Sangeet Chandaliya
Context
Over the last couple of years, I have noticed a lot of up-and-coming entrepreneurs building in public (as opposed to building in stealth). Doing so, in turn, helps them build a small following that can be leveraged to validate problem spaces, prioritize features, and get valuable feedback on the initial product.
This is also a great framework for people who enjoy working on personal projects without worrying about whether they make money (like me!). And so, here is the first of (hopefully) many more journal entries diving deeper into the projects I am working on.
Project Manabu
“Manabu” is Japanese for learning.
Introduction
What? As part of Project Manabu, I plan on creating an analytics platform that helps course creators discover underserved topics in their respective niches.
How? For v0.0, I will focus on aggregating existing courses from different providers, cleaning and storing different course data points uniformly, and understanding what questions that could potentially be answered with the stored data. I will not be focusing on building an extensive UI and instead rely on Google Spreadsheet to create the first set of dashboards.
Why? While building Edunaut (read more here), I developed a decent understanding of how the different course providers work. Around the same time, I also saw a significant rise in the number of “solo” course creators. Diving deeper, I haven't found a data-driven tool that helps these solo creators better understand the market they are catering to.
Timeline and budget
Since I am working full-time at Cube (and it can get a bit intense on some days), I am setting a relaxed deadline of 31st August to build the first set of dashboards. Following this, I will spend the next 15 days setting up and shooting email and LinkedIn messages to potential leads.
For product development, I am not allocating a small budget for data storage ($50). For marketing, I am allocating $150 for email and LinkedIn reach-outs, and conversion.
Target for Weeks 1 & 2
For the first couple of weeks, my focus will be on extracting data from 2-3 course providers and storing them in a standardized format. These providers will be shortlisted based on which platforms are preferred by “solo” course creators, their reach in terms of the number of monthly users, and data points that can be extracted and analyzed.
It is also important that I do not breach the course providers’ terms of use and robots.txt when extracting the courses’ details in an automated fashion. Even if this principle makes extracting data a bit trickier, it must be followed.
That’s it for today! Got any questions or suggestions? Feel free to reach out here.