Case Study: Analysis startup CodeIDE.com
Today there is a boom of social networks - both in the West and in our pioneers we have warmed up the market and it’s quite natural that many start-ups decided to make money on this topic. However, in most cases, it does not go further than copying “Odnoklassniki” or “Facebook”, “only with a bunch of additional chips”, which, in the opinion of their founders, should entice users from already promoted resources. Nevertheless, the topic of social networks is still promising - you just need to pay attention to niche social networks. It is they who have the maximum potential, and that niche networks, as practice shows , are the most in demand now by buyers. Such a social network will be discussed in this article, the original of which is posted on my site IdeaBlog.ru .
The CodeIDE.com startup analyzed in this article is interesting to me for several reasons. First of all, this is “our” startup (more precisely, Ukrainian, but I do not divide Ukrainians and Russians). Secondly, its founders are aimed not at the Russian-speaking, but at the global market (which is rare for startups from the former USSR). Thirdly, the way in which the founders of the startup are developing is interesting, developing its service. And fourth, this startup is focused on a very promising, in my opinion, market. In addition, it is interesting for me to evaluate the prospect of a startup development, when it has not yet laid out its entire functionality to the network, but I also know from its founders how it will look in the near future. The article is large, so those who do not like to read long posts, can not open it.
At first glance, the CodeIDE.com service causes a dual impression. On the one hand, it is made very high quality, and this suggests that it was made not by novices in the Internet business. The impression about the professionalism of the founders of this startup is further enhanced when you click on the " Online Teacher " link in the upper right corner - a few seconds later the operator of the customer support service greeted me and asked how he could help me. This level of user support is impressive and further reinforces the thought that this service was made by serious people. On the other hand, at first it seems that the developers of this service made a “childish” strategic mistake that the professionals in the Internet business would never have allowed - they, it seemed to me, aimed the service only at people starting to learn programming languages. Meanwhile, you should never aim the service exclusively at the need of the audience, which it needs only once in life and for a short time - otherwise you will be doomed to constant expensive involvement of the audience, which, having stayed on the site for some short time and meeting your need, will never return to you again.
')
This is like a website intended only for women preparing for the wedding: usually the preparation for this event takes two to four months, at this time the woman develops wild activity on this site, but then, when the wedding is over, she forgets about it and never returns . Consequently, the site owners are forced every month to attract new and new audience, spending time and money on it, to win the loyalty of attracted visitors in the fight with competitors - but all these efforts in a couple of months go like water to sand, since the wedding is played, the topics discussed are They are not interesting and it leaves the site forever. No - services for women preparing for the wedding, of course, are needed - but only as a supplement to the other, longer-term needs of women: then there is a chance that, having played the wedding, the woman will remain at it to discuss other topics with other attendees, parenting, taking care of looks, shopping, etc., but a website focused only on the preparation and organization of a wedding, an experienced person in the Internet business will never do, because it will be more trouble than profit.
The same applies to sites oriented only to novice programmers who only recently started learning programming languages: sooner or later they will outgrow the need for an online service that tests the performance of their simplest programs, professional software for developers will appear on their computers, and a service designed for newbies will simply cease to interest them. Consequently, all the costs of attracting its users and ensuring their loyalty to the service go “nowhere” just at the time when they should start giving returns. However, CodeIDE.com, as it turned out, has a very thoughtful and attractive business model, and this startup, I am sure, will be very successful. But first things first…
Description of the service and its history
Startup CodeIDE.com is a web service and provides an opportunity to enter the program code in one window, and to see the results of its execution in another window - if everything went well, the result is displayed; otherwise, errors resulting from the execution are displayed. Currently, the service supports 12 programming languages, including Basic, Assembler, C ++, Perl, HTML, JavaScript, Flex, etc. (in order to see which programming languages CodeIDE.com supports, click on the arrow above the top left window - you will see new tabs). The service also has a command line emulator ( CMD tab ), an individual file system for each registered user ( Files tab ), a task list and a mechanism for working with it ( Tasks tab ) and Public Chat , allowing both registered and unregistered users to communicate with each other. . Users can create groups, and in case you are connected to one of them, notifications for group members appear in the chat window.
As I already mentioned, in the upper right corner there is a link " Online Teacher ", when you click on it, the chat window opens and the service support service immediately turns to you for help. At first I thought it was a bot and therefore I asked the question if I was talking to a person. In response, the support service, looking at my IP address, suggested that I switch to Russian, which surprised me even more - agree that there are few services in Runet that can boast of their users' support in real time. But CodeIDE.com really turned out to be “our” startup. To be more precise, the Ukrainian. I introduced myself and asked the support service operator to give my contact information to the service manager to contact me. And the next day, Alexander Vityaz, head of the e-business center of one of Ukraine’s largest financial and industrial groups, the Dnipropetrovsk group Privat, which included Ukraine’s largest private bank Privatbank, knocked me on ICQ the next day adaptability. Alexander is the founder of CodeIDE.com.
As is often the case, CodeIDE.com did not originally originate as a business idea. The daughter of Alexander Vityaz lived in Israel and her father, who was in Dnepropetrovsk, decided that it was time to teach her programming. He tried to use the tools that he had at hand, but remotely, not even managed to install everything, but what was possible did not allow him to engage in remote training - code was exchanged via ICQ, email or blog, and the results were also exchanged this code. Having suffered this way for 2 weeks and realizing that effectively teaching programming languages in this way does not work, Vityaz decided to find some kind of web service designed specifically for this. For two weeks, all banks were looking for a similar service, but they did not find it, and they had to do it themselves. BASIC interpreter made for 2 months. Then came the turn of Pascal, Perl, etc. Now they are "fighting" with Prolog and LISP, in the plans of PHP. But I am already running ahead.
Naturally, since when creating CodeIDE.com there were no thoughts about business, the service was not promoted anywhere. But as soon as he was posted on the network, so that the Knight could finally train his daughter, almost immediately, signals from people who stumbled across the Internet on the project began to come in — mostly messages came through chat. It turned out that such a web service is needed not only by Vityaz and his daughter. Appeals of teachers from different countries of the world who want to study with their students using CodeIDE.com came up - and under them they made a system of virtual classes, as well as a “student-teacher” interaction system , within which teachers can assign tasks to their students, communicate with them and evaluate the tasks performed by students. The service has become very popular among teachers of programming in the Czech Republic. Then it turned out that CodeIDE.com was recommended for work in several Spanish colleges. But if teachers are Czechs, Spaniards, Americans, etc. they brought their offline groups to the service, because using CodeIDE.com it was more convenient for them to train their students, even if they are close to them, then the Indians "just got" Vityaz with their requests to make a platform where they could register with teachers and Sitting in India to teach Americans and residents of other English-speaking countries programming.
So Vityaz came to understand that the project “for a daughter” can turn out to be a good business - for this you should create a platform on which teachers and students can meet, communicate, learn and work on joint projects. And also pay each other for tuition. That is, the service turns into a global educational social network dedicated to computer science. Although Vityaz himself prefers to call it “a large open university of informatics”. The software of the social network is already undergoing testing and is scheduled for launch in March of this year.
Business model
Building a social network in which some users can make money on others, and those, in turn, are willing to pay for the services received - the dream of any startups. Indeed, in this case, those who want to make money by teaching others programming will take care of attracting the audience to the site - they will advertise their services provided by them on this service, in blogs, on forums, in communities, to promote Your page in this social network in search engines, which means the cost of attracting visitors for the startup itself will be very low. An example of such a service is, for example, eBay - the total advertising activity of sellers on eBay is much higher than the advertising activity of eBay itself. And the founders of CodeIDE, it seems, managed to find the very niche that would allow them to implement such a scenario.
For the use of its platform CodeIDE.com is not going to take money. The basic earnings of the service will consist of commissions from making payments from students to teachers - the benefit of Vityaz and the Privat group already has the infrastructure: a service for providing p2p transfers from card to card SiteHeart.com , especially since payments by credit cards are widely common and familiar abroad.
The second source of income is various premium services (for what kind of premium services additional money will be taken, Knight still thinks).
The third source is advertising and partnerships for the sale of books on programming and specialized software through a service from stores selling these products (even now, visitors often ask them to sell textbooks on C ++, Pascal, etc.).
We should not forget about earning through providing teachers with the opportunity to stand out - it seems that after programming teachers and courses offered by them have collected a sufficient number, some of them will be ready to pay for promoting themselves and their courses on the social network just as they are promoting their profiles of users of Russian dating services.
Well, in the end, the service can independently teach its visitors programming languages. The first payment for this service was made in September by a 52-year-old customer from Bahrain, who decided to learn Perl. The cost of one lesson, according to Vityaz, ranges from $ 15 to $ 25 dollars - but now it is no longer necessary for earning, but for a better understanding of clients' needs. At the same time, he believes that this will not create competition for those who want to teach in the service - firstly, the demand from students significantly exceeds supply, and secondly, teachers at CodeIDE.com are unlikely to be able to compete with outside English-speaking teachers. Teaching programming by service staff rather serves to demonstrate the capabilities of the service to both students and outside teachers.
Prospects for service and evaluation of factors for its successful development
Already we can say that the service is quite successful. Even if he doesn’t have most of the planned functionality, he is already popular with his visitors - programming teachers use it already now, teaching him to use his offline groups of students. Today, the service attracts from 500 to 4,000 visitors per day - and this is despite the fact that it still hardly progresses at all (the founders of the startup made only a few presentations of the service in technical universities of Ukraine). The main sources of traffic are the English-language Wikipedia section (from the pages devoted to programming languages) and StumbleUpon, a surfing service on the Internet on the pages recommended by other users — its users have left 115 admiring comments about CodeIDE.com.
The main success factor for CodeIDE.com (both current and, in my opinion, future success) is that Alexander Vityaz builds a service based not on his own ideas about how he should look, but listening to the wishes of his target audience. The need to develop online classes and student-teacher interaction systems was prompted to him by teachers from the Czech Republic who want to use the service. Wishes to create a social network in which those who wish to learn programming and teachers could find each other came from the Indians. According to the wishes of users, minor improvements to the service are being introduced.
The tactics of the service development was also chosen to match the strategy of “listening to users” - Vityaz posted a product on the network that he needed himself, without even knowing how he would be able to monetize it, allowed users to it and just listened to them carefully. And since the Knight is listening attentively, there is a high probability that the service will be ideally suited to the needs of users. By the way, it saves Vityaz and a lot of money - users are engaged in consulting for free. This, of course, was a wise move - and an unusual one, since everyone prefers to post the finished product with all (well, or almost all) functionality. Many fear that their idea will be stolen by competitors, but, as CodeIDE’s experience shows, these fears may be exaggerated. Moreover, Alexander Vityaz would like competitors to appear so that they “warm up the market”.
The second - and no less important - success factor, which allowed, by the way, including for a long time to carefully listen to the wishes of users, is the ability to use the already established infrastructure of the Privat group for the needs of a startup, without attributing its costs to expenses CodeIDE.com. Privat has its own call center with one and a half thousand operators (including operators who are sufficiently fluent in English), some of whom are served by CodeIDE.com chat. The same is true for programmers who improve service daily - they are involved in servicing other Privat businesses for the bulk of their working time. Such an opportunity to use the power of a large business group without having to pay for them, and allows CodeIDE.com to slowly develop its service, listening to the wishes of users and building the perfect product for them.
Having a proprietary payment system that allows settlements between people, and using a very common and familiar tool for users from “solvent” countries - a credit card - is also a definite plus. At the same time, SiteHeart.com will contribute to the development of CodeIDE.com, and vice versa. At the same time, of course, users will be able to use third-party payment systems for settlements between themselves.
It should also be noted extremely well chosen market - education + computer science. 100% of the target audience (those who want to study or teach programming) have a computer and access to the Internet, no matter what the level of Internet penetration in their country. There are no established competitors in this niche, the market is huge, and the demand is gigantic. CodeIDE.com plays into the hands of the “mod” to receive IT education, and the stereotype that exists in all countries that IT education is the best way to find an excellent job and improve your financial situation.
It is also necessary to mention that CodeIDE.com does not need to create a demand for its services - it already exists, but it can only be fully satisfied by engaging in offline courses.
The network already has educational social networks that offer training in, say, foreign languages - for example, the iTalki.com service .. It is in demand by users, but it focuses on the “pimping” of those who speak one language and want to learn another. This allows users to create pairs for learning languages, but it affects the quality of education - to work out conversational practice, communication with a native speaker is ideal, but a professional teacher should teach the basics, and in the same iTalki there is no division into teachers and students. Yes, and the iTalki business model is different - the service, apparently, does not plan to make the resource a place for professional users of each other's languages, so it will not attract professional teachers as a place to make money. The advantage of CodeIDE.com is its orientation towards the provision of “professional” educational services for which it is not a pity to pay money.
About once a month, Vityaz receives an offer to sell CodeIDE.com, and these proposals mainly come not from venture capitalists, but from “core” investors - companies engaged in distance education. But selling a service now, of course, is stupid - given that Vityaz and the Privat group do not have a shortage of funds. Quite the contrary - the Privat group has a fairly significant amount of money that it would like to invest in Internet startups at an early stage (Vityaz calls the money prepared for this purpose not even venture capital, but angel money), but has not yet found quality third-party projects. But the interest of "profile investors" suggests that the project is interesting to the market and, most likely, it will fire.
. IdeaBlog.ru .
The CodeIDE.com startup analyzed in this article is interesting to me for several reasons. First of all, this is “our” startup (more precisely, Ukrainian, but I do not divide Ukrainians and Russians). Secondly, its founders are aimed not at the Russian-speaking, but at the global market (which is rare for startups from the former USSR). Thirdly, the way in which the founders of the startup are developing is interesting, developing its service. And fourth, this startup is focused on a very promising, in my opinion, market. In addition, it is interesting for me to evaluate the prospect of a startup development, when it has not yet laid out its entire functionality to the network, but I also know from its founders how it will look in the near future. The article is large, so those who do not like to read long posts, can not open it.
At first glance, the CodeIDE.com service causes a dual impression. On the one hand, it is made very high quality, and this suggests that it was made not by novices in the Internet business. The impression about the professionalism of the founders of this startup is further enhanced when you click on the " Online Teacher " link in the upper right corner - a few seconds later the operator of the customer support service greeted me and asked how he could help me. This level of user support is impressive and further reinforces the thought that this service was made by serious people. On the other hand, at first it seems that the developers of this service made a “childish” strategic mistake that the professionals in the Internet business would never have allowed - they, it seemed to me, aimed the service only at people starting to learn programming languages. Meanwhile, you should never aim the service exclusively at the need of the audience, which it needs only once in life and for a short time - otherwise you will be doomed to constant expensive involvement of the audience, which, having stayed on the site for some short time and meeting your need, will never return to you again.
')
This is like a website intended only for women preparing for the wedding: usually the preparation for this event takes two to four months, at this time the woman develops wild activity on this site, but then, when the wedding is over, she forgets about it and never returns . Consequently, the site owners are forced every month to attract new and new audience, spending time and money on it, to win the loyalty of attracted visitors in the fight with competitors - but all these efforts in a couple of months go like water to sand, since the wedding is played, the topics discussed are They are not interesting and it leaves the site forever. No - services for women preparing for the wedding, of course, are needed - but only as a supplement to the other, longer-term needs of women: then there is a chance that, having played the wedding, the woman will remain at it to discuss other topics with other attendees, parenting, taking care of looks, shopping, etc., but a website focused only on the preparation and organization of a wedding, an experienced person in the Internet business will never do, because it will be more trouble than profit.
The same applies to sites oriented only to novice programmers who only recently started learning programming languages: sooner or later they will outgrow the need for an online service that tests the performance of their simplest programs, professional software for developers will appear on their computers, and a service designed for newbies will simply cease to interest them. Consequently, all the costs of attracting its users and ensuring their loyalty to the service go “nowhere” just at the time when they should start giving returns. However, CodeIDE.com, as it turned out, has a very thoughtful and attractive business model, and this startup, I am sure, will be very successful. But first things first…
Description of the service and its history
Startup CodeIDE.com is a web service and provides an opportunity to enter the program code in one window, and to see the results of its execution in another window - if everything went well, the result is displayed; otherwise, errors resulting from the execution are displayed. Currently, the service supports 12 programming languages, including Basic, Assembler, C ++, Perl, HTML, JavaScript, Flex, etc. (in order to see which programming languages CodeIDE.com supports, click on the arrow above the top left window - you will see new tabs). The service also has a command line emulator ( CMD tab ), an individual file system for each registered user ( Files tab ), a task list and a mechanism for working with it ( Tasks tab ) and Public Chat , allowing both registered and unregistered users to communicate with each other. . Users can create groups, and in case you are connected to one of them, notifications for group members appear in the chat window.
As I already mentioned, in the upper right corner there is a link " Online Teacher ", when you click on it, the chat window opens and the service support service immediately turns to you for help. At first I thought it was a bot and therefore I asked the question if I was talking to a person. In response, the support service, looking at my IP address, suggested that I switch to Russian, which surprised me even more - agree that there are few services in Runet that can boast of their users' support in real time. But CodeIDE.com really turned out to be “our” startup. To be more precise, the Ukrainian. I introduced myself and asked the support service operator to give my contact information to the service manager to contact me. And the next day, Alexander Vityaz, head of the e-business center of one of Ukraine’s largest financial and industrial groups, the Dnipropetrovsk group Privat, which included Ukraine’s largest private bank Privatbank, knocked me on ICQ the next day adaptability. Alexander is the founder of CodeIDE.com.
As is often the case, CodeIDE.com did not originally originate as a business idea. The daughter of Alexander Vityaz lived in Israel and her father, who was in Dnepropetrovsk, decided that it was time to teach her programming. He tried to use the tools that he had at hand, but remotely, not even managed to install everything, but what was possible did not allow him to engage in remote training - code was exchanged via ICQ, email or blog, and the results were also exchanged this code. Having suffered this way for 2 weeks and realizing that effectively teaching programming languages in this way does not work, Vityaz decided to find some kind of web service designed specifically for this. For two weeks, all banks were looking for a similar service, but they did not find it, and they had to do it themselves. BASIC interpreter made for 2 months. Then came the turn of Pascal, Perl, etc. Now they are "fighting" with Prolog and LISP, in the plans of PHP. But I am already running ahead.
Naturally, since when creating CodeIDE.com there were no thoughts about business, the service was not promoted anywhere. But as soon as he was posted on the network, so that the Knight could finally train his daughter, almost immediately, signals from people who stumbled across the Internet on the project began to come in — mostly messages came through chat. It turned out that such a web service is needed not only by Vityaz and his daughter. Appeals of teachers from different countries of the world who want to study with their students using CodeIDE.com came up - and under them they made a system of virtual classes, as well as a “student-teacher” interaction system , within which teachers can assign tasks to their students, communicate with them and evaluate the tasks performed by students. The service has become very popular among teachers of programming in the Czech Republic. Then it turned out that CodeIDE.com was recommended for work in several Spanish colleges. But if teachers are Czechs, Spaniards, Americans, etc. they brought their offline groups to the service, because using CodeIDE.com it was more convenient for them to train their students, even if they are close to them, then the Indians "just got" Vityaz with their requests to make a platform where they could register with teachers and Sitting in India to teach Americans and residents of other English-speaking countries programming.
So Vityaz came to understand that the project “for a daughter” can turn out to be a good business - for this you should create a platform on which teachers and students can meet, communicate, learn and work on joint projects. And also pay each other for tuition. That is, the service turns into a global educational social network dedicated to computer science. Although Vityaz himself prefers to call it “a large open university of informatics”. The software of the social network is already undergoing testing and is scheduled for launch in March of this year.
Business model
Building a social network in which some users can make money on others, and those, in turn, are willing to pay for the services received - the dream of any startups. Indeed, in this case, those who want to make money by teaching others programming will take care of attracting the audience to the site - they will advertise their services provided by them on this service, in blogs, on forums, in communities, to promote Your page in this social network in search engines, which means the cost of attracting visitors for the startup itself will be very low. An example of such a service is, for example, eBay - the total advertising activity of sellers on eBay is much higher than the advertising activity of eBay itself. And the founders of CodeIDE, it seems, managed to find the very niche that would allow them to implement such a scenario.
For the use of its platform CodeIDE.com is not going to take money. The basic earnings of the service will consist of commissions from making payments from students to teachers - the benefit of Vityaz and the Privat group already has the infrastructure: a service for providing p2p transfers from card to card SiteHeart.com , especially since payments by credit cards are widely common and familiar abroad.
The second source of income is various premium services (for what kind of premium services additional money will be taken, Knight still thinks).
The third source is advertising and partnerships for the sale of books on programming and specialized software through a service from stores selling these products (even now, visitors often ask them to sell textbooks on C ++, Pascal, etc.).
We should not forget about earning through providing teachers with the opportunity to stand out - it seems that after programming teachers and courses offered by them have collected a sufficient number, some of them will be ready to pay for promoting themselves and their courses on the social network just as they are promoting their profiles of users of Russian dating services.
Well, in the end, the service can independently teach its visitors programming languages. The first payment for this service was made in September by a 52-year-old customer from Bahrain, who decided to learn Perl. The cost of one lesson, according to Vityaz, ranges from $ 15 to $ 25 dollars - but now it is no longer necessary for earning, but for a better understanding of clients' needs. At the same time, he believes that this will not create competition for those who want to teach in the service - firstly, the demand from students significantly exceeds supply, and secondly, teachers at CodeIDE.com are unlikely to be able to compete with outside English-speaking teachers. Teaching programming by service staff rather serves to demonstrate the capabilities of the service to both students and outside teachers.
Prospects for service and evaluation of factors for its successful development
Already we can say that the service is quite successful. Even if he doesn’t have most of the planned functionality, he is already popular with his visitors - programming teachers use it already now, teaching him to use his offline groups of students. Today, the service attracts from 500 to 4,000 visitors per day - and this is despite the fact that it still hardly progresses at all (the founders of the startup made only a few presentations of the service in technical universities of Ukraine). The main sources of traffic are the English-language Wikipedia section (from the pages devoted to programming languages) and StumbleUpon, a surfing service on the Internet on the pages recommended by other users — its users have left 115 admiring comments about CodeIDE.com.
The main success factor for CodeIDE.com (both current and, in my opinion, future success) is that Alexander Vityaz builds a service based not on his own ideas about how he should look, but listening to the wishes of his target audience. The need to develop online classes and student-teacher interaction systems was prompted to him by teachers from the Czech Republic who want to use the service. Wishes to create a social network in which those who wish to learn programming and teachers could find each other came from the Indians. According to the wishes of users, minor improvements to the service are being introduced.
The tactics of the service development was also chosen to match the strategy of “listening to users” - Vityaz posted a product on the network that he needed himself, without even knowing how he would be able to monetize it, allowed users to it and just listened to them carefully. And since the Knight is listening attentively, there is a high probability that the service will be ideally suited to the needs of users. By the way, it saves Vityaz and a lot of money - users are engaged in consulting for free. This, of course, was a wise move - and an unusual one, since everyone prefers to post the finished product with all (well, or almost all) functionality. Many fear that their idea will be stolen by competitors, but, as CodeIDE’s experience shows, these fears may be exaggerated. Moreover, Alexander Vityaz would like competitors to appear so that they “warm up the market”.
The second - and no less important - success factor, which allowed, by the way, including for a long time to carefully listen to the wishes of users, is the ability to use the already established infrastructure of the Privat group for the needs of a startup, without attributing its costs to expenses CodeIDE.com. Privat has its own call center with one and a half thousand operators (including operators who are sufficiently fluent in English), some of whom are served by CodeIDE.com chat. The same is true for programmers who improve service daily - they are involved in servicing other Privat businesses for the bulk of their working time. Such an opportunity to use the power of a large business group without having to pay for them, and allows CodeIDE.com to slowly develop its service, listening to the wishes of users and building the perfect product for them.
Having a proprietary payment system that allows settlements between people, and using a very common and familiar tool for users from “solvent” countries - a credit card - is also a definite plus. At the same time, SiteHeart.com will contribute to the development of CodeIDE.com, and vice versa. At the same time, of course, users will be able to use third-party payment systems for settlements between themselves.
It should also be noted extremely well chosen market - education + computer science. 100% of the target audience (those who want to study or teach programming) have a computer and access to the Internet, no matter what the level of Internet penetration in their country. There are no established competitors in this niche, the market is huge, and the demand is gigantic. CodeIDE.com plays into the hands of the “mod” to receive IT education, and the stereotype that exists in all countries that IT education is the best way to find an excellent job and improve your financial situation.
It is also necessary to mention that CodeIDE.com does not need to create a demand for its services - it already exists, but it can only be fully satisfied by engaging in offline courses.
The network already has educational social networks that offer training in, say, foreign languages - for example, the iTalki.com service .. It is in demand by users, but it focuses on the “pimping” of those who speak one language and want to learn another. This allows users to create pairs for learning languages, but it affects the quality of education - to work out conversational practice, communication with a native speaker is ideal, but a professional teacher should teach the basics, and in the same iTalki there is no division into teachers and students. Yes, and the iTalki business model is different - the service, apparently, does not plan to make the resource a place for professional users of each other's languages, so it will not attract professional teachers as a place to make money. The advantage of CodeIDE.com is its orientation towards the provision of “professional” educational services for which it is not a pity to pay money.
About once a month, Vityaz receives an offer to sell CodeIDE.com, and these proposals mainly come not from venture capitalists, but from “core” investors - companies engaged in distance education. But selling a service now, of course, is stupid - given that Vityaz and the Privat group do not have a shortage of funds. Quite the contrary - the Privat group has a fairly significant amount of money that it would like to invest in Internet startups at an early stage (Vityaz calls the money prepared for this purpose not even venture capital, but angel money), but has not yet found quality third-party projects. But the interest of "profile investors" suggests that the project is interesting to the market and, most likely, it will fire.
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. IdeaBlog.ru .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/20485/
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