Udemy

This post is for all the people out there who are just everyday guys trying to launch a company. You don’t have a list of rock star investors. You’re not some famous entrepreneur who’s done it 3 times before. You’re just a regular guy working hard and trying to get your product noticed.

It’s been a month since Udemy.com launched and we’ve been thrilled with the response. The launch was covered on TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, Under30CEO and Vator.tv (3x). Nowadays when I go to conferences a good number of people say “Udemy – I’ve heard of that.” (a lot better than “huh?!”)

Though I’m sure other startups have done a better job, we were excited about the results. We’re un-funded and have no prior experience with PR. Nobody in Silicon Valley had heard of any of us less than one year ago.

We’ve been asked by a lot of folks to talk about how we got the coverage we did and so here is a post on that. We are by no means experts, but I think you’ll find this useful.

Setting up the Launch

The most important thing we did was set up the launch well ahead of time. This wasn’t on purpose, but it was a key part to the coverage we got. The first part of this was building relationships with all of the major blogs. All you need to do is gain enough credibility with ONE writer at the blog (and I’m talking about real full-time writers – not me as a part-time writer at MobileCrunch).

The only thing you can guarantee when you build relationships is that they will read your e-mail. They will not cover you just because you know them, unfortunately.

Here’s how we happened to build our relationships:

TechCrunch – I applied to write for MobileCrunch via e-mail. They had an opening for an intern and I just cold applied. Within 20 min of sending them the e-mail, I heard back – I can tell you more if you ask but it really isn’t that exciting. Since then, I’ve worked my ass off to meet everyone at TC and built relationships with them personally.

VentureBeat – I approached Matt Marshall (founder/editor) after he led a panel at the Future of Funding event. Then I pitched him and he accepted us into DEMO. We couldn’t afford the tickets, so we didn’t go. But he has seen our demo and really likes our company.

Mashable – I ran into Ben Parr (editor) from Mashable because I was wearing a TechCrunch t-shirt at a GDC after-party and he saw it. We chatted it up but I’m not totally sure if he remembers me.

ReadWriteWeb – covered Startup Roots, an organization I’m a part of.

Similar things with Vator.tv, Silicon Alley Insider and Under30CEO. Notice that GigaOm did not cover us – its the only publication we had no relationship with.

Executing the Launch
The execution of the launch was also not well-planned, and honestly we didn’t do a good job of this. We just got kinda lucky. We decided on a whim that we were ready to launch and I sent out a bunch of e-mails to press at 10am on a Friday (E-mail attached at the bottom of this post). Huge mistake. We got no responses until Sunday afternoon. I sent a reminder e-mail on Monday morning, and almost everyone responded. Mashable responded late (so they covered us on Thursday).

The e-mail was short, and followed a format given to us by Adeo, head of the Founder Institute. We were explicit that we wanted to launch on Tuesday, May 11 at 10am. I sent the e-mail to two people at each publication. In the to: line, it was the person who I knew at the publication. I’d say it makes sense to address it to the editor if you don’t know someone – their e-mails are easy to find. I CC’ed the general e-mail address (like tips@techcrunch.com).

Another important thing was giving a week’s advance notice (we only gave like 3 days, which is hardly enough), and “pre-briefing” press. The only one that actually took a phone call was Leena, but the rest of the press did not do a call.

It seems as though TechCrunch and VentureBeat always want to break stories, so it is important to play into that.

The other blogs care less about being the first to write about a story – Mashable covered us 2 days late and didn’t seem to care. RWW published 15 min after 10. Also, Mashable prefers that startups apply to be covered through their BizSpark application process -mashable.com/bizspark.

The Results
Tuesday, May 11. Total traffic = 4,000 visits. (our normal before that was between 200-500 a day)
Covered on TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat. TechCrunch was by far the highest traffic driver, with over 1,000 direct referrals within the first day. RWW was second with 178 and VentureBeat only sent us 64. This may be because VB and TC readers are the same, and readers saw it on TC first. Also, we got selected to be on TechMeme – it was a small appearance and I don’t know if that drove any additional traffic.

The TC traffic stayed and resulted in a total of 1,700 direct referrals since launch.

Wednesday, May 12. Total traffic = 3,000 visits. We were thrilled by how much our traffic stayed through to the next day. Eren says a lot of the traffic was sustained due to the fact that we were popular on Twitter and other viral channels.

Thursday, May 13. Total traffic = 2,500 visits.
Mashable covered us (along with Vator.tv and a mention in Silicon Alley Insider). Mashable coverage brought in 300 direct links in the first day. They covered us at 4pm on a Thursday, which kind of sucks because far fewer people read news on Friday-Sunday and in the evening (never launch Fri-Sun; always a bad time. Control the time you launch or else you’ll get screwed by writers who publish on their own schedule). Mashable was by far the best on Twitter, and we got a lot of retweets from the article.

Weekend traffic was solid – roughly 2,000 on Friday and 1,200-1,300 on Saturday/Sunday.

Monday, May 17. Total traffic = 4,300 visits.
Thrillist covered us. I have no idea how or why they did, but they drove a ton of traffic. Over 2,000 referrals since they covered us. It is a daily e-mail that gets sent out in each demographic about cool shit going on. Anyways, they have this thing where they cover ONE thing each day nation-wide. We were that one item.

We were able to sustain the traffic for over 2 weeks. Our current traffic is roughly 3x what we had before we launched, which we’ve heard is a great number.

We did a couple of things to make sure the traffic was useful, like mandating that anyone who visits a course must sign in before they can see the page. That was extremely useful and increased our signup conversion rate from 10% to 25%. Also, we did the standard tweeting and facebook spamming. You should definitely do something to increase signup conversion though because otherwise press traffic is completely useless. Also, press was extremely valuable for business development, brand recognition and VC/angel interest. All 3 shot up after we launched and we got some major deals after the launch.

All in all, it was a successful launch. We’re going to follow this up with contacting NYTimes and WSJ writers to see if they’re interested in covering the launch of our payment platform next week. Any tips on getting in touch with mainstream writers?

Please feel free to ask follow-up questions in the comments!

————————————————————–
E-mail I sent to Matt Marshall of VentureBeat (essentially the same email went out to all press):

Hi Matt,

I hope all is well, and I loved your coverage of DEMO. We would love to launch Udemy on VentureBeat on Tuesday, May 11.

We have been testing the site for two months and it has been well-received, winning awards at major conferences and obtaining 1,000+ active users (10K uniques). We would like to formally launch next week. Attached is a writeup, some screenshots and the logo.

Briefly, Udemy (http://www.udemy.com) is a website that enables anyone to teach and learn online. We provide tools so that anyone can create their own online course and teach any subject over the internet. It’s free and as easy as starting a blog. There is a 2-minute YouTube video available here: http://bit.ly/udemydemo.

I would love to talk to you about what we’re doing. My contact details are below.

Best,

Gagan Biyani

gagan@udemy.com
510-378-4789

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Udemy democratizes online education by enabling anyone to teach and learn online.

Udemy, a Founder Institute company, is a website that enables anyone to teach and learn online. Udemy’s goal is to democratize online education by providing tools so that educators can easily create their own online course. It takes only a few minutes to create a course on Udemy, and they can cover any subject from the Basics of Photoshop to Poker 101 to Multivariable Calculus.

There are millions of smart people in the world with something to teach. Udemy’s goal is to provide them with a fast, free and easy way to teach online. Already, Udemy has over 400 courses on a wide range of topics (available here).

As such, Udemy provides the following tools for educators:
Content Platform. Upload presentations, videos, and write blog posts for asynchronous education. This significantly differentiates Udemy from competitors EduFire or Supercool School which do not provide asynchronous tools.

• Community. Udemy enables instructors to engage with their users. On YouTube or a blog, instructors and users rarely interact, but Udemy provides users with the ability to “subscribe” to courses so they are more engaged. They can also ask questions via the discussion boards.
• Live Virtual Classroom. This is one of the coolest features of Udemy. Instructors can host a live video conference with our proprietary Udemy Live tool. Udemy Live has a whiteboard, presentation viewer, chatroom, and file-sharing component. Over 10 videos can stream on Udemy Live and 1000+ users can watch a session.
• Udemy is a content site more than it is an education site. This means that anyone can use Udemy – whether it is an author promoting a new book or a yoga instructor wanting to spread their message on the internet.

Udemy is founded by Gagan Biyani, Eren Bali and Oktay Caglar. Gagan writes part-time for TechCrunch’s MobileCrunch and has previously done work for Microsoft, Cisco and Accenture. Eren and Oktay were among the first engineers at SpeedDate.com, where they were in charge of development and helped SpeedDate reach from 0 to 10 million user in its first 2 years.

We’re trying as hard as possible to get the word out here at Udemy, and it looks like its working! Folks are starting to get excited about Udemy and that just makes us more excited.

One example is the group of top-flight entrepreneurs, VC’s, and technology industry executives at VatorSplash. Vator.tv, which is a popular technology news and video publishing site, held the event and it was fantastic. Some of the best VC’s and Angel investors in the planet were present, including Jeff Clavier, Howard Hartenbaum, Raj Kapoor and Jeremy Liew.

VatorSplash is a top-10 competition for startups worldwide. Startups apply online and the 10 most popular startups get to present on-stage during the event. Then, you have to win both the audience and judges’ votes to win the event. Udemy got through all of that and actually came home with the top prize!!!

VatorSplash is a fantastic opportunity for any startup to pitch in front of a top-tier group of industry executives, venture firms and entrepreneurs. The caliber of attendees and presenting companies was incredible and we were lucky to be there. Speakers included Tony Hsieh and Gurbaksh Chahal, who are two of the top 100 entrepreneurs in the country.

To win, Udemy had to win the Audience and Judges votes and compete against 10 great companies (links below). We were lucky enough to get 37% of the vote, which was twice as much as any other company at the competition. We also won the judges votes, and they were extremely positive about our prospects!

The other companies (from Arkayne’s blog post on the subject):

Arkayne – Arkayne provides Internet marketing software that helps businesses get found online, generate more leads, and convert a higher percentage of those leads into paying customers

MindBloom Grow the life you want — where small steps inspire big change.

DormNoise is an interactive student calendar system for colleges and universities.

mytoopi aims to be a virtual market world for web designers to showcase, promote and sell their templates.

iChange – Nutrition and weight counselors providing advice via online, SMS and on the iPhone.

YouHaveIWant – Location-based, real-time matching exchange.

If you’re a website owner and want to help your readers connect with each other, Envolve just might be for you.

Pana.ma is a completely new way to use voice to engage in richer, more meaningful connections with friends, networks and the world at large.

Hey! You Up There! takes the active Tween market into the sweet spot where sports and entertainment meet television, social media and live events!

Here’s a video from the event:

I know I always seem so excited, but its because I am! We had a fantastic few weeks and I wanted to get the opportunity to share it with you all. We decided to rip off the clothes of Udemy on May 11. We talked to a bunch of reporters who write for blogs we love and they were kind enough to cover us. Here’s a partial list of what people said:

TechCrunch – ““one of the most compelling features is Udemy Live”

VentureBeat – “A new kind of online classroom experience”

ReadWriteWeb – “online learners are certain to benefit… from Udemy”

Mashable – “Udemy offers an experience that rivals the real classroom”

Silicon Alley Insider – “Enables anyone to teach online”

Vator.tv – “an open platform which lets users teach or learn from one another online”

Under30CEO – “Udemy is Building a Virtual Classroom”

More importantly, it seems like many educators really enjoyed coming to visit the platform. We were thrilled with the response! Here are some quotes from all the e-mails we received:

“Udemy allows us to teach in a way we never could before”

“Finding out about Udemy today might just be the answers to my prayers”

“Thank You! LOVE LOVE what you have done here.”

“I will be posting classes soon! Thank you for creating this marvelous website”

Thanks to everyone for all your support. We’re still early and have a long ways to go, but the response has been fantastic so far!

Wow – it’s been a crazy few weeks at Udemy. Last week was particularly nice; we were invited to a conference in Arizona called the Education Innovation Summit. At the summit were tons of education technology executives such as VC’s, Bankers, Reporters, and tons of Education Entrepreneurs. It was an outstanding group of people and we were lucky enough to get to give a 7-minute pitch about Udemy!

Our presentation was given to a group of education executives and a panel of judges, who heard over 50 presentations from various companies. Udemy was considered one of the best and was lucky enough to win the Best In Class Award for Social Learning Applications.

This conference came after we’d already been featured on EDUKWEST – a blog run by Kirsten Winkler, an extremely knowledgeable edublogger.

The conference was held at ASU’s beautiful SkySong innovation center, which is an ASU-sponsored conference and office complex designed specifically to help innovators like us build great education companies.

At the conference, the response to Udemy was fantastic.. The competition was fierce as there were companies that had been around for years, with millions of dollars in revenue, presenting! Yet, the judges liked Udemy (I think) because of the scalability of the product and the innovative nature of our approach to online education.

Following the award, many members of the conference came up and started asking us about Udemy and what we were doing. In fact, one of them was a blogger from EdReformer.com and they actually decided to interview me afterwards for their blog! It was great to see such a smart crowd of people find what Udemy was doing interesting. Look forward to continuing to get this kind of support as we move forward!

The Open Angel Forum was an amazing event and anybody who has a chance to should apply. You may already know this, but 100+ companies applied and over 50 investors applied (yes, investors applied!). Only 5 companies and 20 investors were accepted. Even Jeff Clavier (one of the smartest, classiest super-angels in the Valley) said to me “this was like the Who’s Who of Angel Investing.” He was impressed. Enough said.

Jason Calacanis and Tyler Crowley put on a fantastic event and corralled the best angels in the Valley to come. The list included Chris Sacca, Kevin Rose, Mike Maples, Jeff Clavier, Andrea Zurek, 3 representatives from Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Dave Morin, Matt Mullenweg, Narendra Rocherolle, Joshua Shachter, Cyan Banister, Mark Suster and Manu Kumar (Google those names for bios; I’m sorry if I forgot someone!). It was absurdly nerve-racking (though I tried not to show it) to go in front of that crowd.

Udemy was lucky enough to be invited to the Open Angel Forum, and we are extremely thankful to Tyler, Jason for the opportunity. Also, thank you to WSGR and Binc for sponsoring. Chris Sacca of lowercase Capital and Kevin Rose of Digg fame were the local hosts. Sacca and Tyler especially went out of their way to make sure everyone felt at home. Sacca spent more than 10 min with each company after the event to make sure we got feedback about our pitch/company.

The hosts kept the event fairly light-hearted, considering what was at stake for the presenters. As previous OAF attendees mentioned, almost everyone drank a beer before presenting and there were constant jokes about how every company had “adult” applications.
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Shhh… Udemy isn’t launched yet. We’ve had no PR and have intentionally kept Udemy to a closed community of high quality educators, investors and friends. We’ll be unveiling Udemy more publicly soon (read: PR and Marketing efforts), but for now, we’ve got some great new updates.

Udemy now has over 600 academic courses. By taking advantage of free open source content, we have filled our library with high-quality lectures from Stanford, Yale, MIT and IAS. We’ll continue to add more educational videos and presentations to the site so you can use Udemy as a great tool for learning.

We’ll also continue to work hard to enable you to build your own course and we’ve got some fantastic teachers and partners lined up for launch!

We recently added Facebook Connect and other social sharing features to help promote Udemy courses. Facebook connect will make it easier for students and educators to access Udemy. The sharing features, including Twitter, Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon and MySpace, will help students and educators promote the courses they find. Our hope is that you’ll soon see a plethora of Tweets and wall posts about cool stuff people have found on Udemy.

Note: this blog post is for Elance’s A New Way to Work competition, as seen on Vator.tv.

There just isn’t any doubt about it. Things are changing, and Udemy, a startup I’m co-founding, is as good example as any to embody that change. Folks like me don’t just quit their job, take out a loan and start a company anymore. Instead, we spend every free hour – every waking moment – working towards our dream. Success doesn’t just come with the 9-5 anymore (although some can definitely make it work). As Gary Vaynerchuck of winelibrary.tv once said to a packed room at the Web 2.0 conference, if you want to pursue your passion, there are no excuses. You work 9-5 to support your family and yourself? No problem – “7 to 2 in the morning is plenty of time to do damage.” And here’s a little tidbit from the co-founders at Udemy: if you make a decent wage on your day job, pay someone else to work 9-5 on your dream.

I’m writing this from United Airlines flight 255 – service from Chicago to San Francisco. I do this every week. Red-eye on Sunday night to Chicago, then to Roanoke, VA. Thursday night is the way back – every week, 15 hours on a plane; 8 hours at an airport. My full-time job as a consultant keeps me busy; it’s not 9-5, more like 8a-10p. Some people would go crazy having this job alone. But instead, I was stupid enough to sign up for another one (I write part-time for TechCrunch’s mobile site, MobileCrunch), and to decide to start my own company on the side.

Let me be clear about one thing – we don’t let our full-time jobs slack. I actually enjoy being a consultant and desperately crave the approval of my bosses. Instead, I look at 10p – 1a as work time. So is all day Saturday and Sunday. This won’t last forever – but for now, I’m on a mission to penetrate Silicon Valley. I want to be a small part of what’s going on over there; it’s just too amazing not to want to be in on it.

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Hi all,

Welcome to Udemy, the best place to share knowledge online. We’ve got some amazing tech coming your way in the next few weeks/months, and can’t wait to see what you think. Ultimately, our goal is to enable you to create and share knowledge with anyone. You should be able to go on our site and create courses (or webinars) that relate to anything. And we mean anything. Yes, if you want, Udemy will allow you to teach the cha cha, English as a foreign language, how to become a chess master or how to successfully run an ice cream stand in Helsinki during the winter.

Of course, if you don’t have anything to share, no problem. You can get lost in a world of knowledge on Udemy.com!

Well, that’s the plan at least. Obviously, we’re in private alpha right now so there aren’t a whole lot of people crawling the pages of Udemy. But… we’ll be launching private beta in a few days! Can’t wait to see what you think.

Best,
Gagan Biyani