 sessions (October 11, 13, 18, 20 and 25), each running for two hours, 4-6pm PST. We have chosen times that should work well for both North America and Asia-Pacific, reflecting our own time zones (Andrei is based in Boston, Julian in Singapore). If you subscribe to our Substack newsletter, you can use the promo-code BINFXPC to obtain a 20% discount. You can see the full details of the course and register here.
The new platforms for executive education
If you click on the link above to our course’s webpage, you will notice that it is hosted by the startup ScholarSite. So why have we decided to run it via their platform? To understand, it is useful to take a step back and explain how courses like ours have been run until today.
Traditionally, such courses are taught as “executive education” via universities. The universities take control over pricing, marketing, and other logistics, and in return they keep the lion’s share of revenues and typically pay the professors who provide the content and teach the course a modest fixed amount for their time. A key selling point for such university-run executive education courses is that participants obtain a certificate with the university’s brand on it. Some participants find it valuable to feature these certificates on their LinkedIn profiles, or even claim an affiliation with the relevant university by virtue of having done the course.
Over the past decade, a few standalone platforms have emerged that help universities run their executive education courses online. Well-known examples include Emeritus and GreatLearning, as well as the executive program arms of Coursera and EdX. These platforms specialize in re-designing and marketing the courses for an online audience, typically sharing revenues with the universities.
We actually first tried to offer our course via our respective universities and one of these established platforms. In one case we were told we would need to record scripted videos, which in our view guarantees a mediocre learning experience. Furthermore, we also found out that doing such a course through our universities and one of these platforms would involve an administrative labyrinth that would take at least a year to traverse and would eventually leave us with a minuscule share of revenues.
These tight controls and rigid procedures are in contrast to how things work for the course we will offer via ScholarSite. The company’s mission is to empower academics to build their own independent brands. It disrupts the traditional executive education model by giving academics control over what, when and how to teach, how much to charge, as well as how to market themselves (although ScholarSite does help with marketing), and which participants to accept in the course. In other words, ScholarSite uses a true platform business model, in which most of the control is given to the content providers. Meanwhile, the company focuses on ensuring the quality of the scholars allowed to offer courses through its platform. And instead of paying a relatively modest hourly amount, ScholarSite lets instructors keep the bulk of revenues, just like Airbnb, Patreon, Uber, Upwork, etc.
A similar model has been adopted by Maven, another startup that enables creators to launch their own live cohort classes. Currently, there are two main differences between ScholarSite and Maven. First, ScholarSite is focused on leading academics that can bring their research to a non-academic audience, while Maven targets a wider range of content creators, many of whom already have large followings. And second, ScholarSite creates websites for the courses offered by their instructors and helps with marketing, while Maven is closer to the Substack model, which puts most of the responsibility for attracting an audience on the creators.
Over time, the second distinction might start to fade away. As Maven and ScholarSite attract more instructors (some of whom bring their own followers), they will attract more participants who will start to come to their sites to discover courses. And with more people looking on their sites to discover courses, they will attract more instructors. In short, they will both benefit from network effects. In this regard, what Maven and ScholarSite are building is similar to Udemy and Teachable, which also enable the discoverability of online courses. The key difference there is that Maven and ScholarSite are designed for cohort-based teaching just like traditional executive education, which is likely a much more effective way to learn in most cases.
Concluding thoughts
The emergence of new platforms that enable scholars to create courses online leveraging their research expertise is great news for instructors like us. They raise the alluring possibility of a “1000 true fans” future, in which academics and other creators working in very niche areas will be able to monetize their unique skills and knowledge, while at the same time bringing together participants from all over the world who can also learn from each other.
We are excited to be part of this transformation with our own course and we hope some of you will join us on this journey.
Our new online course: Building and investing in network effects
This is a really neat idea! I'm curious how do Profs/Academic staff overcome the potential for a conflict of interest. Either by the university forcing them to teach with platforms that they already have tie ups with or an education offering that directly competes with the offering already provided for the same target audience by the university?
Have already enrolled for the Building and investing in network effects masterclass but only received a discount of 10% on enrolment. @ Kartik Iyer.