Singaporeans who are keen to take up cooking, experience indoor skydiving or learn martial arts can now find out exactly where they can attend lessons and book them on the spot, thanks to a new startup called LessonsGoWhere.
Launched in June, LessonsGoWhere is an online marketplace that allows users in Singapore to discover, list and book over 700 real-world lessons from a variety of categories, which include Baking, Cooking, Arts, Fitness and Dance, just to name a few. Currently, the site has seen a 10-20% monthly growth rate, both in revenues as well as visitors to the site.
The startup was founded by a trio of friends, Ng E Fei, Ethan Yeo and Jackie Yong. They came together in mid 2013 to set up LessonsGoWhere, investing some S$30,000 of their savings. By end 2013, they had received the Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE) Startups grant, with support from NUS Enterprise.
“The idea for LessonsGoWhere started when my girlfriend wanted to sign up for baking lessons, but could not find a place to go. After chatting to baking lesson providers – many of which are single person operations – we found their challenges included getting sufficient students, setting up a convenient e-commerce platform, as well as getting payment before the lesson, as classes require pre-bought consumables,” said Ng, a co-founder of LessonsGoWhere.
“This turned out to be the case for the bulk of the other verticals we’re targeting as well and we decided to set up LessonsGoWhere to solve these issues.”
The platform is simple to navigate, and reminds one a little of a Groupon site. Users can sort classes by category or upcoming classes, and clicking on a class allows one to see the class outline, as well as useful details such as location, class fees, class requirements and so on. The classes are either individual, private classes, or group classes, depending on the activity involved. After selecting their desired class, users pay their class fees at checkout.
LessonsGoWhere currently only lists, markets and books lessons based in Singapore, however they plan to expand regionally soon.
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