Is Udemy the best place for a webinar for game devs, or should I look elsewhere?

There are many discussions these days about how small business owners struggle to get connected and stay connected with their communities of interest. Whether the priorities are personal or professional, the concerns are the same; where do I go to find and share amongst my peers, relevant and consistent exchanges of ideas, values, interests and market intelligence? Building and maintaining an online community centered on your agenda is the single best way to find what you’re looking for. My thoughts continue at http://mvb.me/s/35d923

Marketing & Sales. A lot of entrepreneurs are "doers of the thing" but at some point, you're forced to take the shift and become a "marketer of the thing". Think of it this way: You can have the best product on the market, but it doesn't matter if noone knows about it. Ofcourse, there are so many other important bits I'd love to tell you about - but, start with these and you will see traction, the rest will follow.

I am an entrepreneur without a single degree or certification to my name. I'm certainly not anti-education (in fact, I've taught some university classes), but higher education wasn't the path I chose. My question for you is: what type of learner are you? I learn best when I'm self-directed, studying things that fascinate me, and able to either apply or teach what I'm learning (in fact, I think teaching is one of the best ways to learn). So, I've taken ownership of my "education", and I am constantly learning. I read books and articles, listen to podcasts and other audio programs, attend conferences and events, and seek mentors and peer-learning environments. It has worked well for me, but not everyone is built that way. Some people learn better when the education is structured for them, or when they have schedules, deadlines, and feedback (i.e. grades) on their learning. Even for structured learning, college / university is not the only option. There are incubator / accelerator programs, entrepreneur boot camps, mentoring groups such as SCORE - some of it depends on where you are located, or whether you're willing to travel. The bottom line is that education is not optional (especially for an entrepreneur), but there are several ways to get an education. You need to figure out what kind of learner you are to determine what path (or combination of paths) you should take.

If you're bootstrapping, pay yourself less and re-invest in the company. If you've raised money, then pay yourself average salary as you aren't subsidizing and getting more stock (for the $$) as an investor would - so once you raised, then it's a shared risk - don't make the financial subsidy a thing you take on. I see this happen so many times where venture funded founders pay themselves little (ex: $40K / year) to look good, but the truth is you should be making $75K and instead you don't have the financial resources to a) pay off personal debt, b) hire help to be able to have more time to work, c) enjoy life with your partner/family and in turn burn those relationships. Don't make that mistake if you have financial partners as investors. Be fair, but don't take a financial loss every month to save face.

Qualifications on the answer: Created the first website to be ever commercially licensed by a ministry of education for in-school use (Brainium 1996). Was a VC associate at a 500,000,000 firm called Knowledge Universe focused on all things education-related that intersected with technology. Short Answer: Yes and no. Longer Answer: Learning analytics is one of those "lightening in a bottle" kind of industries. Everyone knows it's going to happen, whomever makes it happen at scale first, will have a huge advantage, and even more niche plays in this space will still create massive value for shareholders and significant transformation of education as we know it. That's the good news. The problem is that funding startups in the education space that are dependent on "permission" being granted by existing institutions and their employees is very much hit or miss. It's getting easier to raise a $500-800k seed round for a good idea with a good team, but the problem is that getting the next bigger round is very challenging in that the models of most of these seed-funded companies are not growing fast enough to prove to institutional investors that a growth model of the idea being very big in a relatively short time-period is credible. So if you're intent on pursuing this, I'd be sure to focus entirely on how you can get growth and adoption with requiring little to no institutional buy-in which sounds almost impossible on the surface of the area you're exploring but I believe isn't actually impossible. I'm very passionate about this space and want something like what you're describing to succeed so would be happy to do a quick call to hear where you're at and see if I can provide you some actionable ideas on how to reduce the friction / improve adoption of your analytics product.