From Belly Dancing To Tally Crunching, This Start-up Markets Every Skill You’ve Ever Wanted To Learn

Want to revive your long-lost hobbies? Need a few sessions with a pro to hone your work skills? Or are you just plain bored and looking for some offbeat experience? People never stop grumbling how painful it is to find awesome things to do or learn, especially in their own city. Trainers, too, often find it difficult to reach out to an audience who is keen to learn a specific skill.

To bridge this gap, SkillKindle.com has come up with an online marketplace where extracurricular is the name of the business game. Simply put, one can search and select from hundreds of fun skills listed here (pro topics are also available in plenty) and book great classes/novel experiences. The start-up also equips trainers with a platform to reach new customers and manage existing ones. In addition, SkillKindle works with corporate houses (SkillKindle Pro) to bring them high quality employee engagement programmes.

But is there an online market for selling offbeat and offline workshops? According to co-founder Tanuj Choudhry, the market it is operating in is worth $150-200 million across the top 10 metros in India. Globally, this number could be in the range of $25-30 million per city, especially in cities like Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, London and Melbourne. Besides Delhi-NCR, the start-up has made forays into Mumbai and Bangalore, and tied up with celeb trainers, as well as reputed institutions such as Inlingua and BAFEL. Here is a snapshot that captures SkillKindle’s vision and viability.

Who runs SkillKindle.com: A 10-member team. While Tanuj Choudhry heads business operations, the other co-founder, Amit Kumar, leads product and technology. Tanuj has done his MBA from INSEAD and prior to starting up, he was a consultant with McKinsey & Company in South Africa. Earlier, he had helped build an 85-member analytics team at the McKinsey Knowledge Centre. Amit joined the start-up a few months after SkillKindle v1.0 was launched.

What inspired the venture: A strong desire to ensure that people can find things to do and enrol as easily as they can buy shoes or book flight tickets online. Tanuj, along with two friends, Cedric and Alejo, came up with the concept back in June 2011, when they were in the sleepy French town of Fontainebleau. But the other two had post-MBA commitments and only Tanuj returned to India to test the idea. His background gelled well too, as his mother is a trainer and his father is a skill-hacker. During Aug-Nov 2011, he put together a small team, researched the market, built a prototype and went live in Delhi. The site was formally launched in March 2012.

What’s the pitch: SkillKindle is an online marketplace to list, discover and book great classes and experiences. But more than that, it kindles in one the passion to learn and share new skills. As the name suggests, it is a platform to reach the curious, across categories as diverse as music, dance, cooking, fitness, sports, adventure, art & craft and media.

How it works: If you are looking to learn a new skill or pursue a passion, you can hit the site and check out hundreds of great classes and experiences happening in your city and around you. Browse through reviews, schedules, pricing, photographs and venue details to find and book something that works for you. One can also contact a trainer directly to know more. As a trainer (for instance, a salsa teacher) or experience organiser (say, a trekking expedition captain), one can list, promote and manage online the entire offline business. Trainers can also use the site’s payment gateway to set up online bookings, collect and display student reviews, and reach out to target customers.

“But the most crucial thing in this business is finding the right trainers,” adds Tanuj. “Our trainer acquisition team ploughs through gigabytes of online content (reviews, social media Twitter handles, websites) and also gets recommendations from our existing trainer base. We combine this with our standard trainer on-boarding process to get a large yet cred-checked set of people,” he explains. User rating is another helpful tool and the company is monitoring it for quality assessment.

Claim to fame: It has 800-plus strategic partners/trainers on board and hosts 800-1,000 activities in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bangalore at any given point. SkillKindle has also hosted 70-plus corporate workshops since June 2012 and catered to some big names. Key clients include Microsoft, Accenture, Godrej, Ikea, Hero Eco, Bajaj Financial Services, Hindustan Coca Cola, Philip Morris, Motilal Oswal, School of Inspired Leadership and Educational Initiatives.

Show me the money: Unlike many others, this start-up has managed to monetise every possible channel. Revenues are generated through trainer subscription plans, corporate membership and class bookings/ticket sales. SkillKindle is pushing hard to enter other cities and city-level profitability is the first goal. Operational break-even has been reached in Delhi-NCR but break-even as a whole is still 12-18 months away. Last year, the start-up raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from Sandeep Uppal and Abhishek Gupta, both former McKinsey employees and now managing directors of Gurgaon-based i3 Consulting.

Biggest challenge: To scale up and expand to more cities in India and abroad. Also, tough competitors are around. One can’t ignore the likes of Justdial (it is going deeper into categories now, but might not do it with the same intensity and rigour of a vertical player like SkillKindle), MyCity4Kids and the global competition Yelp. Going forward, the start-up wants to bring in more disruptive products that will make the discovery journey even more personalised for users. “But stay tuned to this one,” insists Tanuj. “We are about to launch something crazy for trainers and activity organisers!”