![]() The staff rocketed from 67 to more than 400-mostly in sales and post-production-after the company moved to new digs outside Santa Barbara. It soon turned out, though, that the company did need money, lots of it.Īs revenue roared ahead over the next five years, so did overhead. "Lynda and Bruce just blew me away." His advice: You don't need cash you need experienced management. "I've seen thousands of business plans," Robison says. Unsure of what to do hired Eric Robison, who'd spent eight years valuing companies for Paul Allen's investment vehicle Vulcan. Starting in 2007, hungry investors, impressed by its simple model and financial health, came calling. Why invoke the audit clause when you're making pretty good money-in one case, up to $30,000 in the first six months of 2013? "Some book authors get better royalties with than from their publishers," Heavin insists.īuilding on the backs of contributors, was entirely bootstrapped for 17 years. I spoke to ten of them, and none seems to know or care. She keeps her contributors in the dark, too. How much? Weinman refuses to disclose the percentage of sales, the compensation formula or what she pays in kill fees. Once confirmed, they are flown to 's studios for filming, where in-house production techs synthesize courses like a five-hour tutorial on Excel 2013 into roughly 100 digestible three-minute lessons.Įach month kicks a certain amount into a royalty pool and dispenses cash based on number of views. "Being a good teacher on-camera is paramount." Staffers scour publisher lists and conference programs for prospects, then administer screen tests. "You can be a leading expert in something and still have no idea how to explain it," Weinman says. ![]() ![]() People like Julieanne Kost, a 20-year Adobe veteran who teaches Photoshop essentials. So she turned to top talent in photography, coding and, increasingly, office applications-dangling attractive incentives for racking up views. Now you just get it online, and you're back to work five minutes later."īut online video required more content than Weinman could create. "To take a class you'd have to get a hotel, a plane ticket, probably tack on $3,000 in expenses. "What we discovered about video was its cost-effectiveness," Heavin says. The couple built a production studio in Ventura and broadened course offerings, all online. ![]() No more educational retreats the staff of 32 was cut to 9. The dot-com wipeout whacked but also changed it for the better. "Faster cycles require us to be even more nimble," says Weinman. Meeting new exigencies means bringing some production in-house and developing more evergreen content-both expensive propositions-to replace lost traffic. These days takes an average of three months, from pitch to distribution, to produce a video. The site must learn to keep up with "Web warp-speed updates," says Andrew Braccia, a partner at Accel, an investor. All that has helped build a huge fan base and a library of 100,000 videos.īut now for a rethink. Subscribers pay $25 a month, or $250 a year, to access 3- to 20-minute courses on Web design, 3-D animation, Photoshop, Excel and CAD, among others, adding up to $100 million in revenue last year. Profitable since 1997, it was an early adopter of the contributor model: Like, the site relies on an army of outside content creators-educators who star in nearly every instructional video. With the ed-tech business awash in $1 billion in 2012 investments, is the one to beat. ![]()
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