Interest in self-improvement has never been out of fashion. But today we are experiencing a new era in the personal development sphere with the adoption of digital services and mobile applications. More and more people want personal consultations on the go, and the industry needs a reliable infrastructure to provide proven data, reliable methods and protection against fraud. In this article, Timur Karimbaev, a recognized expert in edtech, reviews self-improvement market trends in Russia and the West.
An emerging trend in Russia
Self-improvement became massively popular in Russia about 15 years ago. The late 2000s registered significant increases in a number of different types of training centers, with total volume estimated at $20-25 million per year. Nowadays, the self-improvement market is represented by coaches, books and online courses. While personal coaching sessions are still not common and are perceived as a strange hobby of the rich, the number of Russian coaches is growing – and showmen like Radislav Gandapas have become popular enough to charge $20,000 – $30,000 per performance.
Medium- and low-budget products are getting more popular. The publisher Mann, Ivanov and Ferber specializes in self-improvement books; it is a part of the Eksmo holding, the largest publisher in Russia. Unfortunately, there are no cumulative statistics on market volume. According to GetCourse statistics, revenue in self-improvement courses increased by 300% ($2 million to $6 million) from 2014 to 2016. Market players are intensively adopting digital solutions, which are represented mainly by affordable online courses, websites and apps.
Despite the smaller market volume in comparison to the USA (where the self-improvement industry reaches some $11 billion), Russian consumers tend to adopt Western trends, and many of them are anticipating changes in the Russian market.
As in the USA, the most active consumers of self-improvement courses are millennials. According to Field Agent research, self-improvement is the main value for 94% of this segment. Millennials spend twice as much on self-improvement as older people, and they prefer modern digital services. The average online course consumer in Russia is a woman aged 25 to 35 – and we are now seeing a shift to a younger audience.
Digital services are coming from the West
Russian tech-entrepreneurs are able to observe how certain technologies have proven themselves in Western countries and then adapt them to their own realities with minimal losses. This is a real advantage.
The difference between apps developed in Russia and in the US is in their subjects. While apps from Russia are often based on subjects like astrology, IQ and psychology, Western apps cover more practical subjects – like the brain-trainer Lumosity, the meditation app Unstuck and others – and use more authentic methods of personal data interpretation on their bases.
Russia has not seen many success stories from self-improvement apps developers, with the modest exception of Welltory – an app which analyzes stress levels according to pulse rate via a smartphone camera and provides the user with recommendations. This firm has attracted $1 million in investments.
Western self-improvement services have been growing more rapidly. Only 10% of such applications are supported by venture funds; the amount of investment is about $200 million in total, with a focus on memory and mindset training. The Muse, for example, helps with career building. It has an audience of 50 mln people and about 50 mln visitors per year. Its creators attracted $16 million for developing personalized user profiles and self-improvement applications, identity tests and building an individual career trajectory. Another supported startup is MAZLO, which raised $10 million in 2015.
Consumption is different, but problems are similar
Despite the popularity of self-improvement professionals, there is a known market problem – unproven results. Articles in Western media accuse coaches and other self-improvement industry representatives of an unscientific approach. In Russia there were major scandals in early 2010s, when unprofessional trainers used forbidden methods – which resulted in a number of suicides.
This business is, in fact, almost unregulated. Even in the United States there is no unifying professional association or journal of record. Evaluation of the market is very approximate, as the spectrum of services on offer remains far from clear.
At the same time, there are many qualified professionals who are developing their own methods in psychology and other human sciences; they collect data and interpret it, but still face a huge problem of method validation due to the insufficiency of industry data in hand.
Blockchain to blur cross-cultural differences
The only way to support this market with new technologies is to gather data from tons of sources – collect them, depersonalize them and use them for more integrated research. When you process a large number of varying impersonal profiles, matching certain characteristics and building a knowledge base, your approach becomes a scientific one. The only thing that can unite the disparate elements is Blockchain.
Beyond digital self-improvement services, Blockchain is also a solution for the problem of data protection. Many online tests and quizzes allow the collection of user data – data that are then owned by one company. Several years ago, for example, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell distributed a short personality quiz on Facebook that told people how they rated among the “big five” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. In a short period of time, the two researchers assembled the largest-ever collection of psychometric scores for Facebook profiles.
Blockchain is the only storage technology with decentralized architecture. If you upload valuable data to one block – such as personal data interpretation methods with their subsequent output – you can be sure that it will not be stolen and will not be subject to unauthorized use.
The openness of the Blockchain platform gives all players and developers the right tools to build a fair service, instead of an information monopoly like Facebook’s. At all events, many organizations are trying to collect people’s data, profiles and psychological characteristics to make money. That’s why I am sure that the industry needs Blockchain-based platforms. They represent the only way to keep data protected, available and valuable for new, smart end-user self-improvement services.
- Timur Karimbaev is co-founder and CTO of GetCourse, one of the largest services for online education in Russia ($6 million in revenues in 2017 to date). He is also CEO and co-founder of Human Discovery Platform, the first Blockchain-based system for the creation of complex methodologies for human personality analysis.
