I’ve been passionate about technology since 2002. In 2014, I found out that my expertise could bring real value to people in the intersection of edtech and science when I cofounded GetCourse together with Marat Nigametzyanov and Sergey Mikhailov.
It is analogue of OntraPort and Kajabi, where trainers and coaches could develop and promote their courses. We help more than 1000 trainers to monetize their knowledge—their accumulating revenue is up to $50MM. Average CAGR is 193% per year and its revenue is $6MM. Blockchain technology together with Big Data will bring us one step further in providing people with smart tools for their personal development.
At GetCourse, we see two trends that are in line with global tendencies and the problems arising from them. And there are no solutions for them on the market.
First, the demand for tools for personal development is growing. At GetCourse, revenue of self-improvement courses has increased by 300% from $2MM to $6MM from 2014 to 2016. Globally, Facebook collects an enormous amount of data when asking users to pass various tests. It offers users recommendations, but in fact, it gains data. At the same time, professional methods of personality analysis are disordered and often poorly described, and data that their authors collect is getting lost. Neurobiologists, psychologists, and consultants conduct research on how the brain works, how to typologize people, and develop various methods of human personality analysis, discovering one’s strengths and weaknesses to find out people’s potential. Lack of data is a huge problem for scientists in working on their studies.
Second, there is a growing gap between researchers in human personality and tech-entrepreneurs who are developing products for the market. The number of self-improvement apps (For e.g., Remente and PersonalityPerfect, which ask you to assess your life and provide you with recommendations) is growing, but their creators do not have the opportunity to objectively evaluate what personal data interpretation to select for the app development. At GetCourse, we also see the gap between those who promote and sell courses and those who create content. In fact, people are lacking access to knowledge only because not every scientist can monetize their work.
Blockchain will bring order, equality, and transparency to human research methods
Our main mission when launching Human Discovery Platform is to create a blockchain-network of interpreting personal data methods and big data analysis tools for their statistical verification, and also to build architecture helping tech-entrepreneurs to launch products based on the methods. The platform will attract scientists, psychologists, and other experts by providing them with the tools to digitize their methods and store a large amount of data in an impersonal way for further development of the methods. Each author will input methods into the system by creating a block. Blocks will be stored in a blockchain-network and will be located on decentralized nodes that will run code for analysis. By combining blocks, complex analytical systems will be created. Tech-entrepreneurs will be able to develop highly-personalized apps on the basis of methods, combining the output recommendations via Big Data Analyzer.
We will issue Ethereum-based HD-tokens to ensure proper functioning of the ecosystem. Each time a consumer requests data analysis from an app, he will spend HD-tokens, which will go to the scientist-owned method[CC3] -block and to the node that runs code analysis. Consumers will receive some tokens when registering on the Platform. This will ensure traffic and provide entrepreneurs with an audience to buy their services, and scientists—with a data sample for their studies. The higher the demand for the tokens, the higher its price.
We believe that this decentralized system will attract more people than a centralized one, primarily because it will mean that data will not belong to a single company. A centralized system might use data for its own purposes: recall recent scandal around Facebook and Trump elections regarding Russian hackers. Transparency and equality are important values for us. We also will not evaluate the methods, because evaluation also means some kind of centralization format. We are building the infrastructure. Just like Ethereum is a platform for ICO and does not have a say over which ICO is good or bad, Human Discovery Platform will be an ecosystem for creating human personality analysis methods.
Currently, there is no other platform that provides scientists with both data samples and tools to monetize their knowledge.
Human Discovery Platform development launched in 2017, when we created a dating service on the Product level of the future Platform based on the Human Design method to test the concept. More than 15,000 users registered on the website in a month, and the interest towards the service in Russia is only increasing. On November 22nd, Human Discovery Platform will have a token sale. In June 2018, we will launch the Platform together with my team at GetCourse—me, Marat Nigametzyanov, Sergey Mikhailov, and around 30 IT-professionals.