What Is A College-Student Friendly Revenue Model?
Hi all!
I am really interested in what you all think about how to incentivize college students to pay for a service.
I am building Enlight, a platform where anyone can learn to code by building real projects. Our content is completely free, but we offer a introductory course to learning by doing called Cohorts. It works because it offers community and accountability to people who would otherwise code alone (which sucks!).
We are primarily targeting college students for this program, but it comes with a huge blocker: they don't want to pay a flat amount of money for education and community when they already have to pay so much to get both of these things at their university.
That is why I am wondering what are some other smart strategies that do not rely on having millions of users or selling user data in order to drive interest and users to this kind of program? The people who go through the cohort really love it, but we are also missing out on a massive market of students who are interested in it but are not willing to pay for that community/collaborative aspect.
Is there any immediately obvious revenue model for this kind of thing that isn't a flat amount upfront for the program? Really interested to read what you all think. Thanks!
If they're making their own projects, maybe you could do something more like an incubator setup, where you get a share of whatever they start (or a share of revenue)?
Alternatively, I would target the people who have the money, i.e. schools and parents. Student startup/entrepreneur clubs might also be interested, and they also have money.
Hey, thanks for the reply!
Our users (mostly) aren't at the level where they can build their own products which can create revenue. The cohort allows them to gain the skills and confidence to do so though.
We're passionate about this kind of customer because we know exactly what it is like to be a student who isn't getting any real programming experience out of college classes and doesn't know how to start building real projects. Yes, they usually don't have money which makes this quite a challenge to figure out how to give them this opportunity.
Could you see any other model to explore? We've thought about brand partnerships, but often times the incentives of companies and students are misaligned.
Hey Max,
My data might be skewed, but I recently launched this course: https://youniversity.landen.co/
And we have been getting a lot of sign ups from college students. We were a bit surprise about that as well.
Just FYI
This is a great idea! If you don't mind, how much are you charging for the one week experience?
Yeah happy to share.
For the first cohort(the one we are running now), we are charging $20 per student. We priced it pretty low because we were trying to test if we can create a low touch solution for the instructor and rely more on peer 2 peer interaction.
However, learning so far is that 26 students(how many students in our 1st cohort) are not sufficient density for peer 2 peer to really work. So we put in a lot of time into support the students.
I think selling to college students is always going to be hard no matter what it is (ok, maybe not if it involves beer).
Instead of making something and thinking "how can I convert people to paid users" I'd start with the customers and figure out "is this a group of people with enough money to spend on this product"
Cohorts originally started as a way to learn more about our chosen market (the students). It was free for a short time before we realized this worked really well and people said they would pay for it, which is why it converted to a product.
We're extremely passionate about this market because we understand exactly what it's like to feel like you aren't getting enough out of a CS class or just want to try and build something cool but have no idea where to start and nobody to ask for help.
Is there a way to somehow have some other party pay us for the student who wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise? I don't know.