Hello Learnemy, Kezaar is Your Competitor. Now Fight

What do you wanna learn? Guitar, a new language, or cooking? Kezaar.com probably has someone out there offering their skills. Well, maybe not now, but that’s certainly the goal moving forward for the young Singapore-based startup.

It’s what I would call a skills marketplace. Folks can offer lessons to teach what they are good at and anyone can pick up lessons which they find interesting. It’s not unheard of, for sure. Learnemy is another Singapore-based startup that is working on the same model. Kezaar’s founder argues that there’s a difference between the two – but to me, it is the same. Yup, same.

Now let me put it this way. For users, we love to see competition. It’s fun and more choice for us. Now that Kezaar is up, it probably makes Elisha Tan (founder of Learnemy) jump a little. That’s just competition. Common stuff, and there’s no point hiding that. So compete to grab users and money, folks. Would there be money? There could be since there are tons and tons of Singapore-focused online tuition websites matching tutors to students on the web. I contributed to one about eight years ago. This 2010 report says that the private tutoring market could surpass $152 billion by 2015 worldwide and specifically named countries like Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and China as “thriving markets.”

It’s a fairly lucrative market for tiny Singapore but probably not quite scalable since it is often a one-time commission deal with no recurring fee. A student will probably stick to the same teacher for years so it’s hard to see repeat customers unless they want to learn another skill. It is tough business, I must say.

Such online services feel new but they actually aren’t. Matching teachers and students online has had a long history. It’s just that Learnemy, Kezaar, or Skillshare (in the U.S) have had a more unique approach to building a self-sustainable demand and supply of teachers and students. Online matching and taking a commission cut when a match is made is pretty common. Besides home tuition, there are other verticals like learning a new language for example. Learnemy and Kezaar are wider in their offerings as they could potentially offer anything like languages, dance classes, or even motivational lessons.

So talking about Kezaar and Learnemy’s competitors, there are many out there which range from language schools to a simple buy/sell forum thread. For teachers, they can post their lessons anywhere, probably both on Kezaar and Learnemy even. They seriously don’t give a damn since all they want is students. There’s little brand loyalty. The site that can continuously and consistently match up teachers and students will be the winner. So that’s the reality and I’m hoping to see a little competition between the two. While having NO competitor is ideal, it’s seriously not gonna happen because whenever there’s demand, there will be people wanting to supply. Live and fight, I guess.