WooThemes founder cooking up educational resource for startups

This is interesting. WooThemes founder Adii Pienaar, is quietly preparing to launch a new venture called PublicBeta.

The new project looks to be an educational resource for entrepreneurs, with people including the likes of Hiten Shah, Chris Savage, Dharmesh Shah, Garrett Dimon, Spencer Fry, Amy Hoy, Nathan Barry, Sarah Hatter and Pienaar himself sharing their knowledge and experience on the platform.

Its elevator pitch, naturally, makes it seem a little more exciting than that:

• PublicBeta is a learning community for entrepreneurs; and
• PublicBeta is your more intelligent and more experienced co-founder. Plus you don’t even have to give us equity.

From what we can see, the project — which is headquartered in London — will monetise by offering tiered courses. In fact, Pienaar has blogged about the potential pricing structure. If that post is anything to go by, then it looks like Pienaar is leaning towards a premium subscription-based model, (“more like US$100 per month and not US$25 per month), with the potential for PublicBeta to be invite-only when it launches:

The fact that only a small amount of people can afford or get something could drive higher demand, because it basically comes down to FOMO.

Beyond this though, I would honestly rather 1 000 PublicBeta community members paying me US$100 pm, than 1m customers paying US$5 pm. For me this is about quality over quantity and maintaining a high resolution in all interactions within the PublicBeta community.

Since conceiving the project, Pienaar has moved into a non-executive role at WooThemes. At present, says Pienaar, he is the only person actively working on Public Beta, which is set to launch towards the end of 2013.

While there are a number of online course options out there for entrepreneurs looking to add skills to their offering, a large number of them have relied on being tied to a tertiary education institute for their success.

Public Beta’s decisions to not go that route and to use the premium subscription model is a pretty brave one. Although it won’t need many customers to survive, their testimonials and recommendations will have to be pretty powerful if it’s to thrive.