An up-and-coming Virginia Beach startup wants to host your cooking lessons, makeup tutorials and other how-to videos. They also want to help you make money off them.
That’s the big idea behind Skills Co. — a new online video platform for learning skills in what founder Blake Heron hopes will be hundreds of different professions and trades.
Heron, who also owns the Virginia Beach construction company Bay Crawlspace and Foundation Repair, founded the startup in the beginning of 2018 after thinking about how cool it would be to be able to easily learn any skill online.
“I said, ‘What if there was a company like that?’” Heron said.
Heron describes Skills Co. as a marketplace where creators upload their videos to the platform for free. Skills Co. handles behind-the-scenes data and matching the videos with potential customers.
When customers buy a course, the creator receives 90% of the sale and the platform gets the remaining 10%, Heron said. Skills Co. plans to charge $10-$100 per video course.
The business is still in its infancy, Heron said, with only about 12 videos currently uploaded. Heron hopes that will change this month, when Skills Co. invites around 25,000 experts in several hundred disciplines to the site.
He said the company held off on inviting the creators and experts until now because he wanted to build up the company’s search engine optimization efforts and credibility.
As Heron has discovered since founding his company, others are also entering the video lesson and online learning space. Beyond YouTube’s endless stream of tutorial videos, websites like Udemy or Teachable specifically offer online video courses and a way for experts to monetize their videos.
Heron hopes to beat those services through Skills Co.’s generous revenue-sharing rates. For example, YouTube requires channels to have more than 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 “watch hours” in the past year before they can join the service’s partner program. Then, Google keeps 45% of the revenue generated by ad clicks, leaving 55% to creators. Revenue sharing models vary on Udemy, but creators earn 50% on each organic sale.
Heron said he plans to have a greater breadth of skills than Udemy, which he said mostly focuses on professional skills.
Even though Skills Co. will be competing with YouTube for views, Heron said creators could still use the huge video site to drive traffic. For example, they could host an introductory tutorial video on YouTube, then link to the full course on Skills Co. at the end of that video.
“The concept of this company growing is based on us helping people sell their courses,” he said.
Born and raised in Virginia Beach, Heron said he caught the entrepreneurship bug from his parents, who owned and operated a restaurant there. After college at James Madison University, Heron got into the construction business. As the owner of Bay Crawlspace, Heron directs 24 employees for half of his time during the week. Skills Co. employs a dozen more.
In the weeks ahead, the company is planning to try to have one video for each of 23 major categories — topics like investing, team building, coaching and even golf.