AJULU

The year was 2019.

After building a personal brand on WhatsApp for some months.

I decided to launch a course.

It was a simple course on building a personal brand as a creative.

I charged #1000 to give anyone interested access to the WhatsApp group.

Around 27 people paid and I taught them over a three-day period.

After the course was over, I noticed that not everyone followed through.

I launched a second course some weeks later for #1500.

The same thing repeated itself.

I felt that it was mainly because the courses were cheap.

After all, people found it hard to value free or cheap things.

Later that year, I ran another training program, but I decided to do something different.

I decided to take just 12 students and charge higher for the course.

It was a design-related course.

I pegged the price at #25,000 and it sold out within 2 days.

A 13th person came along and begged me to admit him, so I did.

But by the end of the course, only 3 people out of that 13 people took the course very seriously.

At this point, I knew that they were a problem.

I was thinking that twenty-five thousand naira was big enough to keep people focused on my course, but it was obvious that price was not the issue.

Now there were two paths in front of me after this realization.

Follow the conventional path of only ensuring that the course materials were high quality.

Course creators who follow this path don’t really bother if the people who buy their course finish or not.

They just make sure that the course contains what they promise while selling.

Then there was the second path of creating quality courses and keeping people accountable to finish them.

I chose the path of accountability.

This meant I could not use certain course formats.

I had to create a community and also learn challenges around my courses.

But I did not stop there.

I devoted time over the past four years studying online learning and ways to make it effective for my students.

The more I studied and did practicals, the more I understood and this led to the creation of Superday.

 

The Root Problem

In the race to digitize everything, we brought learning online.

We have been able to create amazing platforms for online learning.

But the problem has never been platforms or even content.

The problem is the lack of significant work to bring the systems that make offline learning work online.

You did not go through primary school to the university because you loved schooling.

That’s why you are secretly happy whenever there was public holidays.

You cherish the days that you don’t have to go to school despite it being important.

So you got through school because there were systems put in place to ensure that.

A lot of people think their problem with online courses is that they cannot afford one.

But at the same time, there are countless free courses on the same subject available online

So why have you not been able to finish those?

 

The Superday Solution

While doing the research for Superday.

I was able to get key insights on a lot of things that have to do with learning online.

I also had one on one calls with over 300 people.

The key was to get as many details as possible about what people struggled with when it comes to online learning.

I was able to group these challenges into three major categories.

1. The Orientation stage (how people view online learning and the skill they want to learn)
2. The Learning stage (choosing the right course/Mentor, staying accountable, e.t.c)
3. Post- Learning stage ( applying what was learned, getting jobs e.t.c)

We have been able to craft solutions to these problems and also verify that they work on a small scale.

The next goal is scaling these solutions so that they can help more people.

Many people think that a lack of discipline is why they struggle with online courses.

Believe me, it is way more than that.

You are not the only one to blame.

The online learning industry also has a role they need to play.

At Superday, we aim to build online learning systems that truly focus on helping students.

The goal here is to build and also support the building of online programs that don’t just charge students for courses and dump them in WhatsApp groups.

We aim to power programs that would take online learners through all the stages they need to succeed.

This would take a lot of work and also time to perfect, but it is a journey that we are willing to go on.

 

How to Benefit

There are two platforms that we intend to use to power the Superday Solution.

Superday Studios and the Superday App.

The Studios handles research and development while the App helps with Student Accountability and a whole lot of things.

The Private Beta for the App starts on January 9th with handpicked online learners.

If you would love to get notified when we get to the Public Beta stage subscribe to my Newsletter with the link below.

Day One Newsletter

We would give access to more people by then.

Welcome to the future of online learning.