Today we’d like to introduce you to Marcella McCarthy.
Marcella, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I’m extremely inquisitive and have lot of different interests, one of them being photography, but I found it really hard to find in-person classes in Miami. Sure, I could take an online class but then, I wouldn’t learn from my peers and when you learn locally, the money goes back into your community. When I started speaking to my friends about this problem, they all had things they wanted to learn but had sort of given up because the process for finding a class was too tedious.
Before launching Skillied, I was a journalist. I have a master’s in Multimedia Journalism from Northwestern University, so I was experienced with digital publishing, writing, storytelling and photography. I’ve had the entrepreneurship bug since college, so when I saw the need in the market for a centralized class platform and when I considered my skills and drive, the idea of building Skillied started to materialize.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I can’t imagine there’s such thing as a smooth road in entrepreneurship. For us, I would say the biggest challenge has been executing things at the speed at which we feel the demand from the market. As a self-funded startup, we have limited resources, which means that when you prioritize new features or changes, not everything can get done at the same time. But we’re getting faster!
Please tell us about Skillied.
Skillied.com is a platform that connects people to classes in the community to help them discover their passion or learn a new skill, locally. We partner with studios and schools – think painting, cooking, professional classes, wine tasting and more – and make it really easy for you to book a seat. We’re like the open table of classes. It’s been really rewarding to hear when someone discovers a class they never knew existed and that now they’ve found a new hobby. And we’ve also had a blast working with teachers to help them develop new classes as the result of demand from our user base to learn a specific skill. The bigger picture there, is that we are literally changing Miami’s educational and cultural landscapes and that’s a pretty cool thing to be a part of.
Where do you see your industry going over the next 5-10 years? Any big shifts, changes, trends, etc?
Continuing ed is changing drastically. It used to be that a person would go to college, graduate and then never really have to learn a new skill – in a formal sense – for the rest of their career but we’re seeing a shift toward life-long learning and that’s really where Skillied fits in. We’re also seeing that as people’s jobs become increasingly internet based, they’re craving in-person experiences more and placing a higher value on community engagement.
Pricing:
- Classes ranging from $35 – $11,000
Contact Info:
- Address: 1951 Nw 7th Ave.
Suite 600
Miami, FL 33136 - Website: www.skillied.com
- Phone: 352.612.2024
- Email: hello@skillied.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skillied_/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Skillied/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/skillied_
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