Learnemy Matches Students and Gurus Online, Hooks Them Up Offline

Singapore-based start-up Learnemy is a marketplace for learners to look for instructors. If you hope to learn how to code, or how to swim, you can find a tutor on Learnemy. The product doesn’t sound very exciting but it does, however, serve a need. Founder Elisha Tan had a little initial struggle getting going, which has kinda spiced up her start-up story a little – as a non-technical person, she had to learn how to code on order to create a workable version of Learnemy.com.

Elisha told me that Learnemy was founded because she believes people should be able to make a living doing the things they like. The team only consists of Elisha for now. But even with basic coding capabilities, she is on the constant look out for a technical co-founder. The recent college graduate went through Founder Institute which has provided her with enough knowledge to manage the start-up alone for the short run.

After three weeks since its beta launch, Learnemy now has about 20 clients learning swimming, tennis or programming and about 70 instructors in her database. The start-up is funded by Singapore’s SPRING YES! Start-up grant which provided her with SGD$50,000 to explore her idea.

The idea isn’t exactly unique. You might have heard of Skillshare which also provides a similar service. And here is Elisha’s take:

For Skillshare, the person who initiates the class is the instructor. So a user goes, “Hey I have something to teach!” and the matching takes place. But in Learnemy’s case, the person who initiates the class is the student. My user goes, “Hey I want to learn something!” and then the matching starts.

Well, I don’t see how that is a differentiator, but I certainly think that operating inSingapore and then scaling to bigger markets in this region, like Indonesia or Vietnam, might be a good idea. After all, Skillshare or any other of Learnemy’s competitors are less active in Asia. But Elisha is setting her eyes on Singapore first, and then the U.S after she receives some subsequent investments. She remarked:

The most immediate plan is to launch an actual app by November this year. In my fairytale scenario, it’ll grow in Singapore, get some investments, and hit the US market. But fairytales don’t exist in the start-up world, so we’ll see how it goes after the launch in November.