What is MasterClass? What problem does it solve?
I’ve been working in online education for the last +6 years, and MasterClass has been in my periphery for as long. The first course I checked out was Christina Aguilera Teaches Singing. That was Fall of 2015.
Many friends talk about how much they enjoy MasterClass. This I attribute to their slick trailers and great ad targeting.
But what is MasterClass? What problem is it solving?
To answer this question, I started with the Reforge Use Case map from the Retention + Engagement Deep Dive program. In the map, we want to answer the following questions:
- What problem does it solve?
- Who is using it?
- Why are they using it?
- What’s the alternative?
- How often are they using it?
There can be multiple use cases, but here’s what I landed on:
- What problem does it solve? I want to consume something interesting or educational
- Who is using it? Educated, income $45k+*
- Why are they using it? I can learn something I’m interested in a short amount of time
- What’s the alternative? Podcasts (“How I made this”), YouTube (TedTalks), Television (“Planet Earth”, documentaries)
- How often are they using it? Weekly
*I considered adding age, but I believe this would necessitate creating additional use cases.
Based on the Use Case map, what conclusions do we draw?
1. It falls squarely in the infotainment use case. This has several implications on the value prop (being easy to consume > offering concrete call to actions), pricing (low), and usage (like podcasts or television, consumed while doing something else).
2. It’s not replacing education. Not that it pretends to. CEO David Rogier said it explicitly enough in his NYTimes interview, “We are not a replacement for college.” This is even though searches for MasterClass have overtaken searches for “business school.”
Source: Post Corona: Higher Ed
3. For the instructors, the value is in the brand, not revenue. Instructors receive a base pay up front and a revenue share of subscriptions sold to their classes. Only at incredible scale could that provide meaningful revenue professional athletes and moguls like Serena Williams and Bob Iger.
Rogier has affirmed as much: “For every single one of our instructors, the decision to teach a MasterClass comes from a place of wanting to help people. You’re never going to earn as much money with us. You’re going to earn tons more if you just do an endorsement deal.”
Understanding this is critical to the MasterClass growth model, which depends on added supply (new classes) to acquire new customers (with slick trailers that appeal to a greater breadth of interest) and to retain current customers (after completing David Negreanu’s MasterClass on Poker, are curious to try Anna Wintour’s creativity MasterClass).
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