Imagine learning French from someone in France or learning to cook pizza from an Italian chef! That is the dream of Bhavneet Singh, the 23-year-old co-founder and CEO of Videowork.com, who is looking to address a key gap as self-learning and lifelong learning take centrestage worldwide with the exponential growth of gig economy workers. The platform offers creators tools to provide live and recorded classes apart from being able to handle marketing, payment, class management, and effective user engagement. It also solves discoverability and seamless consumption issues for content seekers world over.
Videowork.com has inbuilt tools driven by AI that upsells and cross-sells content to consumers in the app based on past behavioural and look-alike metrics. Launched just a couple of weeks ago it is already making waves. According to IMARC, the global e-learning market size reached US$253 billion in 2021 and is estimated to be US$521 billion by 2027 growing at 9.9 percent CAGR between 2022-27. The pandemic obviously acts as a red herring and a trigger for digital adoption particularly in learning.
The genesis
When Bhavneet started using various online conferencing tools for professional meetings and also at home for online education, he realised the gap in service fulfillment and the ecosystem. “I saw an opportunity to bring a video platform for professionals to provide online training seamlessly – a product that would cater to the end-to-end requirement of users both from a provider and from a consumer POV,” he says.
“During the past two years, we researched online conferencing tools which gave us an opportunity to fill the product gap in the market – a seamless platform for the creator economy to monetise their content and also make consumption and discoverability easy for the users,” adds Bhavneet.
How Videowork.com works
Globally, there has been an explosion in the number of influencers and content creators, commanding a huge and loyal audience which often cuts across borders. It’s a great opportunity waiting to be tapped to help these entrepreneurs teach skills that they are experts in, to learners around the world.
“What we have done is to enable them through our platform which has multiple features to help them optimise and earn by doing live broadcast or two-way, one-on-one communication sessions with their learners or fans on a per-session payment model,” says Bhavneet Singh, Co-founder and CTO, Videowork.com. With over 500 such influencers and thousands of committed learners, Videowork.com removes the hurdles that a majority of creators face when it comes to marketing, user engagement and payment – it’s now all under one platform. Pre-recorded content can be watched anytime and anywhere, and people can learn or teach whenever they have time.
The courses on Videowork.com start from as low as Rs 100 making it truly democratic and accessible to most users. Users can also pay in their local currency as all major payment platforms are accepted. There is also an in-built filter to ensure that users below 18 are not shown any content marked otherwise to ensure their safety and well-being. Videowork.com allows a creator to go with video, audio, and run rich media services. They can add moderators to assist where required and create instant services on the spot. On the engagement side, the new venture allows these micro entrepreneurs to reply to enquiries instantly so they don’t lose out on revenue generation.
Andesh Bhatti, Founder of Collectcent and an avid early-stage investor in the Indian startup ecosystem has since backed the venture.
Future plans
Videowork.com will be taken global in phases starting October 2022 and will be available in most major markets by 2023, informs Bhavneet. “The plans are in place and once further funding happens, we will accelerate rapidly,” he adds.
“Micro entrepreneurship is the next big thing globally. I am happy that we will be enabling and ensuring many of these micro entrepreneurs to leverage the power of the internet and the digital world to monetise their social following,” says Bhavneet.
The icing on the cake for this budding entrepreneur is when Kiren Rijiju, Union Minister of Law and Justice, Govt of India, recently spent time understanding the product and congratulated the young entrepreneur for looking to create the next wave of entrepreneurs through his venture. He also expressed his keenness for more youngsters like Bhavneet to build innovative businesses targeting global markets out of India, that puts India on the global stage.
