Reflection

In my ETEC 524 Assignment 1 ‘Educational Venture Analysis Report’, I focused on a Learning Management System (LMS), Thinkific. For this final Assignment 3, I decided to ‘venture’ away from my comfort zone (LMS) and focus on an app.

A couple of reasons drove this decision, such as:

1. feeling burnt-out by work where I spend a lot of time in our LMS

2. feeling like LMSs have overtaken the environment

3. being a little concerned with Thinkific’s financials even though I still believed them to be a good investment.

Unfortunately, last week Thinkific had to make the hard decision to lay-off 100 of their employees, although my project was well underway at this stage, it reinforced that steering clear of the oversaturated LMS market made sense.

Inspiration

This venture idea was brewing since the beginning of the semester. A few scenarios in my life created the inspiration for it:

1. I injured myself in January 2020, leaving me unable to ski until December 2021. During the 2020-21 season, two teenage boys I've coached previously had a skiing goal. They felt no other than I could help prepare them for this goal. Their mother arranged that I 'tutor' them over Zoom. I would give them tasks to film on snow, review it in advance, and comment on it during our synchronous time together. We would also spend time reviewing the skiing theory needed to pass the course they were preparing for. It was a strange yet fulfilling experience, especially because the boys both passed the course they were preparing for!

2. My friend's favourite ski instructor moved away to another resort. She felt like that instructor understood her and would always bring the best out of her skiing abilities. She would love the opportunity to stay connected with this instructor virtually and pay for her expertise.

3. Another friend is a CSIA Level 4 ski instructor who injured herself last season. Her clients were still hoping to stay connected with her and gain knowledge from her expertise.

4. A close friend lives in a remote BC ski town. There are services her family has not been able to access until the pandemic, which shifted their access to a wider pool of professionals online. Thanks to technology, one of her family members can get the specialized help they need. Not every professional works for everyone, their personality and specialty need to be considered as well. However, not everyone can access the person they need the most without technology!

This inspiration allowed me to stay focused on the strength of this idea since there were multiple stories from people in my life that this app could support.

What's out there?

While taking a look online to see what already exists, I felt like there was a gap in the market that this app could fulfill. The only competition that leaves me a little concerned is Carv. However, as we have discussed throughout this course - the most powerful use of AI is combining it with human support. Currently, Carv's personalized plan provides pre-recorded videos that get assigned to the individual based on the data their wearable produces. Whereas Snow-Coach's strength is connecting clients and professionals who will relate to each other's style, since so much more than skiing is your technique - it's also mental.

This biggest question mark for me was the pricing model for the instructors. To figure out which direction I could take, I developed a few different versions and asked friends who would be potential professionals utilizing this app what they preferred. The feedback I received is that they wanted to ensure their pricing would be the same as a ski instructor with little experience. One of them mentioned Rover, an app for dog walking (and more), and that they liked how individuals could set their own pricing. This also reminded me of how Cameo does the same. Everyone agreed that they would feel the most comfortable with this pricing model, especially because they would each take different approaches to support their clients.

Concerns

An overall concern is our financial 3-year forecast I provided. This is my first experience looking into apps, and understanding revenue-generating. Luckily, I could learn a little from my partner who successfully built and then sold the app to Rakuten. These projected numbers a viable between November-May, when the ski season is upon us in Western North America. However, this app would have to rely on expanding to the Southern Hemisphere for May-October starting in year 2. The projected 20,000 interactions a month in North American months is plausible. However, the ski industry is a lot smaller in the Southern Hemisphere - would we need to include 'dryland training' opportunities on the app, or mountain biking?

Building the app and how much it would cost was a large unknown to me. I reviewed several sites to learn about projected app-building costs and decided to go for the top-end since there will be two interfaces, video hosting, and annotating capabilities along with other multi-modal features to support diversity in learning. I also looked at the differences between AWS and Azure for hosting. Our LMS recently switched over to AWS and seemed like the best option when it came to security.

Concluding Thoughts