Kunerango is an Edtech SaaS Toolset for Individuals to Sell Online Courses

You might think the MOOCs moveme nt had saturated the edtech space. But Kunerango, an Italian startup that s built a SaaS platform for instructors to create branded online schools where they can sell courses, reckons there s room for not-so-massive alternatives.In alternatives.In other  words, it s reaching out to the scores of skilled educators, teachers and instruc tors who are not associated with a university and therefore not likely to be alr eady rolled into the Massively Open Online Courses movement. And who want to go it alone, rather than sign up to courses marketplace such as Udemy or Skillshare where t hey have to compete with other educators.The startup, which was founded i n July last year backed by 100,000 ($138,000) from the H-Farm Ventures incubator, opene d its eponymous platform last month, in beta  and has had around 100 (U.S.) instr uctors and 1,000 students signed up to the first batch of Kunerango-powered onli ne schools.It s now ready to move out of the testing phase and into full co mmercial implementation to test its theory that there s appetite among individual educators and instructors for another way to sell their knowledge and skills onl ine  offering them a ready-to-use, customisable toolset to get going. Today in the American market there are 1.6 million independent educators with highly-s killed profiles. Students who benefit from online courses are about 50 million, fo r a total market of $24 billion,  says founder and CEO Mattia Toso, discussing Kun erangos target market. Educators who want to approach the online education m arket to sell their courses essentially have two options: 1) create their own pl atform (alone or with the help of a developer) by integrating different tools (V imeo, WordPress, PayPal, Slideshare, Disqus, etc); 2) publish their courses on a  course aggregation platform such as Udemy, where the competition with other educators is tough. We want to give teachers a third option. And while education is Kunera ngos main focus, it also sees potential for its product to be customised by compa nies to meet their training needs  stressing that its tools enable anyone to create  their own customized academy  on the web. We want to be the shopify for online  instructors, giving them the perfect tool to create their own tailor-made onlin e school in just few easy steps,  Toso adds. You can customize the graphic style of the  platform, create courses with different content types (video, audio, PDF, PPT),  give live lectures, interact with the students through an integrated messaging system and automatically collect payments resulting from the purchase of the cou rse. In terms of competitors  beyond the MOOCs giants  he name-checks Everpath a nd Pathwright as possible competitors  in the U.S. market. Kunerango is hoping to stan d out against these rivals by focusing on serving instructors  specific needs, say s Toso, and generally by relying on its in-house technology  which includes the a bility to support live lectures within its platform (rather than requiring exter nal services plug-ins to power such features). Our target audience are inst ructors with highly-skilled profiles and who want to be able to turn their experti se into a source of revenues. We think we have a good product that covers the need s of this market,  he adds. We did research on instructors enrolled in platfo rms like Udemy and Skillshare. We noticed that the top players  that are now establ ished are moving out to their own platforms, where they are selling their course s only. We are targeting such players to offer them a ready-to-use and highly cu stomized solution. Kunerango does not charge for use of its tools to build an online school or for the number of courses instructors create, but rather it takes $7 per student sign-up and a 4% fee on top of that  taken as a percentage o f the price of the course. Instructors set the course price themselves.Ku nerango is targeting the U.S. market first, which Toso described as a more mature m arket for online training , but he says it also intends to push its SaaS toolset i n Europe and out to emerging markets such as India. Fuente original