Entrepreneur Interview: Brian Rahill of CourseStorm Online Class Registration Tech for arts and non-profits.
In this episode, we interview Brian Rahill, an ex-scientist and founder and CEO of CourseStorm, a tech company dedicated to simplifying course registration for education and arts programs. Brian shares his transition from managing a science lab to founding CourseStorm after identifying gaps in the market for lifelong and community education.
He discusses his previous company, Rainstorm Consulting, that helped Higher Education institutions with recruiting and promotional tools. The interview goes into how CourseStorm was developed to meet the specific needs of adult education programs and has evolved to serve arts organizations, which have complex class registration needs.
Brian highlights the company's mission, their use of AI to streamline data analysis and enhance productivity, and their future strategy focused on expanding their impact in the educational sector.
00:00 Introduction to Brian Rahill and CourseStorm
00:46 Brian's Journey from Scientist to Entrepreneur
01:47 Founding Rainstorm Consulting
02:31 The Birth ofCourseStorm
03:20 Identifying Market Needs and Building Solutions
06:21 Challenges and Opportunities in the Arts Sector
07:38 CourseStorm’s Team and Business Model
08:55 Future Vision and AI Integration
15:05 Conclusion and Contact Information
Transcript:
Gene
Hello, everybody. I'm here today with Brian Rahill. He's an entrepreneur and ex scientist and currently the CEO of a tech company called CourseStorm. CourseStorm's website says that they are on “a mission to streamline access to education by providing impossibly simple course registration for community education arts and workforce training programs.”
And of course, it's the part of the conversation around the arts that I want to focus on because I can tell you from my experience that class registration in the arts is complicated! So that's why I invited Brian to come and talk to us today about his journey as an entrepreneur and working specifically with the arts. So welcome, Brian. Nice to see you.
Brian:Hey, thanks, Gene. Great to see you as well.
Gene:
So how did you, how did you go from being a scientist to being an entrepreneur and what got you excited about tech?
Brian:
Yeah, well, yeah, as you said, I was a scientist. I've always been kind of a. technology data geek, you know, so I like that aspect of it. But, the other thing to know about me is I'm a learner. That's my number one strength. I love to learn new things and have always been fascinated by learning and education and particularly lifelong learning and how that impacts people's lives.
So while I was working in a science lab at Ohio State, I was managing a science research lab at night. I went and got a master's degree in education, specifically focused on how to use technology to enhance education.
Gene:If I'm right, it is not your first company, so let's, let's go back a step, and I talk about that one, and then how did that evolve into what you're doing now?
Brian:
When I heard the word education, I was immediately thinking of either K 12 institutions or Higher Ed, and specifically was focused on Higher Ed. So, what I did was, after getting the master's, started a company specifically focused on how to engage people in four year institutions, helping those institutions kind of tell their stories better to attract and recruit students.
So I was really focused on that: the Higher Ed piece. And my then current company Rainstorm Consulting worked with a bunch of colleges and universities -- made websites and web based software to help them promote their organizations and get new students.
Gene
And then you evolved into CourseStorm and how did that happen?
Brian
Well, we got involved with this great organization called the Maine Adult Education Association and they were offering classes. Lots of adult enrichment classes, so like personal interest classes and job retraining classes for adults.
Now these are people that might have a college degree or might not, but they're going back to school to learn a new skill or retrain for a job or just to do something that's of interest to them. And, and so it was like really eye opening that I hadn't seen, I hadn't known this network of lifelong learning existed.
And so what we did was we built software for them. We built custom software at first to do this adult learning, solve this adult learning need, CourseStorm, help them list all their classes online, CourseStorm, and make it really easy for people to find those, register, and enroll. And so that was, that was kind of the early days of CourseStorm.
GeneIn a certain way, building a product for a specific customer with a use case in an industry can open the door to either going down a rabbit hole forever with that client, or opening the door and saying, “wait a minute….there's probably an industry of opportunity here” So what was the spark? How did you sort of wake up one day and realize here's an unmet need here? And how did you go about validating that before you started to build.
Brian:
I know you've been down this road before, Gene, so you know what it's like! The kind of “aha!” thing again was seeing this this incredible system of lifelong learning that existed right under our noses -- while everyone's focused on traditional education, sort of capital E education.
There was this big need in lifelong learning organizations. And so what we did was build the original software, and then said this need must exist in other organizations. We wound up making a list of potential organizations and calling 50 of them and interviewing them and saying, “Hey, do you have this need? You know, this is what we're thinking of building. Would you be interested to talk with us more as we start to build it?”
And we got a really positive response from that. These organizations tend to be small. They tend to not be the most tech savvy or have the most technology tools available to them. People hadn't built tools to solve this sort of small to medium sized education organization. They'd all built it for the large ones. And so we saw that there was a real gap in the market to serve the small to medium sized education program with powerful, simple tools. And so we made the first early version that just, it just took registrations and credit card payments really simply.
Gene
That’s a perfect st a perfect path and one that I think a lot of entrepreneurs sometimes overlook, which is they, they come up with an idea, they imagine that there's a market, they go build the product, and then when they hit the market, actually, they never did the 50 phone calls, so they don't have that knowledge. I imagine you got a lot of feedback about what the product should or shouldn't do.
Brian:
Yes, tons of feedback, tons of great insight that helped us build the most important things into the product. A lot of the stuff we thought was needed weren't, wasn't needed. And then other things we discovered were not.
Gene
Now you're up in Maine and you speak about a “we,” so what was your initial team? How did you fund the company? How did you actually make it happen? Brian:We were still making custom software and websites for Higher Ed institutions. while recognizing the opportunity in lifelong learning. So we're sort of like doing both at the same time. The best thing that ever happened is my co-founder, Matt James, who is a great person and really skilled as a product innovator and developer, said, “just let me at this. If we can afford to pay me full time, then I can go and really build this software.” And he did, he built the first version of CourseStorm, and that really helped to convince us there was a market there. , and then I was able to, I was able to sell the custom development shop and go full time on CourseStorm.
Gene
So, let's, let's shift over for the moment into the world of the arts and talk a little bit about the complexities that you encountered when you started talking with arts organizations and, and and how you managed to adjust to their needs versus other types of organizations.
Brian:
In some ways there's some complexities there, but in some ways they are like the small to mid-sized education organization we found. As I said, because we first built it for adult and community ed programs, increasingly we were getting interest from arts organizations from a theater or an arts center that's running a camp for kids, or adult improv classes.So we started to see these come in and we reached out to them to understand their needs.
Gene:How is this market the same or different from who we're currently serving?
Brian:
There's definitely some differences in that arts organizations require a number of things -- they need a ticketing system, a donor management or membership system. And so we knew we weren't going to be those things. But they had this education need that wasn't being filled by those systems. There was good technology for those systems in general. But the education need wasn't being filled.
Gene:Let's talk a little bit about the company. How many people do you have on the team and how many customers and what sort of the size and scope of your business today?
Brian:We're a team of 16. Most of us are located in Maine, but we have people all over. We're a fully remote company, which is interesting and fun. It allows us to hire the best people no matter where they are. And we have 700 - 750 customers all across the U. S. We're, we're based in the U. S. only right now. The largest market today is arts and culture organizations.
GeneAnd, how do people pay for your service?
Brian:Right now the way that it works is a percent of the transaction. So our pricing is that we take a cut of the fees. We become the payment processor and we take a part of the transactions as the registration is happening. We send the rest to the organization. So we're always in the position of sort of sending them money.
We're also looking at larger organizations. We've recently been able to serve more complex needs for larger organizations. And so we have some models that we're actually rolling out now, some changes to the business model to essentially charge a subscription fee and cap that pricing so we can help organizations grow and they can reap all the benefits of that growth.
GeneAs you look ahead to, the next three to five years, what's your strategy for the business? And are you looking to go into new markets, new products, stay the course? What's your CEO vision out the front window?
Brian:We gain a lot from focus. I'm a person who likes to do a lot of different things, but what I've seen in the past is that the focus is really helpful. We'll continue our arts focus.
One of the things we do have in our sights by the end of this year is to make 2 million connections to education. So, to serve 2 million students, help them get access to education. We just celebrated 1.5 million. So we're looking to do another half a million this year.
Gene
As an entrepreneur myself, I certainly understand the allure of coming up with new ideas and diving in. You know, one of the nuggets of wisdom is --- just do one thing really, really well! Because when you do eight things poorly, you're doing eight things poorly!
Today no conversation about technology is possible without diving into the emerging world of AI. I wonder how you are thinking about this, this with respect to your own business first, and then we can talk about it more globally. But are you imagining AI as being an integral part of what you build in the next couple of years?
Brian:Absolutely. And, and in fact, we recently launched a new feature situated in the arts in particular. There's a couple things happening. You know, arts organizations, they've obviously been struggling. Some are doing fine, but some just never really rebounded from COVID.
We're seeing like season tickets are down, audiences are changing and down in a number of cases. I think the organizations are. are trying to manage a lot and we see education as a place where they can get build additional revenue opportunities and connect with new audiences.
I think that is so important. Getting people involved in education, they're attracting different people in their community. They're really connecting to the community and then they're building the kind of patrons of the future, the season ticket holders of the future. And so, , so we think that that's a really important opportunity and I'd say it's an area where we're continuing to try to educate the market on this point.
Some organizations already see it and they're doing it and they're doing it well. We're trying to educate the arts market and that there's an overlooked opportunity for many organizations.
Gene
Now, how does the AI slide into that?
Brian
I was just at the INTIX conference, the ticketing industry conference in New York and sat in a bunch of sessions. And what I'm hearing is a lot of presentations on how to use all the data you've got. “I've got patron data, I've got donor data, I've got class data,” and lots of great vendors telling you of the ways you can slice and dice it and you can make this custom promo code for your season ticket holders that didn't come back the next year -- all this stuff. That's great!
But the organizations we're talking to, most of them are just so busy! One of the things I saw all the hands go up, when one of the vendors asked “who here would say even with twice the amount of staff, I still couldn't get it all done” and every single hand went up. So everyone's busy, right? So how do you use AI to take advantage of all of these wonderful marketing things that you should be doing?
Well, just, you know, you're not going to get twice the number of staff. So how can you do it with your staff? That's where I think AI can really augment. I’ve seen incredible power. Lots of people are using it to write, you know, descriptions and do things like that or write a board report.
But the power for the data analysis side is unbelievable. You can feed data into a system like ChatGPT. And then start to ask it questions. Start to say, “how many, how many patrons did you have? How many returning season tickets holders did you have? What's the age demographic? What's the gender demographics?
You can ask a bunch of other things. Where did they come from? Tell me geographically. You know, how does that relate to who took our classes? So I think that there's a lot that's available there. And we're so, we're so bullish on that, that we actually built that into CourseStorm.
So we have that same thing where you can take your CourseStorm data. Instead of slicing and dicing it with lots of different, you know, the report builders in most of these tools are pretty tough. It's just simply asking questions. Just, you have your data, you start to ask questions and generate reports immediately.
Gene
And of course the problem that the AI world is obsessed about is this notion of “hallucination”where the AI has been trained on a whole bunch of data and it makes stuff up. But in the case of your system, where all it's doing is querying the data that's in the four walls of your system, where you're probably going to get a pretty much more accurate response. Am I, am I right about that?
Brian:I think that's been overplayed a little bit. The hallucinations -- obviously it's there. It depends on how you prompt it too. So the way that we prompt the AI, CourseStorm, specifically helps with that, and we also have the AI explain how it arrived at the answer. So, , “you had, you had this many returning season ticket holders.” The AI defines returning season ticket holders as this, , so you can see and you can correct it if it misunderstood your query.
GeneNot surprisingly, we're, we're on the same page. I'm a big proponent of the thing that you just said - which is arts organizations need to find new revenue. And one way to find new revenue is to find new patrons. That's what you're doing because you're in a way showing them a back door to engage people with their organization.
The other way to raise money is to give your staff tools that “buy back” some of their time. You don't have to raise money to hire more staff if the software can make your staff more productive. And those two things seem to be like a winning formula, certainly for every organization. It's certainly for what CourseStorm is doing.
So, it's great to get to know you and to get to know your company. If people , Learn more about your business. Find out more or become a customer. What should, where should they go?
Brian:
CourseStorm. com or look me up on LinkedIn, Brian Rahill, , and then Brian [at] coursestorm.com.
GeneWell, it's been great to chat with you and good luck this year. And let's check in again in the future.
Brian
Sounds good, Gene. Thanks for having me on.
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