Digital Reporter
Robert A. Vergara Jr.
The Generation Y, where the much debated‑about millennials belong to, is said to be the most entrepreneurial generation. A big chunk of this demographic prefers running their own businesses rather than working for an established company.
Research conducted by the team behind Bizcool, an e‑Learning platform launched just last November, led to the same conclusion.
The results of the study, which tapped 500 respondents with age ranging from 18 to 45 years old, showed that 65.2% or 326 respondents are “extremely” into running their own business.
“[A large] demographic of the millennials, they extremely value entrepreneurship, but we don’t have enough access to education. Workshops cost around ₱3,000 for a three‑hour workshop, but it’s still not that intensive,” Bizcool CEO Marvin Perol told the media in an interview.
With such premise came the idea of launching the platform, which aims to bring “affordable and accessible” education about entrepreneurship to the digital space.
Bizcool offers 11 online courses covering fundamental information on establishing and operating a business. Its courses include “My Coffee Shop,” “My Bakeshop,” “My Eatery,” and “My Online Store,” which all cover the kinds of businesses that respondents of the study think are the most ideal ventures.
Each course, which can be availed at a starting rate of ₱1,129, includes five modules, 38 tutorial videos, 41 PDF files, and three worksheets on average.
Perol, who owns a video equipment‑rental business, said the platform aims to help budding entrepreneurs address such perennial concerns as lack of capital through reading materials on how to raise funds and how to create a business plan and financial forecast.
“We’re targeting individuals who are not very particular with academic portfolio, they want to really jump into business right now, that’s their personality profile. But we are continuously studying the market,” he said.
But while many millennials are keen to build their own business, Vincent Velasquez, a college professor and co‑founder, said they dismiss the idea of learning the ropes of entrepreneurship through a conventional, classroom‑setting manner.
This is why the team assured that the contents of the modules for each course are “less academic and more practical” while retaining the theoretical lessons of entrepreneurship.
“Somehow, along the way, in doing our research we had an insight that millennials are not necessarily into studying, they just want to put up their own business, so we wanted to include less academic, more practical tools and concepts that they can really apply,” Velasquez said.
“For the most part we consulted entrepreneurs and business consultants, so for every product we conducted research for the content,” he added.
JJ Ingco, co‑founder who also teaches in a university, said the workshops will also be their marketing tools to attract more people to enrol in the digital courses.
“We’re in the business of creating e‑Learning products. However, when it (Bizcool) was made, we found out that social aspect was something important as well to people, because for the longest time, we learned through schools and that transition from personal or social aspects to digital is quite drastic at this point in time,” Ingco said.
The team currently focuses on gaining traction in Metro Manila to expand the business to the whole Southeast Asia and eventually become the edtech industry’s Uber or Alibaba.
“We want to build a community of startups. Eventually we want to be an ecosystem builder, we want to get these educators, investors to come in to the platform and increase our value over time. We have two types of users—the students and contributors and educators,” Perol said.
