CODERSTRUST UPDATE AUGUST 2016
Dear investors, advisors, and friends,
Here is another monthly update on CodersTrust.
It has never been more clear that CodersTrust is standing before an enormous opportunity. The online labor market will create more than 160 million jobs by 2025 and over five million companies are currently posting over 100.000 paid jobs each month on more than 150 freelance portals. At any given point in time, more than 2 million freelancers are bidding in real-time for client projects creating an unparalleled global job market in terms of size, flexibility, dynamic and reach.
Exactly as you would expect nurses and doctors on a hospital to have gone through a specialized education before performing a surgery, you would think there would be a specialized education for these online and remote jobs. Unfortunately, for the 150 different marketplaces, the 5 million companies using the platforms and for 200 million students worldwide without access to education this doesen’t exist. So it’s not hard to understand the disruptive, revolutionary and complete game-changing natur of CodersTrust that provides student funding and a systematic learn and earn path for students from all corners of the world to be a part of this new online economy.
But let’s see how its going then….
- Online marketing
Students signup is growing at a constant rate, since the launch of our global platform in mid-june:
The following table show the sources of traffic coming directly, organic, from social and PR.
The following table show the online visitors, conversion rates and signup metrics.
2. Online Student Operation
We’re now serving +5000 students from 32 countries and 475 cities worldwide.
The active users following the online “learn and earn” path is constantly growing and is currently at a constant level off approximately 3.000 students.
Our 24/7 online support team has an average of 200 daily mentor conversations with our students:
Our daily live classes has an average of 50–100 students attending with an average of 300 registered students watching the recorded class whenever they can fit it into their schedule.
The engagement from live classes is increasing with more than 150 chat messages being send which includes questions and peer-to-peer student communication.
2. Local student operations.
We currently have a total of 1139 enrolled students and 950 students currently joining classroom training in our affiliate learn and earn centers in Bangladesh, Kosovo, Buthan and India.
2.1 Malasya
Major marketing and recruiting campaigns are currently being rolled out in Malysia with big university conferences as can seen on the picture below:
2.2 Poland
CodersTrust Poland is launched under a local franchise model with a dedicated polish team and the operation has already reached 300 active online students all across the country.
The launch in poland included a competition to win a free program for the best performing students in the trial period. One of the winners was Małgorzata Iwańczak — a veterinary student from a city near Krakow — she spent 4–5 hours every day the last month studying on the CodersTrust “learn and earn” path.
2.3 Bangladesh
Our rockstar bookkeeping freelancer Mizanur Rahman launched a “learn&earn” path for new accounting/bookeeping freelancers in Bangladesh. To solve the number one problem for SME in every country to manage the time-consuming task of documentation and bookeping:
Abdul Kader — One of our best performing student from the first batch of students in Bangladesh — is now a mentor spearheading a “learn and earn” design path for students conquering the freelance market for graphical design tasks.
We originally launched in Bangladesh more than two years ago to develop the platform, proof the business-case and create a sufficient data-set to scale our student finance platform. The graphs below show the investment made in 2015/16 which is now starting to pay off with an increasing revenue almost making the company in Bangladesh break-even.
As for the students, they are currently performing better than we projected in our financial model, which makes the CT offering even more interesting for students and for micro-financial institutions to provide student finance for under-privileged students:
Below is an overview of some of the CodersTrust students job and earning data from the largest freelance portal Upwork. Notice this data does not include earning from freelancer.com, fiverr or any of the other 50 freelance portals.
2.4. Kosovo
The first batch in Kosovo has ended and the team is currently preparing to start another batch from early september. Below is a graph of the total jobs and earning from the first 100 students in Kosovo.
The following graph show the kind of jobs the students have been working on.
The following table show a list of the unnamed students, the number of jobs and total earning they have been able to get during the 6 month learn and earn period:
Here is an even more specific list of the type of jobs the student was able to win and complete. It provides an overview of the kind of tasks students are able to work on as they slowly improve their skills to move up into higher paid categories.
3. Platform
We have faced few bumps along the way in the development of our platform; we have been forced to replace our CTO several times and shift technology platforms. However, we’re now on track with a strong development and mentor team to develop and operate our platform on two levels.
1. First, we have our off-the-shelf platform combining a suite of online software and services (freelance portals, codeschool, onelogin, codacy, payoneer, etc.) into one unified CodersTrust service. We will never have to hold back or wait for our tech platform; we will always be able to drive our student operations with freely available online tools where we pay as we go. Any mentor in CodersTrust is be able to set up, manage, integrate APIs, and oversee a student operation based on this platform.
2. Second, we’re currently working on our Student Finance platform — a platform prepared for our global student finance expansion that has been planned and developed with the time and resources to look ahead and realize the full vision of CodersTrust.
The CodersTrust Platform consist of a testing system to evaluate the creditworthiness of the student, a personalized “Learn & Earn” path with content from leading e-learning portals such as Codeacademy and Codeschool, 24/7 mentor support, daily live classes and a job aggregator to match students with freelance task from more than 10 major portals.
4. Finances
We have deployed significant capital and talent behind our service. In the graph below is an overview of CodersTrust total burn in both 2015 and 2016.
A major financial key performance indicator is naturally to get the cost/student down, and get the earning/student as high as possible. The goal is to get the best possible overview and statistical patterns on bad students dropping out and good students making the best possible return on investment on the online labor market from their online education.
In the graph below is our current unit economics on students and our projection on how we expect to reduce cost per student based on volume, purchasing power and economies of scope and scale.
The graph below show the average student business case for 1.000 students and the target business case as we scale to 10.000 students.
The most important part of this business case is to ensure our students earning is as high as possible. The graph below demonstrates the current difference between our projected and actuals student earnings in the first 1-3 month, 4–6 month and 7–12 month.
The second vital performance indicator is the drop-out rate. Below is a graph demonstrating the actual versus projected drop-out rate for our current students.
Following these rather positive key financial performance indicators, we’re now in a position to dream bigger than ever before. Our goal has always been to proof the business case, collect sufficient data and streamline the full student cycle with a standardized student finance service. Below is an outline of the current loan product we are currently working on together with a prominent list of international financial institutions.
A key part of deploying this student finance service is to continue developing our platform to support the entire student life cycle in an online and automated process.
We expect to go reach 15–20.000 students as we raise our Series A and raise 5M USD to provide as loan for students. A key enabler to reach this level of students is to recruit 100 successful mentors with a proven track-record from 50+ different countries, and let them serve as local mentors guiding students through our learn and earn path based on our extensive platform to manage, track, analyze and monetize their local students. The following graph shows the projection and break-even scenario for this growth plan.
Conclusion
We are focused on one of the greatest opportunities in the world economy that has yet to be disrupted by the Internet. We still believe that CodersTrust has a fair shot at becoming one of the most significant companies in the 21st century. We believe it is our moral duty to our generation to pursue this noble and just mission — whatever it takes.
Peace!
Ferdinand Kjaerulff
CEO CodersTrust
