Mindsy
= "Mindsy Wants To Be The Netflix Of E-Learning".
URL = http://www.mindsy.com/
Description
STEVE O'HEAR:
'Launched publicly last month, Mindsy is a new UK startup that’s building a Netflix-style service for consuming e-learning content, specifically online video courses. Instead of selling individual courses as per sites like Udemy and Skillshare, the company is repackaging some of the same premium video content in a subscription ‘all you can eat’ model, costing $29 per month.
Mindsy also recently raised a small amount of funding: An £80,000 seed round from Mark Pearson of Markco Media and MyVoucherCodes fame.
“We’re trying to build a platform for e-learning/video learning across all topics,” explains co-founder and CEO Christian Owens. “Instead of focusing on creating our own original content we partner with existing instructors and experts who have already put together high quality, engaging e-learning content.”
To that end, Mindsy already boasts over 5,000 video lessons (although discrete instructors/courses number in the hundreds), ranging from computer programming to learning the piano — all for a single monthly subscription with no limits on the number of videos that can be consumed. How much e-learning a user could properly work through in a month will vary, of course, but certainly a subscription model seems attractive when you consider that some of the same content costs more than $29 on its own.
“A unique trait of Mindsy is we see ourselves as a “Netflix-style” service for this e-learning content,” says Owens. “The content available through a Mindsy monthly subscription can be bought elsewhere at individual per-course pricing. [The] average price of each course we offer on these external sites is around $49. Our users get everything in their subscription.” (http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/09/mindsy/)
More Information
- Mindsy isn’t the first e-learning site to adopt a subscription model. Competitors include Lynda.com for design and technical courses, or Treehouse for coding and website building.