Ryan Singel has a short piece on Lynda Weinman, the founder of the subscription-based educational site Lynda.com. After writing a successful early book on web design, Weinman built a devoted following. She embarked on a fast-paced career as a speaker and consultant, which soon proved exhausting. After a brief experiment with real-world classes, she turned to the web video:
But then in 2001, the tech bubble burst, taking with it the jobs of tens of thousands of web monkeys and the travel budgets of big web companies. Then came the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which exacerbated the crash and turned many off from flying.
So Lynda tried something that at the time was largely unheard of. In February, she put 20 classes online and charged a subscription fee of $25 a month. At the time, online video wasn’t common — YouTube’s founders were still working at PayPal and few people had broadband connections.
But people subscribed. Lynda added more courses. A few more subscribed. But it was no instant success.
“For the first couple of years, the site did not catch on,” Weinman said. “We were still selling videos on CD-ROM and writing books. It was not until 2004 to ‘05 that it started to take off and really catch on.”
“If we had not moved to Ojai, we would not have launched the online video site,” Weinman said. “Because we moved there, we had to be more resourceful.”
I recommend the post, which brings to mind a number of themes. Weinman and her husband made what was essentially a lifestyle decision to move from Pasadena to Ojai. This led them, quite inadvertently, to build a truly scalable business, with 200 full-time employees. And what the business “sells” is the opportunity to learn marketable skills:
“Someone sent me an e-mail recently saying he heard Howard Stern on air saying he discovered Lynda.com and how cool he thought it was,” Weinman said. “They asked, ‘Doesn’t that make you excited?’ I also got an e-mail that same day from a woman who said she had been earning $35,000 last year, and after using Lynda.com she is now making over $100,000 a year.”
“I got more excited about that — not to put down Howard Stern,” Weinman said.
To be sure, there are many others who, as the article notes, watch hardly any of the videos, and who get little more than an hour’s worth of entertainment value out of them. But that’s not nothing.