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Chat Transcript
Event Q&A
Event Summary (English - see below)
CEO, Greg Brown
- Total Q1 revenue increased 16% year-over-year to $176.4 million.
- Udemy Business revenue increased 47% year-over-year & Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) increased 42% year-over-year to $396.0 million.
- We ended the quarter with 14,400+ global UB customers
- What we mean by the “unification of Udemy”, or what we internally call our “One Udemy” initiative: as you all have seen from our earnings reports, Udemy Business has fully developed alongside the marketplace and we now have two mature business lines. We have an opportunity to bring these two business lines together, bridging the experience for professional learners so that no matter how they come to Udemy, they can find a solution here that will help them achieve their professional goals. Whether they are looking for a single course, a subscription, or a learning program, their learning journey is not linear so no matter where they are at - Udemy is the destination that will meet their needs.
- Our Instructor teams recently had the chance to talk to 50+ of our Instructor Partners this past April and we dug into your ideas and concerns for AI + Udemy. Fundamentally, we still believe that human expertise is the core of the Udemy platform, AND also, AI can be a tool/lever for Instructors to build content more scalably. We also still see AI as a way to help learners find content and build skills faster, which creates a stickier and more valuable experience for the learner.
AI is constantly evolving, and so must we. We will continue to monitor new developments and adjust our strategy accordingly to the needs of the learners, instructors, and organizations that rely on our platform.
President, Udemy Business - Stephanie Stapleton Sudbury
- We have so much momentum and excitement around Udemy Business - our trajectory to get from $1M to $100M as a SaaS business is a big deal - it took us 5.5 years. Only 9% of companies have done that that fast. It speaks to our product market fit. We’ve continued to see growth, and we have built a sustainable go to market engine.
- We have three different customer populations: instructors, learners, and organizations. When we think about UB customers, we are really focused on executives or L&D leaders who are looking to upskill and re-skill their teams. These are the people we talk to on a day to day basis. We have a very broad and deep catalog of almost every function, in almost every industry.
- Our revenue distribution is spread globally and 50% of UB revenue comes from outside of the AMER region. We serve companies of all sizes, but also partner with some of the largest (Some with hundreds of thousands of learners).
- In the past, learning was considered a perk, or a “nice to have” in orgs. That has fundamentally changed in the past 7 years. The need for upskilling and reskilling in a hybrid world is an executive priority. The CEO cares about skilling their workforce and closing skills gaps and preparing for the future. Customers see learning as a key priority to do things like increase productivity, improve retention, drive revenue, and support business continuity.
- Our business model is unique and we can provide business-critical content that is always up to date and available in 15 language collections (including English). We also provide impactful, actionable data including learning trends and industry benchmarks.
- We have several tools to help drive adoption of the product - including a structured launch plan, learning paths, program toolkits, content mapping, communication templates, benchmarking, trending skills, and insightful reports.
- Ultimately we want to help orgs drive and influence company culture where employees are motivated to gain new skills, and ultimately employee learning will directly impact business outcomes.
- We see a 69% average adoption rate per UB account.
- In 2023, I’m excited about expanding our reach through strategic partnerships like AWS, further differentiation of our product via local language content, investing in key learning modalities (Udemy Pro, Leadership Academy), signaling skill acquisition through Badging, and continuing to drive deeper adoption and penetration through our marketing & customer success efforts.
SVP of Supply Strategy, Scott Rogers
- This year we've made multiple improvements to instructor analytics to help you understand and drive your performance including: new visibility into your engagement, ratings, and audience interests among Udemy Business learners.
- We also gave you deeper insights into the engagement of all your learners, including device usage breakdown and a long-requested historical view of course engagement.
- Finally, we made the Performance dashboard…well, perform better. For those with a lot of data, we've significantly improved your load times, uptime, and made sure the data you see in Performance is calculated consistently with other sources like the Revenue Report.
- The coding exercises tool was something that instructors had given us feedback on for years. Practice was something that learners wanted, and instructors wanted to provide.
- This includes increased usability and guidance for learners, AI-assisted & improved creation flow, and data that can strengthen the quality of your exercises.
- We collect signals of course demand and are working to share this information with you to help inform your decision-making process when it comes to deciding what to teach next. Demand signals include: search data, industry trends, UB customer requests, existing supply, and competitor supply and investment strategy.
- We’re elevating your voices as proud Udemy Instructors. We’ve partnered with internal Udemy teams to showcase Instructor Partners on social media, podcasts, with other software companies, in person workshops with UB customers, in person at conferences, and at events for prospective UB customers. There will be more to come around opportunities like this in the coming months.
- Where traditional publishers typically subtitle or dub their English courses and experts, we have the advantage of local language courses created by local experts with locally relevant examples. But not only is there advantage in local relevance, but these marketplaces are enabling us to have languages not supported by our competitors.
- Growing local language consumption is a key company goal this year.
- Industry data is clear - only 5% of the world lists English as their first language and 90% of learners want to learn in their native tongue.
- Our MX purchase and consumption data bears this out - with a majority of regions with adequate supply favoring local language over English content.
- Our efforts to drive visibility and usage of our local language content are working - local instructors now make up 5,000 of the 8,000 UB instructors and you’ll see from this chart the consistent growth of royalties paid to local language content instructors since January of 2022.