Tribumaker

The idea came from my own pain point: I published my first Arduino course on Udemy, and the platform's commissions are brutal: they keep 70% of every sale and leave the instructor 30%. Since it was a volume game, it still worked out: 300 new students a month, at $10 a sale, that's $3,000; 30% of that was about $1,000 a month for me.

The hypothesis was simple: if I kept that 70% the platform was taking, invested it in marketing, built a specialist team and focused on a well-defined niche audience... this was going to go incredibly well.

The bet was to build a community before a platform. The model started as a WordPress MVP to validate quickly without investing in development. In 2021, that traction was enough to raise funding from Start-Up Chile, the most recognized startup support program in the region.

We built a website, a shopping cart and the full LMS (course platform) in WordPress, together with my friend Andi Erezuma from @remache.ar. We recruited students straight from Udemy: I'd message each one privately, invite them into a WhatsApp community, and from there bring them into the events and new courses we launched.

• Start-Up Chile ~$15,000 raised in 2021: external validation of the model

• 300+ students on the platform
• 7+ countries teachers from Argentina, Peru, Chile, Spain, Mexico, Australia and more

That's how we kept adding more teachers (from Costa Rica, Argentina, Peru, Australia, Chile, Spain and Mexico) to the community. Within a year we were 15 people on the team, with 9 courses and more than 300 students spread across different WhatsApp groups.

Later my partner Bauti joined (a former student from my robotics courses at Ultrabot) who focused entirely on sales and marketing. Thanks to him we raised that Start-Up Chile funding: 70% went to marketing and the rest to producing a new course.

One of the biggest problems was that we never got the traction we needed. Our original students had come from paying $10 for a course on Udemy, so they expected this new platform to feel similar, except with the differentiator of having the instructor's WhatsApp and being able to ask anything, anytime, 24/7. That exact differentiator was what made it impossible to scale.

Sales and marketing are everything: before you build any app, platform or whatever it is, make sure you've already proven at least one scalable way to acquire customers. If you don't know how to do that, bring someone onto the team who does. No sales, no business.