IAmThirsty, a marketplace for corporate training, is a chip off the Propertyguru block

As the chief operating officer at PropertyGuru, the leading property classifieds site in Singapore, Winnie Khoo was in charge of human resources, and she sought out corporate courses to upgrade the team. Yet she couldn’t find good information about the quality of these classes.

“There’s no fair opinion, there’s no feedback, there are no ratings. Training is such a huge industry in Singapore, you have money from the government, money from schools, money from employers and staff themselves, yet there’s no place for them to make a fair judgement. It’s a very empty space,” says Winnie Khoo, who worked at PropertyGuru for four years from 2010. It’s a surprising fact considering that the global spending for corporate training is US$130 billion worldwide, according to Deloitte.

Sensing that it was time to seek out a new challenge after spending a large chunk of her life at Alibaba and then PropertyGuru, she decided to venture out and build something of her own. That was the start of IAmThirsty.

Simply put, IAmThirsty is a directory of corporate training courses and the schools that provide them. The topics range from workplace communications to bookkeeping to managerial problem-solving. Over 8,000 courses are listed on the site, a lot of it crawled from sources like the website of Singapore’s Workforce Development Agency.

Old school

Khoo contends that plenty of training providers in Singapore do not have an online presence and tend to rely on newspaper ads to get leads. IAmThirsty can bring these services into the digital age and boost their businesses at the same time. Meanwhile, learners and HR practitioners can read reviews, rate courses, compare them, and make enquiries to providers.

Khoo believes IAmThirsty can improve the industry. “A lot of the training providers won’t like it because they’ll be compared, rated, and people who attend their courses may not provide a good review […] but they will up their game if they don’t provide good enough training.”

The promise of more leads could be the carrot that complements the stick, similar to how Airbnb and Uber incorporate ratings into their platforms while improving the efficiency of transactions and benefiting property owners or drivers. Yet at the same time, IAmThirsty’s marketing strategy and revenue model echoes PropertyGuru’s.

Khoo is tackling this from the bottom-up: generating site traffic through search engine optimization in the hopes of creating demand from learners who would in turn draw the education providers. She claims the site has about 1,000 daily visits.

For the first phase, Khoo wants to charge at least the first 50 schools a subscription fee – as much as S$10,000 (US$7,245) a year – for unlimited listings along with branding and consultancy support. She’ll explore other revenue streams thereafter. While the fees sound hefty, each school can make back the money by receiving just a few signups through the platform – assuming of course IAmThirsty is effective at referring customers.

She’s currently bootstrapping and is the only one working full-time on the site. She has a freelance sales team of five and a developer on retainer. But once sales and site traffic stabilizes, Khoo will start looking into raising a seed round.

Of course, it helps that the Singapore government is actively promoting skills upgrading in the workforce. It subsidizes a lot of corporate training courses and is even planning to dole out credits to Singaporeans to spend on classes. IAmThirsty could leverage this to gain a firm footing before expanding abroad.