Bhavneet Chahal built a remote-first education company since 2013 that shifted from consumer sales to corporate licenses. They launched an LMS in 2015, added authoring tools and SCORM support by 2018, and focus on bite-sized, gamified learning. Growth is steady but held back by limited marketing budget.
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That Amazon and other companies banks are going through right now.
I know, yeah, no, it was really interesting to watch that during the pandemic. And I was on a few podcasts then too to talk about how to manage remote workers. But yeah, we've been remote since 2013. I was in Australia, France, my co founder was in New Zealand. So we never had an office and we just grew that way. So we just hired the best people from around the world.
And you know, you mentioned your customers. Young professionals need tech skills. Are they paying out of their own pocket or are you finding most of your growth through corporate accounts where a company will pay per head and people have unlimited access to your courses?
Hmm, great question. So when we first started by selling on Groupons, it was individuals looking to upskill. And then over the years we noticed that corporates were purchasing our courses in bulk, you know, like 10, 20, 50 licenses. And we started to build out an LMS, a learning management system in 2015 to support and.
Excuse me one minute, I'm gonna. I have to switch to one thing we always do in this show, which is give our guests an opportunity to pitch, pitch, promote without questions and to promote anything you want without questions. I gotta take a second. I have to take my contact out. Something's happened to my contact. So I want you just to talk for the next second. Next 90 seconds to promote away on anything you want starting now.
Okay, Please come to go. Skills for online education courses and a learning management system. We specialize in bite sized courses for working professionals. We sell to both individuals as well as companies looking to upskill their teams. Our unique selling point in this space is that we really focus on the learner experience. We really care about providing an amazing learner experience that is includes bite sized courses, a gamified experience, and a personalized learning experience.
Great. Well, thank you for covering for me. That hasn't happened in about 30 years. Something just got in my contact and it was all of a sudden painful. So that's live show biz. The show, the show must go on. I've had lights and microphones fall on me before in traditional TV studios, so you never really know what will happen when you go live, but that's part of what makes it fun and exciting as well. What are your long term plans? Do you hope to be acquired by. And I realize some of this may be confidential or none of my business, but do you want to just continue to grow at a steady pace? Do you want to be acquired at some point? What's an end game for A business.
Like this right now we just have so many plans to keep growing. I started telling you about the learning management system that we're building. So we started building that in 2015 and started selling to corporates and it just opened up a different world for us. In 2018, we introduced more features for the LMS one, including SCOM courses so people can import their own courses into our learning management system to deliver internal training. And then in 2018, we introduced a course authoring tool so businesses can create their own courses on our platform to deliver internal training again. And we're continuing to build out that part of the business which we're really excited about. So yeah, we just have a lot of ideas and a lot of. We're still very much in the phase of we want to grow, we want to see where we can take this, we're opening up new markets and we want to keep growing for as long as we can.
What's been the toughest part of your entrepreneurial journey? I've been an entrepreneur most of my life and I've had some successes and wins. Those have been great. I've had a lot of failures. Numerous, numerous talk shows, TV shows, radio shows, websites go bust. Was there ever a moment where you thought, wow, I don't know if I'm going to be able to keep the lights on this month. Were there down times or has it been just steady, positive progress?
We've just, we have had steady progress. We haven't had, you know, rocket, rocket style growth, but yeah, just very steady, slow progress, which makes me feel quite comfortable. There are times where, you know, I would love to hire a bigger team, spend more on marketing and advertising and we, we don't have the resources for that. So that's when, you know, I do feel like, oh, you know, if we had taken on some external funding, that would have been nice to grow faster.
Is marketing the biggest expense aside from salaries or salaries for people on marketing? I mean, my perception of the industry, a company like Udemy is, you know, they, I don't know if it's 75 out of every hundred dollars, but a huge percentage of the money they spent was on advertising. Yeah, which frankly, I'm on a lot of platforms, but that is a dominant platform and they spent a lot of money advertising me and they would, they would spend money, presumably they spent 20 or more dollars for some ad, got a click, they gave me a couple dollars. But they still lost money on that particular sale. They were building market share, building a database they could afford. I mean, there's still deficit spending. They could afford to because they had venture capital, and now they have public markets. You know, they're a publicly traded company, so they can get. They can get bonds and all sorts of additional revenue relatively cheaply. But as a private company, you don't do that. So I'm just curious, is that where the largest expense is, outside just the overhead for the engineer?
I think so. I think, yeah. I think we do spend the most on marketing activities, and if I did have more to play with, that's where I would invest it.
