SCF #10
EduNode
by

Learn Blockchain/Web3 skills, monetize your content, and reach your goals.

Awarded
Budget request:
$
*
WebsiteCode

Project Stage

Startup

Category

Education & Community

Based in

Vienna, Austria

Team size

Active since

March, 2020
Products & Services

Our products and services are divided into two categories, memberships, and tailored solutions.


Memberships Solutions for Students

For clients looking into using our cloud-based e-learning solutions, we offer educational courses and content on our website, based on a free and a monthly premium subscription, and which can be accessed by anyone from anywhere.


Tailored solutions for businesses.

  • On-Premise Solutions (B2B)


Our educational platform offers flexible on-premise solutions for companies, institutions, and individuals that allow them to design their very own e-learning solutions.

  • E-Diploma Solutions (B2B)

Our e-Diploma solution offers innovative certification solutions for institutions and companies.

  • Content monetization

For users willing to publish and monetize their content on our platform and get payments in the currency of their choice.

What's new?

Our product changed from a simple website with an idea, to a significantly developed blockchain-focused E-learning platform with Stellar related blogs, courses, login with Freighter Metamask and Twitter integration.

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Previous Project(s)
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Progress so far

Milestone 1 - March 2020

-> EduNode was released


Milestone 2 - October 2020

-> Winners of the Stellar Community Fund


Milestone 3 - October 2020

-> Finalist of the Educational Content challenge - Kelp StellarBattle


Milestone 4 - February 2021

-> Release First EduNode Stellar Course


Milestone 5 - July 2021

-> 2K+ of users have used our platform and learned something new during the last year.


Milestone 6 - September 2021

People from over 100 countries have already engaged with us.


Milestone 7 - October 2021

More than 500 passionate people about EduNode follow us on social media.


Milestone 8 - Q3 2021

Partnership with WIFI - With more than 3,000 courses, seminars, and training courses, WIFI Vienna is the largest provider of vocational training and further education.


Milestone 9 - Q4 2022

- New Dashboard UI

- User Account / Profile

- Customer Support Chat

- UX Bug fixes

- Users are also able to link their public keys to their accounts.


Milestone 10 - May 2022

Blockchain Workshop sponsored by Talent Garden Austria,  Stellar Global, and Litemint.

Goals

In 6 months, we should have established the following short and medium-term goals:


Goal 1: We want to increase the number of paying customers by 500% in 6 months.

Goal 2: We will increase the number of educational content creators on the platform by 50% per week.

Goal 3: We want to release new Web3/blockchain-related courses, content, and blogs every week.

Goal 4: We will continue with the technical development of our platform

Goal 5: We are going to partner up with companies, universities, and educational institutions.

To get there, we request a budget of  
$
*
  to:

We will create specific strategies, with an action plan, an indicator, a responsible, and a deadline. This will allow us to closely follow and make sure that our goals are done according to the plan.

Strategy 1: Increase content

  • Action: Integration of new courses and content with partners.
  • Indicator: Available Courses
  • Responsible: Operations team
  • Time: Every week


Strategy 2: Security and safety

  • Action: Hiring a security Audit Service
  • Indicator: Successful audit
  • Responsible: IT team
  • Time: Every 3 months
Additional information

Executive Summary

EduNode is an innovative web-based e-learning platform that focuses on creating interactive educational experiences like courses, content, and tools for everyone.  


Vision

Our vision is to establish ourselves as the leader in the Web3/Blockchain educational field allowing content creators, freelancers, and students to monetize their skills. We also aim to be one of the leaders in the massive open online course (MOOC) sector by empowering individuals and educational institutions and providing them with forward-looking educational strategies that allow them to increase their market value and therefore improve their quality of life.


Mission

Our mission is to empower our users by providing easy access to high quality courses, certifications, and tools that allow them to monetize their skills.


Goals

In the next 3 years, we aim to reach the following goals:


  1. To become the leader of interactive blockchain learning experiences.
  2. Partnering with 100 big companies to help them train their workforce.
  3. Partnerships with the main universities around the globe.
  4. Develop a useful Freemium service that helps people learn new skills, monetize them and land their dream job.


Current challenges


Issues updating the content of videos

Due to the fast-changing nature of technology, there is a big challenge at the time of keeping up-to-date technology courses. This is especially challenging for educational institutions, considering that, you can not change the content of a video course directly without being forced to delete the whole video and create a new one from scratch.


Global challenges and a new era of education

Global challenges, including pandemic and inflation, have introduced significant changes to many industries around the world, and the e-learning industry is not the exception. Remote skills training is becoming the new normal, and many students and employers are looking to learn new skills and train their workforce, in a way that allows them to be prepared for new future challenges.


Few specialized options in the EdTech market

Companies find it difficult to find technology-focused educational platforms that help train their workforce in order to prepare them for the new digital era. This is especially challenging considering that currently there are few options in the market that offer IT trainings, such as Blockchain development, software development, and Web Development.


Rising costs

Students are also facing many challenges regarding the costs of high demand skills. This stops many students from enlisting and causes many others to drop out.


Solution

We help people learn new skills and companies train their workforce in the field of IT/Blockchain that will help them reach their learning and earning goals from the comfort of their homes, classrooms, or offices. Unlike traditional e-learning platforms, EduNode focuses on interactional content and exercises that are currently being served on our website and that aim to solve the current challenges related to learning with Video. We use software technology to provide a richer, up-to-date, and interactive e-learning experience.  We offer a wide range of services focused on providing world-class training and certifications services for companies of all sizes.


Unique Selling Proposition

Our advantage in technology consists in a new way of learning as opposed to video and a new way of generating immutable and universally verifiable digital certifications. We leverage blockchain technology in order to offer content monetization and digital certificates for course completion that can be easily audited, and which are environment friendly, compared with regular paper certificates.



Web Technology description

EduNode is currently being served on a web app, which can be reached via www.edunode.org. Our website uses mainly JavaScript frameworks and libraries such as Nodejs and React. The front end of our Website is hosted by Netlify and the back end is being served on Heroku. We use MongoDB as our database provider and Mailjet as our E-mail service provider.


Users of our web platform are able to:

  1. Create an account using their E-mail address.
  2. Login with Freighter or Metamask
  3. Users can add their username
  4. Individual Dashboard
  5. EduNode Courses (Basic Concepts available).
  6. EduNode Blogs.
  7. Access to EduNode List of resources.
  8. Integrated Customer Support.


NFT Certificate on Stellar

We create NFT certificates for course completion using the Stellar Network, which allows us to offer immutable proof of completion of courses. NFTs, short for non-fungible tokens, are unique digital items, and they can represent ownership of artwork, audio, writing, in-game items, or really anything.



Open Source and Enterprise-ready products

We believe in the value of open-source, and for this reason, we have open-sourced most of our source code. Furthermore, we are also ready to meet any patent requirements needed in order to create tailored solutions which support and facilitate enterprise-ready products that will help organizations reach their learning goals.


Customer benefit and value chain

  • Curated courses - Our customers benefit from our curated educational courses that will allow them to reach their learning goals and increase their value in the job market.
  • Flexible learning time - Users are able to enjoy our e-learning solutions at any time and regardless of their geographic locations.
  • NFTs certificate - Certificates in the form of NFTs are available after course completion. These digital course certificates can be verified on a public ledger.

Market Research

The e-learning market or MOOC (massive open online course) is one of the industries that have shown significant growth during the last years. With the arrival of new global challenges, this growth has increased at a compounding rate. According to market research firm Global Market Insights, the e-learning market was at $250 billion in 2020. That is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent through 2027, to hit $1 trillion in 6 years. That includes academic, corporate, and government use of e-learning.



E-Learning at Work

If we take into account the current e-learning market statistics (Valuates Reports, 2021), the adoption of e-learning for the development of employee skills is expected to drive the growth of the market. Many major multinational corporations have discovered that using online learning tools is the most effective way to ensure that all of their workers are trained to the same level.


Segmentation

As part of our segmentation analysis and considering their particular geographic, demographic, and psychographic, below you will find an example of an individual customer and a business customer:


Target Market

Our target market is composed by individuals (such as Developers, Freelancers, Content Creators and Artists), as well as companies  (Such as public and private institutions,, universities, companies etc).


Individual customer example

Carolina is 25 years old, she is a freelancer and a very active person, with an income of around EUR 25,000 a year. She likes sports, and loves to learn. When she learns, he does it mainly online using learning platforms. She wishes to learn new skills that allow him to increase his salary from, 25000 to 30,000 for which he decided to enroll in one of our Blockchain/IT courses with the idea of receiving a completion certificate that allows her to validate her newly learned skill.


Business customer example

An educational organization, that is interested in providing its employees with high-demand skills that increase their value and output at work. Since they have more than 30 workers, they want to make sure that their employees can access the learning platform independently of their location and time.


Competition

In the MOOC industry, we have identified some indirect and direct competitors working on educational products, however, the lack of interactivity is one of the issues that the currently established companies have not solved with their offers.


Sales and Marketing Strategy

Our marketing strategy will be focused on:

  1. Social Media platforms include LinkedIn, Twitter, Discord, and others.  Social Media will allow us to approach and understand the problems that potential clients are currently facing.
  2. Search Engine Optimization in platforms like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. We want to create a strong and trusted brand that can be easily identifiable and searchable by our clients.
  3. Encouraging word of mouth is the marketing coming from loyal and satisfied clients.

Financial Analysis and Sales Forecast can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jJ_BnAbIN85CQVd22XQYUxfREUipEMa9m5yvw4BGTUg/edit?usp=sharing


Pricing

We offer flexible pricing for individuals and companies of all types and sizes.

With an average of 39 EUR monthly fees in their premium packages, high fees increase the barrier for new students to enroll in high-quality courses. We want to be able to offer a more affordable solution with a monthly fee of 29,99 EUR. We also offer added value to our students by offering a unique e-Certificate solution for course completion, that is immutable and easy to audit on a public ledger. Also, we offer FREE access to some of our content.

SWOT Analysis

Here is a summary of the result of the SWOT analysis that was applied to EduNode.


Strengths:

Our core strength lies in the power of our team and partners. High-quality IT/Blockchain courses, Growing user base, Innovative certificate creation technology, the flexibility of a start-up environment, and faster execution compared to established players.


Weaknesses:

As a new educational platform, it might take some time for us to break into the market and gain acceptance, especially from high-profile clients in this highly competitive industry. Another weakness is that we may not have the required cash to promote our business, especially via mainstream media (such as TV, Radio, and Newspapers).


Opportunities:

The opportunities available in the e-learning industry are massive, considering the growing need for educational platforms that help people develop their skills in the new digital era.


Threats:

Some threats that we are likely to face are unfavorable government policies, the arrival of competitors within our location of operations, and a global economic downturn that could potentially affect purchasing/spending power.

Pitch deck
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Deliverables
First Deliverable

IT and R&D - For IT and R&D we aim for $30,000 in order to further develop our platform with the necessary features that allow users can utilize it without any inconvenience.


Marketing and Sales - In order to properly accomplish our marketing plans and carry out our Sales Strategies, which include Social Media, SEO, and offline marketing, we aim for $16,000.


Operations - We are looking to cover the costs of our Operations department, which will be a key team serving as intermediary between the sales team and technical team, for a total of $6800


Finance - In order to hire Finance and accounting support, which constitute an important part of our team we aim for $12000


HR and Legal

We also aim for $12400 in order to hire a strong HR and Legal team, which will support us with everything related to new team members and compliance-related tasks.

Team

Olvis E. Gil Ríos

Founder

Entrepreneur, Developer, and Economist. He has founded several Start-ups and has more than 9 years of experience in financial technology.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/olvisg/

https://twitter.com/OlvisGil


Marlis Wallek

Strategic Advisor

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marliswallek/