This is an exciting time for your new company. You've got your freshly printed business cards in hand, your business plan looks solid and you're ready to go get that all-important first customer. Then you realize, "Wow, this is a lot harder than I thought!" To cope, you might search for a seminar or consider taking a class at the nearby university.
[ibimage==24396==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-right]
That's old school. Now you can take advantage of the expert-led, full-bredth courses offered by online education companies like uGurus.
"[We help] web professionals build wildly successful businesses," said CEO Brent Weaver. "We take experts that are out there doing amazing things with their business and give them a platform to share their knowledge with the world."
With so many massive open online courses (or MOOCs) available for free including hugely popular sites like Khan Academy, Coursera and Udacity, Weaver knows his company has some stiff competition, especially since you have to pay to take courses on uGurus. That just motivates his team to stay innovative and provide top-notch material.
"Web education is definitely crowded," Weaver said. "Take that a step further and online education is even more so. In the web space we focus on business skills, not technology. Every other major education hub over-emphasizes technical skills as being the gateway to building a successful business and career in the web space."
uGurus differentiates itself by offering not only knowledge acquisition, but access to experts who serve as mentors to participants and what Weaver terms "social education."
"A lot of online education hubs like Lynda and Team Tree House are engaged in only one type of learning: knowledge acquisition. They have videos that lecture and then the user validates that learning by taking a quiz or test. While this can be valuable, it’s only one form of learning. There is really nothing that a user 'accomplishes' through a test.
"Learning is inherently social. We learn best by not just being instructed on something, but to then apply it to our lives, and then transfer that knowledge to others."
Finding users is a tall order at times for most online companies, but as many of the uGurus lessons preach, building a business involves making important investment decisions.
"A single user might pay $99 for a month of membership, but our intent is to give that user $10,000 worth of value in their month of membership," said Weaver. "In our minds, this compounds, so a customer should really feel the love the longer they stick with us."
