Master Excel Skills: Start Learning Today!

Every business uses Excel and it's one of those programs where you're not taught how to use it. You are kind of, you know, when you start a job, you kind of thrown into something and you're told, you know, use Excel for this. And no one's like, there's no course in Excel at university or at high school and you're expected to know what to do. And you don't know what, you don't know until you see someone else's spreadsheet and you see pivot tables and macros and all, all sorts of things. And then you realize, oh, okay, I actually don't know too much about this. And so that's when people start to search for Excel courses online and they hopefully find us.

Tell us about your journey. You started relatively early, but companies like Udemy had already been around for a few years. There was a time when Silicon Valley was doling out tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital to online training companies. My understanding is almost all of them went out of business. Udemy did go public, but not at any, they don't have any valuation where really anyone was very excited about making money. They did, they, you know, they raised what, 400 million and their, their market cap is only a billion. So the investors didn't make much money. In retrospect, are you glad you said no to that so you didn't have to worry about investors expectations?

Yeah, in retrospect, yes. We never needed to raise money. So back to the Groupon story. So I saw this demand, thought that what they were selling was not that great, decided to create our own Excel course and we wanted, right from the beginning we were very focused on the learner experience. So we found an Excel instructor, Ken Paul, who is based in Canada. He's a Microsoft mvp. We asked him to create bite sized courses for us. My co founder, who's based in New Zealand, created all the technology to put the courses online and I went back to Groupon and said, hey, I've got this Excel course. It's better than what you've got on your platform for XYZ reasons. Would you like to try it? They did and it did very well on the Groupon platform. And then because it did well there, we could sell our Excel courses to Groupons all over the world. And as a small startup, that basically gave us a cash injection into our business because Groupon takes a cut on sales as opposed to us paying some.

But they don't take equity, thankfully for you.

No, exactly, no equity. There's no upfront marketing fee. It's just, it's a high, it's a big cut on your sales. But, you know, as a startup, it was great exposure for us and we knew we had a great product and it did very well. So that's why we never needed to raise money. We just got a lot of revenue from selling to Groupons and also other daily deal websites all over the world.

Our special guest today is the CEO and founder of Go Skills. You can find more at goskills.com it is Bob Chahal. We're very happy she's here with us. You've specialized more. You're not trying to have 100,000 courses. Tell us about your strategy and how you're different from others in the marketplace.

Yeah, so we do have a strong technology focus and business skills focus. We didn't want to compete with Coursera and the universities and the MOOCs, which were very popular at the time. So those are the massive open online courses. So we wanted to focus on practical business skills. Things that you need to know in your job that you're not taught at school or university. Things like Excel training, project management, Lean, Six Sigma. You might need to be certified in these things for your job, but it's not a degree.

If you have questions for Bob or anything you want to know about Go Skills, feel free to post the questions in the comments section. We are broadcasting live today on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter X and all the other places you can actually join us on screen if you have a question for her as well. I meant to ask you about the marketing. Trends change all the time in marketing. Are you still finding. Is Groupon your main marketing arm or the other sites or how has that evolved for you?

Yeah, that's a great question. No, even when we started the Groupon, the daily deals industry was already starting to taper down. But what was very fortunate for us was that because we had all these high value Groupon links coming to our website, we started to rank very well on Google search results because we were getting links from highly credible websites to our small little startup site. That's when we discovered the world of SEO search engine optimization. We evolved our platform to become less of a supplier to Groupon and more of an e commerce site ourselves.

Your own brand?

Yeah, exactly. Our own brand brand. Our own SEO strategy. People could purchase directly from our site and sign up. Whereas when we first started, it was all about entering your coupon code to get access to your Groupon deal.

I mean, marketing has always changed. It's changing faster and faster these days with AI and more people gravitating towards using ChatGPT as a search engine, which I didn't even know till yesterday, and now it's all I'm using is the ChatGPT as a search engine. How has that changed your strategy? Is the fact that Google isn't as dominant, changing what you're doing?

That's a really great question, and it's literally what we're thinking about right now. It's really hard to know how to optimize for AI search, and I think there's going to be a lot of trial and error. We're trying to keep abreast of what the leaders in the space are saying, but I don't have the answer yet. It's this short form. Yeah, we know that we need to be there. I don't.