MAKING ASIA MOBILE LEARNING MARKET NR 1 — The AIAR® Journey 2019
The Internal Development 2019
The last tour has resulted in AIAR® now having a broad international group of owners investing from Hongkong, Bahrain, Dubai and Singapore, which has now set the stage ahead! On one hand we have a highly impatient CEO (= me 😊) who wants to kick off while having minimal dilution in this phase, where we are already aligned in budget for this phase using an entrepreneurial lean-and-mean mode.
On the other hand, we have our other founder and CBD (= Marcus 😊), who still wants to add more of his friends in Manila, Dubai and elsewhere in the world. If we end up somewhere in between it might perhaps be the best, but with 40.000 followers in social media I might be famous for something but I can assure you it’s not for my patience — i.e. expect intense takeoff shortly 😊
Another thing that feels good is that for the family & friends who helped out during the earlier start-up year in Europe, we are this summer making the SPV set. Perhaps the most fun of it all is though that be the tech development is totally shining, where we behind us have the best requirement specification (353 confluence pages) and among the best prototypes I’ve seen in over 100 projects in my life — everything delivered to us in intimate collaboration with the stars in the tech team of Da Nang.
To that we are on the verge of adding another team to complete the rest to an extremely competitive cost with extreme quality level and secure timeline.
The External Development 2019
In terms of business development, it was this spring made official that we closed the Ghana JV-contract with 0.5 million students, and Nigeria around the corner with another 3 million in line. In addition, as a sneak preview we have last month signed contract for distribution to 40 million consumers for one of the states in the world’s largest education market (sneak peek and still to be announced :D).
To all of this, we can now add that we have initiated partner discussions with one of our dream partners and its more than hundreds millions of users — one of the few worthy such a state-of-the art ecosystem as AIAR® — while Mr. Marcus also hedged it all with equally good entrants to most of their competitors.
One of my biggest favorites, however, is that we recently not only have met with an abundance of interesting ASEAN distributors, role models and investors, but also just initiated negotiations with a number of business schools. In both Manila, India and the leading education country in the world, Singapore, we are discussing collaboration regarding hundreds of thousands of online students. Here our partners contribute with content and distribution, while we provide the game changing ecosystem for maximization of fun, efficiency and credibility of the learning.
The Road We´re Heading for the Rest of the Year
And having the rock solid tech soon in place, adding growth hacking from both extremely disruptive distribution channels via JV’s (though with more “untested” LTV), in combination with smaller volumes but more secure LTV from ASEAN-partners (where we are also in dialogue with another UN-funded Africa project and others), AIAR® is soon to fall into the right “league”.
In the latest talk of the town regarding Digital IPO:s, the success story of Slack tells us with admiration how they in four years went from $0B valuation to a senseless $21BN, and all with …. 90 million users.* It is not totally unparalleled with the 15 million users I received in one of the ventures I chaired some year ago (though with $0,01M in marketing budget :D).
And it’s definitely not unparalleled to the 100 million users my co-founder Mats this year received in the company he co-founded a while ago (Acast, the world’s largest podcast application). And, while we’re at it, it is of course not even close to the 200 million subscribers of our Swedish friends, Spotify, where our forth co-founder Johan was heading strategic excellence at HQ before heading the tech at AIAR®.
And now I haven’t even started talking about all the missions where I personally assisted over 100 companies in its digital success — like when elevating $30M eCom to $150M in four years’ time, increasing ROI from hundreds of millions dollars’ worth of digital media with 500% in 5 years’ time, implemented digital strategies with measurable effect for 64 countries in the world’s biggest tech company etc. etc.
And we’re still talking about hardcore verticals, with extreme competition. While if we take a closer look at the by far narrower “competition” for AIAR®, the biggest MOOC:s and eLearners are becoming unicorns even being digital dwarfs with 10–30 million members :-O
I’m not saying it’s like stealing candy from children. But still, where I’m coming from it’s not anything that makes me shiver of fear either so to speak. Where we in the first PoC of AIAR®, with only one learning subject and extremely simple tech, in three months became the world’s most downloaded independent app in its field on Google Play and AppStore, loved by people in 165 countries.
In 3 months.
With a simple MVP technology that is not even close to the disruptive magic the AIAR® team is injecting as we speak 😊
The Legacy to Change the World
What I think I’m trying to say, is that we right now have nothing but a helluva team. And now this “helluva team” is 200% determined to change this world. To change the world with learning as tool, more specifically a devastatingly disruptive mobile learning tool, so game changing that this world will never be the same again.
This doesn’t mean that I’ve lost respect for the challenge, but I am (!) feeling the smell ahead of where this wonderful creature actually is heading. After summer AIAR® is completing the entire technology. After which we will migrate content and then make unforeseen growth hacking boosts with phenomenal partners in two phases in two continents (Asia & Africa). And not far after that we are heading towards the similar level as Slack & Co, aiming to become the 11th unicorn of ASEAN (or the 9th unicorn of Sweden, depending on how you count :D)**
What I’m not saying is that it’ll “easy”. But what I am (!) saying is that we’re a bunch of lunas that have achieved results at higher level than this before. And now it’s for real — this is our legacy to the world, and now we’ve got such a brutal speed in the team, superior development with learning models looking like social media and gaming, in combination with golden partnerships — i.e. the probability of global success is getting very high, while the timeline are getting considerably shorter 😊
We’re simply going to make learning fun again — and in the process transforming learning quitters into learning lovers. And it’s all starting to become a superspeed in doing this, and ahead it will do nothing but accelerate — i.e. stay put, because you aint seen nothing yet :D
Many hugs / Rufus
Rufus.lidman@aiar.com (WhatsApp +46733 90 18 80)
* Why Slack is an interesting comparison is of course not the operations in itself, but the fact of the marketing model and the business model being similar — with a viral marketing rendering millions of people getting used to the format while the companies are paying for it.
** And — for those who do not get their kicks on digital labors but the humanistic ones (and in this company we never understood why one excludes the other), then this is what I personally see in front of me. Every day. Multiplied by some hundred million http://bit.ly/2RIbwAA
