Shilpa is the Co-founder of YesCourse , an Australian start-up in the technology and Education space and teh Director of three online training Academies in the health and wellness industry.
Her Real “WHY”.
Shilpa graduated as a medical doctor from India and built a successful career in health and wellness as a consultant, coach, speaker and author before she moved to Sydney Australia in 2004. The first time she realised the value of her time was when her son was born. Having no help at home and her priorities having changed suddenly she simply did not want to spend most of her time away from home travelling, speaking or selling from stage.
Unfortunately all her speaking engagements were scheduled after hours or during the weekends and this was when she wanted to be home the most. This was when she wondered if she could upload and sell her course online, plus she could use the time while her son slept or played to talk to her students …
Building her Online Academy
How can a Full Time Mother run an Entire Academy! Shilpa dreamt of pre recording her training videos and building other digital content when she had free time as a stay at home mum and upload it online. She could set it up such that her students could enroll and learn from her when they had the time. Both could connect at their own time and pace without compromising on the learning experience.
This was a risky proposition. Many experts in the industry advised her against it. They said the returns from online courses especially pre-recorded ones were not as good as live face to face seminars and courses. The market was not mature for such online schools. Plus she had no idea about the online technology needed to build such schools nor any experience whatsoever in online sales and marketing. More importantly she simply did not have the money to invest in expensive software.
Her Leap of Faith
She discussed it with her partner Atul and he decided to use his background in innovative technology and engineering to build the automated systems required to run her dream online Academy. Together they took the leap of faith. In 2013Atul left his job investing all his time and funds to build the online platform to run her school. Shilpa spent her time on researching, planning the marketing her courses during their son’s nap times.
Now the general marketing advice they were given was to start with a small local group and gradually build to a global audience. Shilpa chosse tp take a risk and decided to go full global to leverage the scalability of being online. Immediately she started getting students from the US all without leaving the comfort of her Sydney home.
By 2015 she had 10,000+ students from 74 different countries in her online Academy. It quickly became the number one fully Automated online Academy in the world in the Wellness industry.
The start of YesCourse
At the start of 2015, she realised that the technology they had built was so simple to use, that it could be scaled to others. Plus there were so many entrepreneurs like Shilpa around the world that could benefit from this. The platform called YesCourse.com was launched! It provides everything that any Entrepreneur could need to run their own online school.
At the end of that year they had 3500+ Academies running 24/7 on the YesCourse platform. Most of them from the US, UK and Australia. And they haven’t looked back since then.
Three lessons she has learnt building her business:-
Nurture the relationship with your network
Take those Baby steps
Find a good mentor.
