Una startup que combina con la novicia rebelde...

Quilters And Sewers: The Key To Startup Craftsy's Unfettered Growth

Jewelry Making and Cake Decorating.
Quilting, Gardening and Spinning and Weaving.
Knitting and Sewing some beautiful strings.
These are a few of my favorite things.

- A new take on “My Favorite Things,” Sound Of Music 

Craftsy, an online education platform, offers interactive classes in all the categories in my Sound Of Music mashup above plus more. Since the site launched in July 2011, they’ve already managed to attract over 500,000 class enrollments (paying an average of $26.50 per class) and are projected to hit over 750,000 class enrollments by the end of 2012. Craftsy’s most popular class is a quilting course, which has almost 100,000 students. The site is currently on track to become larger than the University ofPhoenix, which is considered to be one of the largest online educators.

Craftsy has one major advantage over other online educators: demographics. Almost all of its users are women and 80% of their users are over the age of 40. Most users live in the suburbs or rural areas, with over 50% of users spending more than ten hours a week crafting. The makeup of their userbase is not that of a standard Silicon Valley or New York startup.

This makes sense, considering that the Craftsy team works out of Denver, an off-the-beaten-track tech hub in the U.S. The team has built their business through very traditional marketing and advertising in trades and other decidedly low-tech venues like sewing conferences. And most important, they are going after an underserved but very large market. For instance, there are 21M quilters in the U.S. who spend approximately $3.6 billion annually, and there are 26M sewists (yes, a real word) and they spend $2.7 billion in total annually. Craftsy is the first site of its kind, and the first platform to bring these old-school, localized industries online.

I had the opportunity to connect with the founders of Craftsy, two former eBay execs, John Levisay andJosh Scott, to ask them a few questions.

Alex Taub (AT): Where do you see your business going in the next 12 months? What are emerging classes?
Craftsy Founders (CF): We are producing 15 new 4-6 hour classes per month, and will continue to ramp up production in order to produce more than 250 new classes in 2013.  Many of these new classes will expand our offerings in existing course categories, including quilting, knitting, crocheting, sewing, cake decorating, jewelry making, and cooking. We will also add classes in a number of new categories over the course of the next 12 months.

AT: Any plans to take the classes offline?
CF: Many of our instructors offer terrific offline classes, in addition to the classes they teach online via Craftsy. We will continue to work with them to promote their offline class offerings. We will also continue to have a significant presence at local trade shows and conferences in the categories we cover, like the International Quilt Festival.

AT: Why has Craftsy been so successful with the female demographic? Any plans to expand to classes geared towards men?
CF: Our core demographic has been traditionally underserved by technology companies, which ordinarily skew towards men. Our audience is affluent, well-educated, and technology savvy, and we look forward to continuing to focus on meeting their educational needs.  Our current courses are geared towards women, but we are considering creating classes which are more male-focused in the future.

AT: Where do you think the future of education is going?
CF: We think the future of education centers around accessibility. High-quality educational experiences have, for too long, been exclusively available to those with money, time, and a specific geographic location.  We look forward to continuing to create superior educational content that’s easily accessible to more people, at more times, in more places.

AT: What’s the most interesting thing about Craftsy that hasn’t been spoken about publicly?
CF: Craftsy members are not only passionate about their crafts, they are also passionate about giving. We are kicking off a holiday charity event this week where we are asking Craftsy members to knit hats for homeless children. Last year, when our community was much smaller, we collected over 3,000 handmade hats.

AT: Where do you see yourselves compared to other education startups?
CF: Craftsy stands apart from other education start-ups in two fundamental ways:

1. For students, Craftsy offers:

• Access to an interactive learning experience. Craftsy’s unique platform captures the magic of a live class experience, and discussions and interaction are seamlessly woven into the learning experience. If you have a question while watching a video lesson, simply click the “ask a question” button on the screen. Your video will pause and the question you ask (which can include a photo if helpful) will be associated with that exact time point in the play of the video. You will receive an email notification when the instructor or classmates respond to your question; typically you will receive multiple responses within 24 hours.  This integrated Q & A creates a virtuous loop of contextually-relevant interaction that makes the content more robust over time. When other students view that same time point in the video lesson, they will see your question appear contextually on their screen, and will see the ongoing threaded discussion in response to your question, so their experience will be enhanced as well.
• Access to the world’s best instructors. Craftsy aims to democratize access to distinguished teachers who are well-respected and lauded in their fields. Within each of our categories, we seek out and work with the best instructors from around the world. Our instructional design team collaborates with each instructor to design a compelling class that will deliver a great learning experience. We bring the instructor into our studios and our full-time, professional production team films the class in a several day, multi-camera, HD shoot. Our editing team then creates an in-depth lesson out of the raw footage, adding motion graphics and other supporting material where helpful.  The result is a high-quality, effective class experience.  The focus on consistent quality enables students to trust the experience they will receive from Craftsy, and save the time they would otherwise spend digging through inconsistent online offerings.
• Classes that are available for students to enjoy on their own schedule and in the comfort of their own homes. Craftsy classes are available anytime, and students can access courses as many times as they want, for as long as they want since access never expires.
• In addition to the aforementioned benefits, the Craftsy online education platform enables students to easily take and review notes while watching a class, show the projects they create as a result of what they have learned, loop over important sections until they are mastered, access closed captioning of the video lessons, and search the text of the videos and discussions to easily access and review relevant moments.

2. For instructors, Craftsy offers:

• Scalability: Craftsy classes attract thousands of students, far more than an instructor could ever manage to interact with in a live classroom setting. The Craftsy platform makes it easy to teach and interact with a large student base.
• Ease: Craftsy instructors are experts in their domain, but not necessarily experts in technology development, video production, or online marketing, so we handle all of that for them. All Craftsy instructors need to do is what they do best, teach a great class. The Craftsy team handles the rest, including production of the online courses.
• Income: Craftsy is a significant source of income for our instructors, with several earning over $100K per year.

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