Ghost Skills limits its course catalog to about 100 curated offerings from roughly a dozen instructors, serving busy professionals with vetted content. Their AI chatbot can be scoped to a single instructor's material or the entire catalog. The company, which has 25 remote employees across 15 countries, prioritizes instructors with teaching experience, on-camera charisma, and subject expertise.
Questions this video answers
About 100 courses.
Roughly a dozen or so instructors.
About 25 people.
Across 15 countries.
AI course instructors, .NET software engineers, and an SEO copywriter.
Chapters
Well, you have a chatbot, one brain that builds from all of your courses. Like, so, for example, mine is not pulling from ChatGPT. It's not pulling from the Internet. It's only giving information based on my own brain, specifically from the writings from my books. The videos of every one of my 300 courses has gone into it. Every YouTube video I do, every tweet, it goes into that. So when it answers, it's only pulling from my information. The only thing that's a little bit different there is, like, for example, the answer I just gave, it used impact as a verb, which I hate. I would never do in real life. So it didn't mimic everything. But that's not a substantive, you know, mistake. That's just a stylistic.
Yeah.
So I'm wondering, are you. Are you going to plan on. I mean, in theory, you could have an AI chatbot that only takes the data from any individual course and answers from that, as opposed to one that pulls from everything.
I think we're doing both. So it. It could have, like, the wider context as well as definitely the data from our course. And I think that's just to give it a wider. Hopefully it'll give a better answer if you do ask something that's slightly outside of scope. Our courses are very specific, you know, for a very specific audience, and we have very specific, specific lessons. And you might ask a question that's just slightly outside of that, and so we want to be able to cater to that as well.
We're speaking with the CEO and founder of Ghost Skills, a highly successful and specialized online education company. They specialize in technology, things like Excel. They're highly selective. They have. You said 100 courses and. And just a dozen or so instructors. I've been very fortunate and proud and happy to be one of those. Tell us about your curation process. Because we live in a world where so many people say more is more, and Udemy brags about we have 80,000 courses. How did you come upon the strategy of limiting it to 100? I mean, there's certainly. The philosophy is, you know, less is more. And Leonardo da Vinci went on to become the most famous painter in the world. He only did 25 paintings. Van Gogh only. Only did a few. So how did you stumble across this strategy? And what is the magic number?
Yeah, that's a great question. So we purposely didn't go down the route of Udemy, where it's a platform for anyone to sign up, create content, and sell their content. I personally found it quite overwhelming when I went onto some of those sites and I just searched for an Excel course and I get hundreds of results. And then you have to wade through reviews and content to see what actually works for you. We wanted to target a very specific audience, so working professionals, busy working professionals. And we created all of our course content based on what you would need in your job to assist, to succeed. And so we only have one Excel course. The Excel courses that you see on the website are different versions, but it's still the same Excel course.
They don't have to spend two days looking for the perfect one. If they pick the subject, they put their trust in you. You've already vetted tons of courses. They're only getting a great option from you.
Exactly. They're only getting. Yeah, exactly. And then looking for the instructor is also a big part of this process. So, you know, instead of just getting anyone that, that can teach online, we look for someone who's not just an expert, someone who has experience teaching, but someone who's also very good at coming across well on video. And getting that combination of3, those three factors is really, really difficult. You're amazing at it, TJ, but is a bit of a unicorn. And so we spend a lot of time looking for the right instructors that, that are charismatic, that are really good at teaching, have tons of experience teaching and come across very well on video.
We do have a number of online instructors, subject matter experts, who watch this either live or on demand. Is there anything you're looking for right now? Do you need instructors in any particular niche? How do you like to be approached? Because you're not like you to me, I can't just push a button, upload, hit publish, and there I am. How do you like to, how do you like someone to pitch you, number one? Number two, are there other things you're looking for? Are you looking for marketers or other technologists right now?
Yeah, so we're always looking for great instructors. In particular, we're looking for AI based courses. So if you, if you've got a specialty in AI, please contact us and you can just email us info skills.com we that's a, that's a managed inbox. We see every email that comes through there. And in terms of, did you mean like in terms of hiring people or do you mean just instructors?
Are you in need now? Are you looking for software engineers, for example, or how else can we help you?
If you're a great Net software engineer, please email us too. And we're actually currently looking for an SEO copywriter. So if you're in that space as well, just email us.
Okay? And how big is your company now? What kind of headcount do you have?
We're about 25 people, and we're fully remote. We've been remote from day one. We've got people across 15 countries.
You didn't have to go through that awkward transition of people coming to an office, sending them home, and then asking them to come back and getting people angry.
