Delhi-based SkillKindle - a marketplace to discover training and workshop sessions in Delhi & Mumbai, to launch in Bangalore soon

Wanna discover ballet classes, golf tutorials, pastry making classes and vipassana workshops around your locality or in city. Here comes New Delhi based community marketplace SkillKindle, which allows you to list, discover and book great classes and experiences in the city. The platform informs users about upcoming and past workshops and classes. For easy navigation it also offers filters such as date, location and category, price and teacher.

For businesses (trainers) SkillKindle enables them to create their classes with detailed schedules, prices, payment (receiving) preferences and venue photographs within 5 minutes. Trainers can also track registrations and interact with students through the comment threads, launch campaigns like ‘Early bird discounts’ or ‘Group discounts’.

Currently the platform lists over 700 upcoming courses/workshops spanning across genre such as art and crafts, culinary, sports, music and technology and design with several others. Speaking about the size of opportunity, Tanuj Choudhry said, “The marketsize of such courses and workshops in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore alone are worth $350 million. With 30,000+ trainers in these 3 cities alone, there are substantial inefficiencies we are trying to tackle – the market is unorganized, the cost of marketing (horizontal listings and marketplaces, newspaper ads, physical advertising material etc) is high and there are no online tools to “manage” one’s training business.”

As of now around 800 trainers across Delhi NCR and Mumbai use SkillKindle to promote and manage their classes, workshops and events. They include the likes of Shiamak Davar’s dance schools, Anupam Kher’s acting school, the Arsenal Soccer Schools, Inlingua and Fitness First on one hand, and smaller (in scale) yet equally impressive experts like ace-photographer Girish Menon, mixologists Yangdup Lama and Nischal Gurung, and Salsa India on the other.

SkillKindle serves two customer segments – individuals and corporates. Since March 2012, the platform has sold 1200+ tickets online and conducted 60+ workshops for corporates such as Microsoft, Accenture, Godrej, Ikea, Hero Eco, Educational Initiatives, Bajaj Financial Services and Hindustan Coca Cola. For every ticket sold through SkillKindle, the company charges a sales commission. “If you pick up a subscription package, a nominal 7.5% is what we take. In other cases, it goes up to 20%,” added Choudhry. SkillKindle offers an online payment gateway and a cash-on-ticket-delivery option. SkillKindle also takes commission from trainers for SkillKindle Pro workshops. In addition, it also generates revenues from programme design, where SkillKindle helps organizations to design full-fledged employee engagement including training programmes. Launched by Tanuj Choudhry, Amit Kumar and Veer Bahadur Singh Narula - SkillKindle will launch its operation soon in Bangalore. The startup also plans to display dedicated phone numbers for several trainers, allowing users to speak to the trainers directly.