CourseHorse Reaction

The visit to the Stern school of Business was refreshingly different from the previous media organizations we visited; mainly because Course Horse is still an upcoming company. Nihal Parthasarathi, the co-founder of Course Horse, gave us an insight into the challenges faced by entrepreneurs right at the early stages before the business is well established.

Being a finance and marketing graduate from NYU, Nihal has a solid Business background and a keen interest in the education industry. He described how he and his business partner, Katie, came up with the concept of Course Horse and how they share responsibilities. Market research, financial modeling, creating a prototype, compiling the functional documentation, approaching various schools to post their courses on Course Horse, product development and testing, these were some of the activities he has been handling. He mentioned that the development work is done by a small team from Philippines. Despite the language barrier, he maintains a great relation with the team, which in my opinion will take him a long way; personally, having experienced the other side of a similar situation, I can say that a good relation with the employer makes a huge difference in an employee's attitude towards work.

His advice for building your own start-up from an idea is simple: firstly, can it make money? and secondly, will it make the customers keep coming back to you for more? When asked as to how Course horse plans to keep its customers coming back to them, he responded saying that satisfied customers would spread the word via reviews. Course Horse offers & plans to offer some incentives such as loyalty points, certifications from Course Horse and graduation gifts, for taking up the courses via their website instead of going to the vendors directly. As compared to their competitors, Course Horse is very much particular about Quality Assurance; providing a high quality of courses and offering refunds for courses makes their system more user-friendly. One thing that struck me then was Nihal's readiness to accept ideas from a bunch of students like us and I realized how important any sort of feedback is, to a budding business.

Another thing I picked up from this session was the emphasis on presentation skills. According to Nihal, Course horse managed to win the Stern Venture Competition mainly on the basis of their presentation skills, and the ability to respond to questions confidently. Passion for your work is definitely at the top of the list of things for starting your own company, but the ability to express your ideas is very much important too. His thoughts on networking too were very helpful; when you are meeting new people, having a product already out in the market improves your standing and every time you make a new business contact, it helps to share your own contacts with them.

It was great to see a fresh and enthusiastic business in action. It is not merely enough to have a great idea for a new venture but also to have a large set of business and communication skills as well. It reaffirmed the challenging yet compelling nature of entrepreneurship for me.