3. The online freelance market is replacing a
100-year-old workforce model enabling us
to re-invent student finance for the 5tn USD
educational market in emerging countries.
The market for consumer spending on education is now over $5tn, 8x the size of the software
market and 3x size of the media and entertainment industry. Unfortunately, not much has really
changed about education as a whole since back the 18th century. At the same time the cost of
education is skyrocketing and the level of quality in emerging market is decrasing.
With an estimated 2.37 billion workers in the world’s key emerging markets and an additional
416 million high school and college students projected to enter the workforce over the next 35
years, the developing world is in a race against time to absorb impending youth bulges and
head-off potential employment crises.
The rise of online freelance marketplaces which is projected to create 160M online jobs by
2025 creates an unique opportunity to crack the code for the future of education
A new student finance model for young students in emerging markets to learn IT skills with
repayment from their freelance earning has the potential to enable millions of people to be
integrated into the online economy and a business model to create a muiltibillion dollar
business.
Ferdinand Kjaerulff
Co-founder and CEO
4. FOUNDER
STORY
I originally started CodersTrust
based on my experience in Iraq. I
was amazed to find an Internet café
in the beautiful town of Al-Qurnah
just north of Basra in the southern
part of Iraq.
We backed the entrepreneur by
paying the educational services he
provided for the local community.
However, it was not until I realized
the power of the freelance market
as an IT entrepreneur, that I saw
the opportunity to create a
sustainable source of funding for
education through this very market.
I keep telling this story to co-
founders, partners, investors,
students and employees who
believe in the vision to drive the
launch and growth of CodersTrust
in Bangladesh. I tell that story every
single time, because it is real and it
proves that things can be different.
Ferdinand Kjaerulff
CEO Coderstrust
5. Unique investment opportunity
“CodersTrust is the most promising project, I have ever been
a part of. We are developing a system, that activates young
brilliant people, make them enter the global market and work
locally from where they are – it is strategic upgrading of
tomorrow’s technological labor force. CodersTrust will take
microloan into a new era.”
Morten Lund
Chairman
6. WHY MORTEN
INVESTED?
Morten Lund is a typical serial
entrepreneur from Europe with a
need to get presentations,
websites, and financials done.
In the old days, Morten would work
all night to get this kind of work
done, but instead he post his
projects on Upwork.com and
receives more than 100 bids from
freelancers all around the world in
less than 10 minutes.
Last week he awarded a project to a
sympathetic woman in Bangladesh
who had a nice profile picture and
was quick to answer on the chat.
She demonstrated that she could
easily do it in 3 hours for 15 USD.
Instead of spending the money in
Starbucks or working 10 hours to
get it done himself, Morten saved
the time and more than tripled his
own productivity.
7. MEET OUR
STUDENT
Just 6 months before, the woman
who was awarded the project from
Morten Lund had never seen a
computer. She lived in an isolated
slum area in Dhaka with very limited
opportunities and a pretty bad
outlook for a brighter future.
However, the women had applied to
CodersTrust and with student
finance from UNDP she learned how
to do data-entry tasks on freelance
portals. It would have taken years for
her to get a regular job, but it took 6
months for her to win and
successfully complete her first
freelance project. She now has a
track record of 3 work hours, total
earnings of 15 USD and a five-star
rating from Morten Lund, which is
her competitive edge in applying for
the next small project.
She is now taking online courses to
upgrade her skills, bidding every
day on projects to get experience
and slowly building her online
reputation, which will allow her to
compete for the highest paid jobs.
9. Employers spent
between $2.8bn and
$3.7bn globally last
year on payments to
workers and the online
platforms that act as
intermediaries in the
human cloud
THE HUMAN CLOUD
- A new world of work
Over 5 million companies are
posting approximately 250,000
paid jobs each month on more
than 150 online freelance
portals.
At any given point, more than 2
million freelancers are bidding in
real time for client projects,
creating an unparalleled global
job market in terms of size,
flexibility, dynamic and reach.
In the 20th century Henry Ford
combined moving assembly lines
with mass labour to make
building cars much cheaper and
quicker.
Today, a growing number of
freelance portals are bringing
together computer power with
freelance workers to supply the
luxuries that were once reserved
for the wealthy.
11. CodersTrust provides students like Ella
with a personalized ‘Learn-and-Earn’
path that includes content from leading
e-learning portals such as Codeschool,
24/7 online support, weekly live classes
and a career advisor to match her with
freelance jobs from more than 10 major
portals. This creates a fast, cheap,
efficient shortcut that allows students like
Ella to find the best-paying jobs in the
online freelance economy.
With CodersTrust, Ella can build an
online reputation based on ratings and
reviews from multiple freelance sites,
which is the most valuable asset she will
ever own in today’s digital world. Ella
ends up with a highly rated online profile
in a higher-paying job category.
Exactly as you would expect
hospital nurses and doctors to
have gone through a specialized
education before performing
surgery, you would think there
would be a specialized education
for these online and remote jobs.
Unfortunately, for the 150 different
marketplaces, the 5 million
companies using the platforms
and for 200 million students
worldwide without access to
education, this does not exist.
LEARN TO CODE AND
GET TO WORK
WITH TOP-RATED
FREELANCE MENTORS
12. Conversation with Ella
Hey Champion
Thank you! "
Hi there!
How can we help you today?! #
I have a question concerning my
html5 project in block 2? !
Don’t worry! Let me connect you
to one of our super Code
Mentors. They’ll be able to help
you out $
Hi Ella! My name is Taulant, one
of your Code Mentors!
Great job for coming this far!
Let me check your assignment
and I will be right back for you "
2. We organize the student
learning personalized “Learn &
Earn” path in small learning
blocs
We have customized a learning
path for students current skill level
with online tutorials, test projects
and individual mentor assessment
of their work. The “Learn & Earn”
path focuses on applicable skills
they need to be employed by
international clients, rather than
the academic content that is
offered by local universities. To get
a job as an online freelancer has a
lot less to do with which University
you attended or what your grades
were, and a lot more to do with
what you can actually get done.
CodersTrust exists to get
students on a fast-track to
success with a customized
“Learn & Earn” path that makes
them rockstar freelancer with
the freedom, workpassion and
safety of an online income.
1. Everything is organized
around upgrading your
freelance profile
Our goal is to make the students
online freelance profile go from
zero to hero in the most efficient
way, so they don’t waste time
and money being stuck by
themselves.
3. Students can get help
anytime from a community
with instant chat support from
mentors.
Students can get help from
mentors and their peers
whenever they desire, and they
can watch video tutorials as
many times as they need to.
They’ll get support from our
world class mentors whenever
they run into a problem on their
courses or freelance projects.
3. You get free access to the
best online course materiel
the web can offer
With CodersTrust students get
access to world-class content
from leading international
course providers on the web.
The “Learn & Earn” path allow
students to follow the best rated
courses on CodeSchool and
Udemy as a part of the
program.
13. 5. Personalized jobfeed and
personal carrier advisor to make
you get the highest paid jobs.
We have a dedicated team of
bidders who constantly match our
students’ skills with the jobs
available on online portals and who
support students in the bidding and
follow-up phases.
However, we are developing a
highly complex, game-changing
algorithm that will automatically
match our students’ skills and
experience with available jobs.
This will help our students more
easily identify jobs that suit their
skills. It will also help
CodersTrust become a leaner
organization, by eliminating the
need to hire dedicated
personnel for manual
matchmaking.
.
4. Join live classes
Learn to code with a live mentor,
not only with video tutorials.
CodersTrust live classes enables
students to learn hands-on with a
live mentor.
Ask questions and get instant
feedback. Students get to code
live with hands-on exercises and
pair program with the instructor
or other students. Students can choose to pay
an upfront fee or repay the
fee from their future
freelance earnings:
15. Our ambition is to move from
short-term courses to a full
year program package includin
introducoty, basic and advance
blocks to take students all th
way from having little or no skill
and make them become hig
earning freelancers.
2. The basic program
targets entry-level
freelancers who want to
upgrade their coding skills so
they can earn average
salaries of 800 USD/month.
3. The advanced program
enables basic-level
developers to take advanced
coding courses, giving them
a target salary of 1.200
USD/month.
The students can apply to enroll
in an introductory, basic or
advanced program depending on
their levels of experience and
skill sets.
1. The introductory program
is aimed at students with little
or no IT skills who want to enter
the freelance market with a
target salary of 150 USD/month.
We started with one ‘Learn-and-
Earn’ path that helped data-entry
freelancers become front-end
developers. Today, we offer six
different ‘Learn-and-Earn’ paths,
enabling us to reach a larger
market.
Currently, we take in students on
all level and upsell the next level
to the student for him to reach a
higher earning level.
17. There are approximately 200,000
experienced mentors worldwide
who can be targeted to scale
CodersTrust by localizing content
and accessing relevant subject
domain knowledge. The
marketplace model allows us to
cost-efficiently scale the number of
mentors and students on the
platform by setting up a semi-
automated recruiting, hiring and
management process on the biggest
freelance portal, upwork.com, and
simple user and performance
management in our learning
management system Thinkific,
where mentors gets their own
landing page and a customizable
‘Learn-and-Earn’path to promote
locally.
Furthermore, this reduces
CodersTrust fixed burn-rate and
risk, by transferring marketing
and operational uncertainties to
independent freelancers who are
paid a fixed monthly fee and a
performance-based fee based
on students’ payments and their
student earnings.
We originally hired mentors as
employees to build a core
CodersTrust team, but we are now
moving towards a marketplace
model where we act as the
platform/middleman between
students and mentors.
We have used this model to both: 1)
expand into new countries, such as
Bhutan, Malaysia and Poland, and 2)
expand into more verticals, such as
Design, UI/UX, Digital Marketing,
Bookkeeping, Back-end Web
Development, Android App Design,
iOS App Development and others.
The top 5% students
becomes mentors to
teach the next
batches of students
creating an internal
engine of mentors to
drive growth
19. In total the addressable market in
India for CodersTrust is around 9.5
million people, worth US$2.8 billion.
If smaller markets such as
Bangladesh are included as well as
the students enrolled in IT
universities, the potential market
grows to US$12.4 billion.
Low-Performing Freelancers
Today, 33% of the 45 million
freelancers worldwide are based in
Asia. Of the 15 million freelancers in
Asia, 75% are low performers on
these freelancing portals, due to a
lack of skills. Therefore, there are
potentially 11 million people who
can be trained to improve their skills
and earning
Young Unemployed
In 2015, 100 million young
people (that is, aged between 18
and 30) were unemployed
worldwide. Of these, 35% (that
is, 35 million) are in Asia alone.
Also, as many as 200 million of
the working youth earn less than
US$2 a day.
CSE Graduates
Asia has approximately 3.5
million IT graduates per year.
India holds 45% of these
graduates. However, roughly
93% of the engineering
graduates are unemployable,
meaning that they lack skills to
find a job in the marketplace.
It is expected that, by the end of
2017, there will be more than 6.87
million IT graduates from
developing countries and 45 million
freelancers worldwide. Of these
freelancers, 14 million will be from
the developing world and getting IT
jobs in 2018.
Of the 10.5 million IT graduates in
Asia in the last three years, 4.5
million are in India alone, and 93%
of them are unemployed upon
graduation. Also, given that more
than 25% of the 28 million IT
freelancers worldwide are from
India, and that 75% of them are
unskilled and not getting sufficient
jobs, there are 5.3 million unskilled
IT freelancers in India.
21. SOCIAL MEDIA
MARKETING
We have a fully
optimised social media
and advertising
strategy for student
acquisition.
Today, over 80% of all
internet traffic in our
targeted geographies
is on Facebook.
We’ve built a strong,
effective marketing
channel in Facebook
over the past three
years, and we now
have close to 340,000
‘Likes’, giving us
above-average
industry engagement
rates.
22. FACEBOOK
We have experienced significant
traction on Facebook with more than
300.000 likes among our target
demographics. Students are signing
up just by posting announcements
to this following of potential
students about new batches being
launched.
Enrollment
There is a direct correlation between
the facebook following and the
number of students signing up each
month.
It’s approximately 1 out of 10
followers that have signed up and
applied to become a part of
CodersTrust
The opportunity
However, the majority of the
qualified studens that have applied
cannot afford to pay the upfront fee.
The bottleneck is access to student
finance that would enable
CodersTrust to enroll the student
and let them pay as soon as they
started making money on the
freelance portals.
This is estimated to be a 15X missed
opportunity compared to current
number of enrollment.
27. TEAM IN
BANGLADESH
The Bangladesh team
is operationally hands
on, with eight full-time
mentors currently, as
well as three freelance
mentors under the new
Live Online Model. The
majority of the team is
centred around the
Learning-and-Earning
process, including but
not limited to student
advertising, lead
conversion, student
onboarding, class
launch, online learning
support, online
earning support,
documentation and
business development
with local stakeholders.
Processes and
technology provided
are used and
implemented.
