This post is part of a regular series of interviews with people across Asia-Pacific who use the Internet to create, connect, and grow. This week Krishna Kumar, the CEO of Simplilearn.com from India, shared the story of how he grew his online education company aimed at professionals looking for new skills and offering them certification.
Q: Why did you choose to go online?
After exiting my last company, I was looking for an Internet-based business that would give the flexibility to build a large global business. While I was looking for a business opportunity, I maintained Simplilearn as a personal blog. Over time, I realized that this personal blog on project management had great potential to become a global business, and it eventually became one.
For one, it was not about what differentiation the Internet brought in. We are an Internet-only company. We get 100% of our customers online. We deliver 100% of our products online and we get 100% of our supplies online too. We have paying customers from over 150 countries including the US, Australia, UAE, Singapore, Canada, Switzerland, and South Africa.
Q: What has been your biggest challenge?
When we started five years ago, professional training was not an established category. However, as we grew, we scaled up our product and technology to attract customers from across the globe.
Q: What does the future hold for the business?
I want to establish Simplilearn.com as the go-to career destination for working professionals globally across all sectors, to impact at least a million careers annually. My vision is to be the career partner for people across the globe, enabling them to think about Simplilearn.com, whenever they are looking for career advancement.
Q: How has your digital journey been so far?
Initially we experimented with various digital channels for marketing, before we reached a state where the exact role of each channel was decided. Our overall digital spend is $40,000, and over half of that goes to AdWords, which goes to show how extensively we have worked with it.
Q: What do you think offline entrepreneurs can learn from online entrepreneurs?
In today’s world, being offline is not an option. Some part of the business must be online. The greatest learning for offline entrepreneurs will be your ability to think of the whole globe as your market. The Internet allows you to acquire customers from pretty much anywhere in the world, and that opens a wider opportunity.
Q: Who’s your Asian Internet idol and why?
One entrepreneur I really admire is
K. Ganesh of
Growth Story, a very successful online tutoring business. His ability to identify multiple large problems in the market and find an Internet-based solution is amazing.
Posted by Krishna Kumar, CEO, Simplilearn
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