With the help from two other co-workers, Coursify was built.
Fernando Vaz, our recent winner of our Lean Product Development course scholarship sponsored by PublicBeta, is a product manager at Smiley Media.
Working at Smiley Media, Fernando was always approached by others if he can do a presentation on creating mockups in keynote. Overwhelmed by the number of request from others, he decided that he would just create an online course.
During the off-hours of his work, Fernando maintained a blog that acted as a personal journal as well as a space to talk about technical topics.
With this in mind, Fernando thought that putting the course on his blog would be the best way to let his audience, and others know about it.
But trying to embed the course on his blog was no easy feat.
The only model available to those that wanted to sell their courses was done through a marketplace like Udemy or Skillshare.
Fernando knew that there had to be a an alternative that put the tools in the hands of the instructors who wanted to sell the course on their own website or blog.
“There was no service online offering customization, and some of the plugins that dealt with it required complicated setup in WordPress. I just couldn’t find a simple way of doing it.”
Already with a handful of people expressing interest in Coursify, Fernando hopes to expand on the basic features, which is why he decided to apply to our Lean Product Development scholarship.
Excited he made the leap, and applied for our scholarship.
“ I think the curriculum of the course is really great in getting you to think creatively in building our your product and how to do core stuff of the business scrappy, which is really important for me right now.”
Fernando also plans to take the lessons he learned from the course to his team. Already, Fernando has assembled a team that includes a developer and a designer with him handling the product management side.
Together they have already built a landing page, and made plans for developing the core features of the product.
Fernando eagerness to learn and receive guidance from other entrepreneurs, who are amongst the many instructors teaching our course was one of the main reasons why Fernando was selected as our scholarship winner.
PublicBeta, an online community of successful entrepreneurs that teach and mentor upstarts, a sponsor of our scholarship outlined certain criteria such as a willingness to learn in selecting who will receive the scholarship.
Amongst the many candidates that applied, Fernando successfully matched each criteria.
To keep up to date on Fernando progress he can be found online on LinkedIn, Twitter or at his own blog.
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