A successful case of knowledge-sharing platform
In October 2013, a company was founded in Sillicon Valley, with 450,000$ seed fund from angel investors and the goal to help people around the world to share knowledge. The young startup grows its way into a niche market - to help students with their homework, by connecting students to tutors around the world. Its iOS and Android apps became a hit in AppStore and Android, once ranking 2nd in each stores. They were on the same page with Udemy, Coursera and Memrise.
The company caught attention from investors, consequently received 4 more rounds of fund, with the latest 9 millions $ from famous Capricorn investment. The valuation of the company, although not disclosed, is estimated around few hundred millions of US dollars. This is just a first stage for the young unicorn.
Hung Tran, CEO of gotit, recently announced new goal of the platform
"To connect and economically empower people everywhere. We’re enabling knowledge to be traded directly between one human being and another through our AI-powered platform."
The target market for GotIt now is not limited to tutors and students, but the whole knowledge economy. As long as you have knowledge which is valuable to someone else and you are willing to share it, you can make money from it. The change of direction of GotIt signifies the time has come for a platform to connect brainpower of experts in any fields in the world.
Next generation of knowledge sharing platform is coming to life
Recently, a new player is going to join the knowledge-sharing game - Experty.io. Their current focus is on connecting experts and knowledge seekers, and to allow experts to monetize their skills through a skype-like voice and video application. The business model sounds like that of GotIt. The target market is also no longer limited to student-tutors, but experts in any fields in the world. These similarity make Experty and GotIt direct competitors.
In this competition, Experty who relies on blockchain as the backbone of the business is having a big advantage. While GotIt still relies on a centralized system which is vulnerable to hacks, and traditional ways of payments (Visa & master card, in-house wallet) which is costly and slow, Experty relies on Ethereum network which is decentralized, unable to hacks, and new payment methods using Ether which is more transparent and real-time. All transactions, all ratings are visible in Ethereum network, creates the transparency and fairness for all parties using the platforms.
Experty ICO & forecast
Taking into account the advantages of Experty and the perfect timing to be in the market, it is likely that they company will reach the valuation of few hundreds of millions US$ - same valuation of GotIt in the next few years. Given the market cap of the company after ICO is 9 millions, the room to grow is huge, which can be 10x - 100x.
Potential use-cases are probably beyond expectation of even the founders.
In their website, Experty lists some as their uses cases such as blockchain influencer to educate the public and set trends, for Youtubers to connect with fans while monetizing their time, for advisers of any fields to service clients etc. However the potential use cases of Experty goes beyond the list, probably beyond what is expected by its own founders. Some example are:
- Mimic the success of GotIt as the first step - to connect tutor and students - Experty can solve the same problem more efficiently, so why not? Experty can leverage on Artificial Intelligent
- Partner with Coursera and Udemy to make it possible for professors and teachers in these platforms to monitize their platform even more by directly answer questions from students as per requests.
- Or even, disrupt the online learning marketplace by creating a decentralized online learning marketplace. Professors and teachers will be able to independently create courses in the decentralized marketplace, and students who access their courses will be able to pay directly to them. There is no middleman taking a cut.
- Artificial Intelligent (AI) might be the last puzzle to make Experty perfect. Overtime, by learning huge amount of data from solutions of experts to resolve different issues, Experty can apply machine learning technique to create models, and subsequently create AI bots which use the models to give solutions to new problems and questions from users. Knowledge seeks can chat and talk directly to the AI bots, get charged a low fee in real-time and review the bot's answers publicly in the platform.
Experty's ICO presale will start from 22 Jan 2018. Visit their website to learn more about the platform and participate to make the world a better place.
