Corselo

Started with an idea that any offline course which requires students to be physically present with the instructors, wasn't organized on an online marketplace for creators to create and list courses online and for people to book, pay and leave verified reviews on courses they take.
I built the front-end within a month and gave the mYwindow team to create the back-end.
We had the MVP ready in 4 months by Nov 2015, then hired interns to source course creators like sports academies, tech skills institutes, cooking academies, dance & fitness & scuba diving academies to list courses on the website.
In Feb 2016, I rented some space in a co-working space in New Delhi and hired 2 guys to lead online marketing and partnerships.
We realized that the chicken-and-egg problem around not having enough courses on platform in the start (as physical sourcing was taking lot of time) and investing money in online marketing to attract users would result in lack of options for people. While brainstorming around this, we came up with an amazing hack of integrating Google Location APIs to import thousands of course academies across New Delhi in various domains like cooking, sports, tech skills etc. The only missing piece of information was pricing and batch schedules which we manually entered data for within a month, and immediately reduced spending on local sourcing.
This led to onboarding over 5000+ courses within one month and it allowed us to immediately start online marketing. Our creative media was absolutely classic and the initial dollar spends on Facebook and Google Adwords started to show initial revenues with few bookings happening every day. As soon as we got a booking confirmation, we'd call the institute and share the booking details with payment confirmation and also sign them up for a referral commission for each booking. It was a absolute win-win at both ends and our hack was successful.
After a few weeks of slow and steady revenues in June 2016, we started to realize 2 things: 1) Only when we were spending heavy money on paid adwords marketing, we were getting revenues because the status-quo around user behavior to look for such courses was to Google. I found it super risky to put mYwindow profits into paid marketing and the best way to do this was to raise venture money and it would work itself out. This seemed like a clear volume over profit business and this strategy sounded less exciting. By just being the marketplace without owning the course experience, not being able to offer anything substantially unique (like Airbnb), and not having a strong argument to the question of what-if-Corselo-didn't-exist is a difficult situation to be in. 2) Because the course institute details like name, location, and course details were publicly available even on Google, users started going directly to these institutes without trying to book via Corselo because there wasn't any incentive for them to book online. It was a classic example of it being seen as a commodity (like airline/hotel bookings) where the users would have zero loyalty and would book anywhere where the cost was cheaper or discounts were available. We couldn't afford to even add a service fee on top of course fee as that would again mean users going direct. The only ways were to either offer a cheaper price (by offering cashbacks/discounts like other Indian players MMT, PayTm, Goibibo etc) or go talk to each course owner and figure out a unique proposition for them that would allow them to offer something via the online platform which isn't accessible if the user came directly, which could mean extra online learning resources, more learning hours, subsidized costs etc.
Such realizations ideally should never happen after you've spent 12 months and $25k on something. If I were to go back, before even starting to design the front-end, I'd first speak to at least 10 course academies in different domains and see what we can offer together differently online. I'd consider moving these physical offline courses to online learning in form of a structured video curriculum, allowing course creators to create online versions of their physical courses through our platform where the entire course is consumed on Corselo as well. And again, I doubt if the market in India would've considered becoming an early adopter to this. Market research and cold talking to potential customers before even building your product is one of the most under-rated strategy in building successful startups, which I learnt at the expense on building Corselo as a solo founder.
After a lot of thought, in August 2016, I decided to pause working on Corselo as running multiple projects in parallel being a solo founder didn't seem like a good idea to me.