You know, it took me a while to understand italki as I pointed out in my last post about them. There are two important news I did not talk about yet and both have to do with usability and customer care.
italki embeded two new payment methods to their platform. Not a big deal you might say, but hold on. This is huge.
You know I am still quite active teaching on different platforms out there. One reason is that it helps to pay the bills of course but on the other hand it helps me to stay in contact with the education revolution at the place where it’s happening. Between the teacher and the student.
From this experience I can absolutely say that payment is one of the main issues for students in some parts of the world. Not because they don’t want to pay for lessons, but because they cannot pay. There are no credit cards, PayPal, Moneybookers, money transfer or what so ever available. So, a huge market in the Middle East and also China was left aside.
Until now. And this is the point where the beauty and simplicity of the italki credit system comes to play. With the services of cashU and Alipay potential students from those regions can now pay italki credits and use them on the marketplace so either for one on one tutoring with a teacher / tutor or buying a subscription to the offers of Elutian and other companies which will offer their services on the italki marketplace in the future.
On other platforms this has always been either not possible or a real hassle for all people involved and it still is. For some it is simply not (yet) their target group, some seem to have a huge potential in their database but, in lack of an other expression, don’t seem to care. italki now takes care of all this, streamlining the process for students and teachers.
And if you take into consideration that about 15% of all italki users are from the middle east, then you can see the potential. If you take an estimated number of 500.000 users on italki this would be a group of 75.000 people. Even if italki can only convert 1% of them this simple change in the payment options might bring them 750 paying students. Those are far more than other platforms have as overall active student group!
As online marketers say: “The money is in the list”.
Another maybe small but yet important fact that shows the customer orientation of italki: there is a Press Release in Arabic which is not so obvious. I don’t remember the correct percentage but only a very little percentage of all internet websites are actually in Arabic these days although it is one of the most languages spoken languages on the globe.
Looking forward to meet Kevin Chen, one of the Founders of italki on the ETCon at August 27.
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