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Comment by rokhayakebe | Hacker News Reader

I have a feeling one of these sites (Niroka, Skillshare, Codecademy etc...) will be a billion dollar revenue school.

Edit: I have a former colleague who started his own SEO shop a while back. After getting tired of competing on price, he switched his business model. He now goes to small companies and charges a minimum of $1000/day to train employees on SEO (I have no evidence, but I believe him). I can only imagine how much money the above companies will make if they were selling course to businesses.

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I have a feeling one of these sites (Niroka, Skillshare, Codecademy etc...) will be a billion dollar revenue school

A billion dollars a year? How are they going to manage that? How many people out there want to learn to program computers, and how much are they willing to pay for it?

One million customers per year at a thousand dollars a pop? One hundred thousand customers a year at ten thousand dollars a pop? Ten million customers a year at a hundred bucks a pop?

You're assuming the end game is programming.

You're right, I am.

Comments like yours are a little annoying because you're telling me off for making assumptions without providing alternatives to those assumptions. What else would the end game be? Then we can have a discussion about whether that's reasonable, and whether you can get there from here.

Yes, I apologize. I wasn't telling you off, I wanted to succinctly point out that there's more to the idea. To address your semi-rhetorical question, this model is easily adaptable to anything that you want to casually learn (excluding what I'll call "traditional education spheres"). That is to say, right now it's incredibly difficult both to offer to teach a cooking class in your community and to find a cooking class to take. Thinking about Niroka as a way to connect people with skills willing to teach to people interested in learning new hobbies is better than thinking about it as a place to go to learn (blank). If they grow and expand in this way, Niroka would become the starting point if you're interested in learning a new skill that can't easily be absorbed through what's currently available on YouTube or printed on the web (this also presents people who do offer some of these services that way an easy way to monetize). In a similar vein, it can also be easily adapted to handle scheduling for small businesses dedicated to teaching schools (in exchange for a cut, they maintain the schedule of classes and provide a large potential audience for say, a local pottery place or yarn store, etc.) The harder market to tackle would be traditional education where topics can require highly specialized knowledge and fall prey to bad teachers.

One will end up getting some type of accreditation. When it happens they will go from delivering one-off courses and concentrate on delivering degrees. Someone pays maybe $9,000 to get his BS online. Maybe a mega-corporation pays $1000 per employee to take a 3-day-Hadoop course, etc...

How do you know, rather than doing that, they wouldn't just reduce a multi-billion dollar industry to a 50 million dollar industry, with all 50 million going to them?

I just think that it is a likely outcome. What you say is also possible.

I'm really not sure how well this kind of thing can scale. Without some formal accreditation process for instructors I can't see this bringing in corporate workshops and seminars which are where I'd guess the money is. Having to evaluate every instructor and every curriculum is going to only get harder as these sites grow.

Sadly, I think this kind of thing is going to stay firmly in the realm of the hobbyists.

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