This founder is building a startup at the cusp of Airbnb and Coursera

Stay on Skill founder Arjun Tuli is a coder who loves to travel. Photo credit: Stay on Skill.

Guitarists sent videos of themselves playing, photographers sent links to their portfolios, somebody who’s good at Indonesian cooking applied, and so did standup comedians. An Indian startup’s pilot to let people barter their skills – anything from yoga to coding – in exchange for free stay in Indian homes has got people applying from all over the world.

“There is a Spanish lady who does workshops for theater enthusiasts. She sent us videos of her plays. The diversity of skills of the applicants amazed us,” says Arjun Tuli, co-founder of Stay on Skill, another variation on the Airbnb model.

There is a Spanish lady who does workshops for theater enthusiasts. The diversity of skills of the applicants amazed us.

Here’s how it works. Guests provide some proof of their skills – like a video or a certificate – to apply for free stay in destinations of their choice. They are matched with hosts in those destinations who offer accommodation to travelers for free, in exchange for learning a skill.

Not only does this make traveling the world affordable for people with skills they can teach, it also connects them with like-minded people locally. Tuli started with the idea of providing the service for techies, “to help folks in the tech community travel and be hosted by startups.” He thought there would be many takers for hosting coders and designers, founders and investors, but the response was lukewarm.

Then he shifted focus to India as a destination instead of a specific community, and the idea caught on. “We had to close out the applications at 300 as we wanted just 30 people for the first tour,” says Tuli. Based on this experience, the platform will be opened up and made global.

He also shared an interesting number from the applicants’ list: 48.2 percent of the applicants were solo women travelers – “which I think is pretty big when it comes to India,” Tuli says.

Startup evangelist Arun Raj bartered his photography skills for free bed-and-breakfast for 4 days and 3 nights at this camp in Coorg, India. Photo credit: Stay on Skill.

Different from other volunteering models

This is Tuli’s second startup. The earlier one was Knowledge Maps, which was selected for Startup Chile. The idea was to build a community to share and curate the best learning resources for any topic on the internet.

But it failed to find a product-market fit in time. “We were able to get some funding for it, and had some good mentors. We worked for a year and a half on it but ran out of money before we could see the product getting traction,” says Tuli. “The biggest mistake I could spot was that we didn’t follow a lean methodology to build the product.”

He doesn’t want to repeat that mistake with Stay on Skill. So he’s starting with a pilot project, with a limited number of tourists and hosts in India, to validate the concept and finetune operational details.

See: How Chinese unicorn Tujia altered the Airbnb model – and why Airbnb hasn’t adapted

Early believers and challenges