This IT education website, which has only been online for 7 months, raised US$22 million

This educational website, which has been online for only a month, has raised US$10,000

Pictured is Jin Yan, founder of Geek Academy
Reported by Tencent Technology Hu Xiangbao on the 2nd of the month
Recently a company A vocational online education platform called Geek Academy has become the focus of attention in the field of online education because within the first month of its existence, investment giants spent tens of thousands of dollars to pay for its entrepreneurial cake.
Geek Academy was launched at the beginning of this year. On January 1, this year, Geek Academy announced that it had successfully completed a round of financing of US$10,000 from investors (Haina Asia) and Lanchi Venture Capital. How could a new vocational online education project gain the favor of top international funds in such a short period of time? The amount of co-investment by Lanchi Ventures in this round of financing is also at the forefront of the online education industry.
Compared with the online education industry, Gong Haiyan ((_/__.) Weibo
), the founder of Century Jiayuan last week, laid off a large number of layoffs at Ladder.com, the founder of Shijijiayuan.com. The closure of Hao.com was precisely because of a broken capital chain. In the same investment environment and at the same time point, Geek Academy has embarked on a small but beautiful new path of vertical online education that deserves research and attention.
Take the paid road and aim to become China's

Geek Academy mainly provides technical courses for professional developers. Its online education courses cover many courses, such as , , , , , etc. It is the first to adopt the domestic vocational online education payment model. Its income mainly comes from membership fees (yuan/month, yuan/year, etc.).
For mobile developers, online can easily and efficiently learn useful technologies. Compared with offline training courses, online is often more efficient and more professional. Because it directly hits the practical pain points of mobile developers, Geek Academy has captured nearly 10,000 precise paying users within half a year of its launch.
In reality, many Internet giants, including Netease and NetEase, have entered online education mainly by adopting free Internet thinking to compete with the traditional charging model.
Jin Yan, founder of Geek Academy, believes that the threshold for vertical vocational online education is higher, the higher the professionalism, the higher the accuracy, and the greater the value of the fees. Professional developers and ordinary users have different needs. Online is the most effective way to learn, and it is closely related to practical skills and improving personal value. As long as the content is high-quality, a large number of users will pay for it.
In fact, the probability of paying for educational products is much higher than that of other products, but the premise is that it truly meets user needs.
Online education is a slow-growing industry, and online education can carve out a new path through a narrow vocational niche. Jin Yan told Tencent Technology Geek Academy that the ultimate goal is to make China's users few and sophisticated but of great value, and it can also meet the needs of enterprise employment in the future. There is huge room for imagination.
It is understood that it was founded by a vertical online learning service provider in the United States. It has only raised nearly 10,000 users in this round of financing. It only took half a year to expand to 10,000 users. The income is also similar to the Geek Academy model. It has been profitable for several consecutive years by adopting a membership fee system. Successful foreign precedents also endorse Geek Academy’s successful financing. In comparison, Geek Academy is faster.
Invisible Power Online + Education Double Fusion Gene

In fact, the reason why Geek Academy can quickly and continuously obtain capital recognition is inseparable from the accumulation of its founding team and its predecessor.
The predecessor of Geek Academy is the earliest and largest mobile developer community in China. After years of accumulation, the mobile developer community has more than 10,000 registered developers on the community and its users are extremely sticky.
Jin Yan from Geek Academy has always been a practitioner of vocational education. He is the author of China's first development textbook "Introduction to Development and Practical Combat". He founded China's largest mobile developer community and was the earliest offline developer in China. training. Prior to this, I had accumulated rich experience in the two fields of traditional education and online, and after years of exploration in the vocational education community, I had gone through many minefields and found an effective method.
In 2008, Jin Yan saw the right opportunity and led his team to move to professional online education to establish Geek Academy. It can be said that he had the right time, place and people.
It’s too early and user habits haven’t matured yet. It’s too late and there’s no soup to drink. In the past, community was the best model because at that time hardware, bandwidth, payment, and technical support were not supported. However, in 2000, including people's usage habits, the wave of mobile Internet stimulated professional learning and various auxiliary environments matured, becoming the eve of the industry's explosion. It’s the right time for Geek Academy to accumulate a lot of experience.
Geek Academy extracts user demand data from the community and quickly puts users' actual needs into the production of online courses and quickly iterates in a course + community model. Currently, Geek Academy has gathered a number of vocational and technical courses, including almost the most popular technical courses in China in the first half of the year.
The geographical advantage is that Geek Academy has chosen vertical vocational online education as its entry point. Vocational education will be a large market worth more than 10 billion, especially for mobile developers. This group of people is active in learning and has a strong willingness to pay. They are loyal users of school education and can directly decide their own pockets.
This is different from online education (basic education stage) where the payers are parents and users, and students are passive learners and have little willingness to use. Especially for users in primary and secondary schools, student decision-making assessment involves how parents and teachers can connect the three links efficiently and it is very complicated. None of these schools of stubborn geeks exist.
In addition, vocational and technical education is an easily standardized product that is naturally suitable for the online model. Geek Academy brings together learners from big Internet companies such as Baidu and Alibaba. The word-of-mouth spread of high-end learners has allowed its users to grow rapidly and reduce promotion costs.
Humanity is the most important factor that cannot be seen. Education is a very complex thing. Online education requires both traditional education and familiarity with and embracing the Internet and mobile Internet. Specific to the two-level online education and online education, most practitioners have not achieved a truly effective integration of the two.
Jin Yan said that in the future, traditional institutions in the entire vocational education field will either reconstruct themselves or be reconstructed by others. After successfully obtaining capital, Geek Academy will accelerate this reconstruction process. The goal of Geek Academy is very clear. We are to be in China and help Chinese practitioners improve their professional skills. My team and I can do what traditional education and other educational institutions have failed to do.
In short, domestic online education is currently in the midst of a hustle and bustle. Some specific operating models are worthy of our calm thinking. However, although Geek Academy has achieved success in the capital market, its real rise in the market depends on subsequent operations and how it develops in the future.