4. Have a really clear pitch for your teaching partners as well.
Let’s have another look at that pitch to your partners, the teachers you want to convince to populate your site with their tutorials:
“Distinction
Be ranked on the world map and achieve top spot as an instructor. Be the best in your field.”“Reward
World’s only learning platform that rewards instructors based on ranking performance.”“57.5% Signup for a free forever privileged* account. Instructor commission payout per course starts at 57.5%. No monthly fees or hidden fees.”
So, hopefully we’re going to create a dedicated page that talks directly to the ideal tutors you want to attract. And on that page you need to describe the benefits of your system directly to them in a sentence or two, before you start diving into percentage points and sounding like a bank.
Right now there are some airy fairy phrases on the site like “Be Inspired To Teach”. You need something with more punch. Something that talks to a particular type of tutor. Something like this…
“If you’re the type of teacher who likes to make world class lessons, we’re the learning platform that rewards your extra effort.”
Or in other words – “If you’re the best, this is the place where you will earn the most.” That might even be better copy…
“Outstanding Tutors – if you’re the best in your field, this is the platform where you’ll earn the most. Here’s why…”
You can then go on to explain how your system rewards the best tutors and how it results in more promotion and more income for them. But keep your language simple and human and down to earth. Don’t use abstract words like “Distinction” and “Reward” as headlines. They are meaningless on their own, so they don’t draw the reader in to learn more. If you can’t get them to read a headline, they won’t read anything else.
Overall there is a lack of persuasive copy on the site. You don’t actually explain why tutors should invest THEIR time and effort into working with you. I suspect you’ll have to work much harder to persuade the best people to work with you.
You have to justify your value to them. As a new business you don’t have an audience, or a community. You don’t actually have much to offer them yet. So it’s not really a case of you giving them a 60% commission. It’s the other way around. You have to convince them that they should give YOU 40% of their profits. The question is – for what?
- You have to prove that you are spending money developing a community.
- You have to prove that you are spending money marketing their tutorials to the wider world.
- You have to prove that you already have traction.
It’s a chicken-and-egg business challenge, but that’s not their problem, it’s yours. And right now there’s no persuasive sales pitch as to why your tutors would spend any time or effort helping you build this community.
Action: Step back and look at your pitch purely from a tutor’s point of view. They will be less concerned about what your site could be in the future and more concerned about what it is right now. You need to prove you have any value to them, right now.
5. Start with just one category and prove your model.
You seem to be trying to cover learning categories that include everything. That’s a mammoth task requiring heaps of manpower and time.
You’ll struggle to make any kind of buzz in any community. Both on the learner side and the tutor side. And that’s how these things spread, people in the same circles talk to each other and recommend you.
To have any impact, you’re better focusing on 1 niche to start with. Master your model within one community. Say for example, languages. And go deep. Be the best learning community for languages. It will take you years just to crack one market, let alone all markets.
Once you have cracked one market and proved you can make the model profitable, you’ll be able to get funding to scale and expand into other niches.
Think of it this way, even Amazon – the “everything store” – started off selling nothing but books. They proved their model in one niche. And they had tens, if not hundreds, of millions worth of funding, right from the beginning.
Action: Drop the idea of covering all categories. Unless you have secret funding and lots of staff, you’ll struggle to compete. Pick one niche and prove your model first. Then expand.
6. Focus on what people really want, it isn’t learning.
Throughout the whole site your focus is on “learning”. But there are very few people who really care about learning. Learning is a means to an end. For most people learning is a chore. People don’t want to learn, they want a result.
I want you to think “further down the line” whenever you are persuading someone to do something.
For example:
Buy this lesson because…
- it’s the quickest, most efficient way to learn Chinese from the best teacher.
- because the sooner you learn Chinese, the sooner you can travel to China.
- because the sooner you can travel to China, the sooner you can get that well-paid job in Beijing.
- because the sooner you can get that job in Beijing, the sooner you can get a better apartment.
- because the sooner you can get a better apartment, the sooner you can get married.
- because the sooner you can get married, the sooner you can be happy.
This is how we think. This is how we plan our lives in our head. If you learn to think about your customers and their dreams in this way, you’ll be far more effective in communicating to them. Because they really don’t care about learning, they care about moving away from pain and towards pleasure.
Action: Think “further down the line” when trying to persuade people. Learning is a means to an end. So don’t just sell them the means, join the dots so that you become a pathway to the goal they are really striving for, the good life, full of happiness, free of pain.
7. Tumbleweed will kill your town before it gets established.
If you want to build a town in the desert, find the gold first! In this case the gold is your pitch. Your promise to solve a problem that your customers are desperate to solve. Once you perfect your pitch, populating your “town” will be a lot easier.
But whilst you’re building your base of tutors and lessons, you’ve essentially got an empty database. An empty database is like a ghost town full of tumbleweed.
It’s another reason why it makes sense to focus on just one category to start with, and add more later. People don’t like the look of scarcity. It makes them feel like there’s something wrong with your “store” when the shelves are empty.
You’re better selling from a tiny shed that’s bursting with products, than a big space containing very little.
It also means that virtually anything that a user searches for is going to result in “0 Results”. If you present an interface that is focused on searching, but a user gets 2 or 3 “0 Results” they’ll be gone, never to return.
Scaling to a size that will make a search box a viable interface could take years. So, it’s probably not the best way to start. You’re using the same interface as Google, and Google has conditioned us that every search will result in a million results.
But don’t forget, long before Google, the most popular way to find things on the web was the Yahoo DIRECTORY. Where you could see what information was available.
It might seem like a good idea designing a website or app for the eventual conditions you imagine. But you also have to design it to work in the awkward early years. If you don’t, you probably won’t make it to that later stage.
Action: Consider listing new courses in a directory format, so people can see what’s available, and avoid pointless searching of an empty database in the early stages. And if you keep search results, make sure they never return a blank page. Fill it with something – a course suggestion, or humour – but don’t give them tumbleweed or your searchers will abandon the site.
Summary
It’s early days, but the success of this venture doesn’t lie in the technology. Having a sales pitch which convinces both parties that you solve a real problem that they are actually suffering, that’s your real battle. Separate the pitches, focus on one or two related niches. Be prepared to do whatever it takes to get early tutors on board, and prove your value before attempting to scale to other niches. Stay the course, see it through, make your mark.