Hey everyone,I've been going through this subreddit awhile and have seen pretty good responses.I'm asking for advice and/or feedback on a business I've dedicated some time in while working as a data scientist. Without getting too specific, it's an online educational platform that covers a pretty niche (and high barrier to entry) area in a certain field. No, it's not machine learning (it's actually a higher barrier than ML, believe it or not). It's actually a field I dedicated time in learning for almost a decade now. I'm considering to take my efforts in this business a lot harder because I do believe it approaches a gap in the online educational market, namely being more academic and research based than broadly employable skills for the general workforce.I also see a big impact for a specific group of people from this kind of content, as it would serve as useful to scientists, researchers, graduate students, and R&D teams wanting to refine their knowledge and skills on these subjects without having to go for a second PhD. So far, I haven't seen any full-fledged set of MOOCS or courses for these subjects, despite ironically not changing all the time like software development or machine learning. I've only seen maybe 1 course for one of the subjects, and it wasn't very complete.While this may sound all good, the following are my concerns:If there's such a gap, why is it not pursued by places like Coursera and the like?My opinion: I believe this is because places like Coursera or Udemy are mostly about skill learning for people looking for more broadly employable skills (programming, etc.). Their goal isn't very firm about tackling more academic subjects or providing people the ability to really push the edge in a field just yet, especially since it's in direct conflict with the academic institution's goal of remaining an authority in higher research and academics. I also believe, from my experience in a PhD, I see very few good academics or researchers into branching out to make online educational content full-time compared to their research, goals to become a professor, or their backup plan of getting a high paying industry job when their faculty dream crashes and burns, so it never completely takes off. It sort of makes sense, most already put a decade into a very risky investment pursuing a PhD in this field, many don't feel like making another. The people this would impact is smaller than the general workforce. Most are looking to just find a job, not be a researcher or further a field. If they are, they typically go for a PhD in this field.My opinion: While this may be a niche group of graduate students being the first to benefit, I believe there are hidden groups I recently haven't considered, namely companies and government with R&D teams. I feel a niche group of researchers isn't a problem, especially if there really is potential for corporate interests. If a company has an economic research group, their team has or needs these skills. High frequency trading firms on wall street typically look for people with these skills. If they are a quantum computing company with a strong R&D demand, their team needs or have these skills. There are biotech companies that would benefit from this service. Military research uses these skills, etc. I could keep going, but you get the picture. It's pretty similar to how online educational platforms pitch enterprise options towards companies too, there's just more money floating around in B2B.I'm very curious what advice or feedback others have on this. There are some people on here with quite a bit of experience, so I know you guys are speaking from experience.If you need more information, feel free to let me know and I'll do my best to clarify. see hubwealthy.com/wealthy
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