When starting a business or launching a new product, one of the hardest challenges is having an audience.
One of my favourite techniques to get people to notice and then maybe to follow you/your product is Other People’s Network (OPN).
The concept behind this technique is simple: if someone already build relationships with people that may be in my target, why don’t I harness them in order to get their audience to know me?
In other words: Other People’s Networks allow you to build an audience or acquire customers simply by figuring out how to use the networks others have built.
Therefore, the basis for OPN is to:
- find where I can find my target Buyer Personas
- use someone else’s network for promoting and selling a product/service.
One of the biggest business cases of a successful OPN is Udemy.
Udemy is a company based in San Francisco and it is one of the most famous online learning platforms aimed at professional adults.
Udemy sells content for profit and provides tools which enable users to create, promote and sell a course.
The founder of Udemy is Eren Bali who created a software for giving live virtual classrooms in 2007 and launched the website udemy.com in 2010 together with Oktay Caglar and Gagan Biyani.
In February 2010, the founders tried to raise venture capital funding.
Anyway, due to missing both contents creators and an audience on the website, the idea failed to impress investors and the co-founders were rejected 30 times.
Therefore, they needed an idea and they noticed an opportunity in accessing YouTube’s Network.
In fact, YouTube is an infinite source of content and it is easy to find someone who uploads tutorials and webinars.
This wathe s perfect material to be offered as free courses by embedding YouTube player in udemy.com.
Within a few months, Udemy had around 10.000 registered users and this attracted around 1.000 instructors that had created about 2.000 courses.
At this point, the co-founders tried to attempt another round of financing and raised $1 million in venture funding by August.
In the following years, the success of this initiative brought the company to an exponential growth and according to Similarweb, in August 2018, Udemy hit more than 90 million Total Visits.
Business Strategy | Product Marketing | Executive Master eCommerce Management | Business Innovation Master | MSc
I am driven by my personal growth and of people/contexts that surround me.
I followed a professional path in Valentino Fashion Group and Luxottica during which, thanks to the ability to understand different businesses and interests, I was able to succeed in Operations, Merchandising and Retail.
These organizations have exploited my ability to mediate and translate needs/constraints into practice, assigning me to Project Management roles.
Luxottica relied on my ability to analyze, to anticipate things and to imagine/implement solutions by appointing me in Supply Chain Management department and assigning me to the Product Management of IoT solutions for Anti-counterfeiting and Retail digitalization.
During this professional path, I also developed my leadership by managing teams to build Processes, Organizations, Systems and Governance Tools.
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