What is an Edupreneur? How to become one - The Ultimate Guide 2024

Have you ever taken a course online? Or have you found yourself learning from social media platforms? People are giving away their secrets of success, how-I-did-it things through ebooks, short courses, etc for free! Crazy, right? You are learning from them without paying any dollar! These people are changing the way we learn and we do business. We call them Edupreneurs.

Edupreneurs are the next big wave of educators & entrepreneurs. They are thought leaders who make a living through educating people. They share their knowledge and expertise through courses, training, and workshops.

Let’s dig deeper into who they are, what they do, and how you can become like them too!

What is an Edupreneur?

Obviously, this term is a mix of two words: Education and Entrepreneur. As we define it in Teachfloor...

Edupreneur is the intersection of being an educator and an entrepreneur.

In other words, they can be professionals with a teaching or education background who decided to use their skills to create their own business. Or vice versa, where entrepreneurs or experts decided to use education as a means to grow or build their business.

They use education as a strategy to sell their services or products. They bring so much value into the world by using learning and education as powerful tools to share and earn.

The difference between an edupreneur and an entrepreneur

By the given example, edupreneurs can be entrepreneurs who teach their expertise in public. But what is the difference between the two?

Entrepreneurs are profit-centric, while edupreneurs are transformation-centric. Although profit is also important for edupreneurs, they are more focused on the transformation of their students. They want to make a living while creating a legacy.

Entrepreneurs sell products through negotiation, direct selling, etc, while edupreneurs sell products and services by providing educational value to their audience.

Their Characteristics...

What makes them special? And what does it take to be one?

They are lifelong learners

They never miss to educate themselves. It’s a way for them to give more to their students by sharing what they’ve learned. They are lifelong learners and thought leaders who believe that education is transformational. It's the reason why they shift into this vocation.

They are generous in sharing ideas and knowledge

If you’re not generous enough to share your thoughts and ideas, it would be hard for you to become a successful edupreneur. Generosity to provide educational value to people is one of their highlighted characteristics. They know what services to offer for free, and what can make them a living.

They are passionate to change people’s lives

Edupreneurs are serious about transformative learning. These types of people are not doing business just for the sake of it. In other words, they are doing it to transform people and leave a legacy while sustaining their lives.

They are changing how we learn

With their innovative ideas, edupreneurs are enablers of the education industry. They are changing how we learn, how teachers communicate with students, and how schools teach. Overall, they are changing the educational system and preparing us for a brighter future ahead of us.

Some examples...

Who are these people that we can call edupreneurs in our society today? Basically, they hide in different terms, titles, and forms. But we can describe them as edupreneurs. Let's find out who they are!

Thought leaders, consultants, coaches

These subject-matter experts who share their ideas with the world, and coach people and businesses to improve their works can be called edupreneurs. What they do is a huge part of the knowledge economy where they transform the world through their thinking and experiences. Famous thought leaders are Simon Sinek, Jay Shetty and Adam Grant.

Digital creators and course creators

These are professionals who productize their skills and knowledge through giving educational value to their audience. They are creators of online courses, training, workshops, ebooks, articles, tutorials, etc. Sometimes, they are called solopreneurs because they built their own business, they fund it themselves while using their knowledge as the main capital. Famous creators are Justin Welsh, Ali Abdaal, and Dan Koe.

Educators with an entrepreneurial mindset

As we said a while ago, edupreneurs can also be professionals with education and teaching background. Educators, teachers, and professors who started to monetize their skills in education can be called edupreneurs. How? Because they are not only focused on transforming their students, but they are also sustaining their lives from it.

CEOs who use education as a strategy

E-learning has been predicted to climb to $325 Billion by 2025. Due to this fact, businesses are pivoting their sales strategy to e-Learning. Especially in tech, web apps provide a couple of learning resources for their users. This is through blogs, tutorials, open forums, free workshops, and community discussions. In addition, CEOs and other employees are starting to be thought leaders in their own field by giving more value other than their company's products or services.

How to become an edupreneur

Two important things in edupreneurship are Your audience and your content. Your audience is your students. A teacher needs students like an edupreneur needs an audience. The main concept of this is to teach the world with your expertise and make a living out of it.

By doing so, you need people who will listen, who will believe in your ideas, and who will buy your products or services. In short, you need true fans.

1. Know your audience

Identify who is your audience. What are their pain points? What are the problems that you can solve? How do they learn? Where do they learn? This is a critical part of building yourself as an edupreneur because this is where you will learn how to be valuable to your market.

2. Help them through social media

After identifying your audience and their challenges, it's time to give them solutions. Most of the time, successful edupreneurs start to help their audience through social media. It's the easiest way and almost everyone has social media accounts. Some platforms you can explore are Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Quora.

3. Create other forms of content

Posting on social media is just one form of content. Yet, there are many forms. If your audience likes your posts, they would want more of it. You can give it to them in form of blogs, ebooks, videos, podcasts, etc which they can access for free or with a small amount.

4. Organize workshops, webinars, and talks

After consuming your asynchronous content, your audience would want to get in touch with you, and see and hear you live. You can do this through organizing live workshops, joining webinars as guest speakers and panelists, etc. This way, you can build trust which is a necessity to make your audience pay for your content.

5. Create a course

Now that you built trust with your audience, it's time to put your content altogether and start creating your first course. It doesn't matter if it's an email course, a self-paced course, or a paid course, as long as it's something that gives value to your audience.

6. Build your micro-school or online academy

Lastly, it's time to build your online academy. Have you observed how sharing your expertise through social media posts can create an academy at the end? Yes, these are the steps on how you can productize your ideas and expertise!

The critical part of building a micro-school is choosing a learning platform. They are tons out there, but make sure you choose an all-in-one platform with free trial to save you time in designing and creating several course curriculums. In Teachfloor, we help edupreneurs to start their online academy through our course template and customer support. It's the best platform to start your journey of edupreneurship!

Conclusion: Is edupreneurship the future?

To conclude, the world needs more edupreneurs. The future of work is all about learning and working at the same time. In the next years, companies will start prioritizing building their own L&D or micro-schools inside their companies to retain employees and move faster with technology.

Our final words are: We need more educators, as well as we need more edupreneurs.

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