BlueLearn: How could it ever be a viable business?
From a telegram channel to raising $4million for a "community app". Was it even required?
What is was BlueLearn?
According to their website BlueLearn was…
“A place where you can learn, find work opportunities, and meet passionate people to grow with"
Now don’t get me wrong, I truly liked the idea at first. In fact, I used the app myself. Even reported a bug to the founder when I found it and he was quite nice to acknowledge it.
But how could it ever generate money?
When you open the app, it allowed you to join certain clubs - from meme clubs to WebDev and even NFTs/Bitcoin Clubs. Clubs were essentially groups where anyone interested in the topic could join. The app’s motive was to get people who are interested in a topic together…..ummm like Facebook groups for GenZ?? or SubReddits?? or Discord Channels?? Oh wait! It started as a Discord Channel.
That being said their target audience seemed to be mainly students between the ages of 17 to 24 and trying to upskill them.
BlueLearn had multiple activities on its apps and even the Discord Server:
Clubs (Free)
Live Events (Almost always free)
Free and Paid Courses
Social Events and Gatherings (Again, almost always free)
Events such as Hackathons (…..yes, free!)
They did a fantastic job from the perspective of serving the student community but if you’re in business you got to make some revenue too.
The way they earned majority of their revenue was through the Paid Courses and perhaps a few Live Events (though most were free to attend) and the revenues weren’t very exciting to look at compared to the valuation, at least not as of 2022.
Now, I understand this data is old but say they hit the target of strengthening the product and team as well as growing its community user base by 10x after raising another $3.5million from Elevation Capital & Lightspeed Venture Partners
And if the revenue grew even by 5x (quite an optimistic assumption) it would’ve still been around Rs.35-40 Lakhs after a post money valuation of roughly $15million (the latest figures haven’t been updated so we have taken a conservative number). To convert all the units that is roughly $50,000 Revenue (Revenue, NOT Profit) on a $15million valuation. Which, I have to say is better than a lot of startups out there but to give you a perspective of how much it really is - $50,000 is barely even enough to pay the full year rent for the office they leased in HSR, Bangalore.
The Founder mentioned in his YouTube video that…
Overtime we realised that we cannot build a venture scale business with BlueLearn.
Basically, there seemed no viable way for the company to make any money. After all, their target audience was 17 to 24 year old college students with barely Rs. 3,000 to Rs. 5,000 ($36 to $60) of monthly disposable income. The probability of them purchasing courses through BlueLearn was anyways quite low when free platforms like YouTube and online course giants like Udemy & Coursera exist.
With this they decided to shut the company’s operations and return 70% of the capital to its investors (Kuddos to the team for that!)
What’s next for them?
Majority of the team at BlueLearn was quite young with an average age of about 23-24 years. Quite a lot of them from BITS and other renowned colleges. These folks always figure a way out and I really like that about them!
Not to mention, the founders got featured in Forbes 30 under 30 (Asia - Consumer Tech)
Now maybe Harish ends up going for an MBA. Seems like he has been preparing for GMAT for over a month now 🤷♂️
No, but genuinely, all the best to the team!
Signing Off
PS: I have taken rough estimates of the numbers since figures are not publicly disclosed for a privately held company.
I’ll be do more analysis of startups in the Indian Ecosystem and will be posting about them here! Do subscribe if you’re interested! Until next time 👋