Signa

Providing online courses in different digital economy topics for deafs, helping them to get prepared for their professional activities through

Accessibility is a topic that has been talked and becoming one of the biggest challenges. How to prepare people with disability for the future of work? Although, there are feel people in the world trying to solve this problem. Even less trying to give training for a group of people who requires a specific language and culture adaptations: the deaf community. Many of them are illiterate in the language of their own country. They rely on sign language. Now-a-days the only solutions they have are: depending on their family and friend's knowledge, take a face-to-face course and try to do some lip reading or try to get the informations by looking at the scene, or pay/fight for an interpreter. That is why we created Signa.

Signa is a platform that provides online courses for deafs, helping them to get prepared for their professional activities through contents created in sign language and subtitles, with their culture and their teaching methodology. The topics involve: HTML (coding), Excel, video editing, photography, Corel Draw (design), Photoshop, Canva, Languages, Mathematic, Financial Math, Trello (tasks management) and others.

Lead project (Projeto Lead - http://projetolead.com.br/)
Online courses for all people with disabilities.
Our advantage is to have a communication and methodology specific for deafs.

Deaf to deaf (Surdo para surdo - https://surdoparasurdo.com.br):
They connect who wants to learn with who wants to teach by scheduling appointments and charging per hour of 'consulting'.
Signa's advantage are: more accessible price comparing the intensity of contents that we offer, variety of themes, activities, time flexibility and the possibility to rewatch the contents whenever is needed.

We give the deaf community the opportunity to have access to new knowledge, conceptions, softwares and skills. We teach them how to code, edit video, learn languages and others, by our own courses or by other people courses hosted in our e-learning. The technology helps us to help a forgotten part of the society (360 million deaf in the world) being able to rich all territories with no much infrastructure as a regular school and more scalability because once we create one course the same can be accessed after for a lot of people with no more production work.

Our success is measure by the number of courses, number of students and the revenue.
Our top three goals are: 1 - Increase the number of courses in our platform 2 - Increase the number of students and 3 - start a test in North America in 2019.

Our vision is to provide accessible to training for deaf people from around the World. To five years from now our goal is to be providing training in Brazil, United States and Canada. We also want to be connecting those people into the market, helping to make this connection between deafs and business. It is going to transform the economy. Once those people start to get prepare for the market, start to see opportunities to work in areas that they never thought about, we have a new group of people avaiable to 'produce'.

Our organization currently empower deaf people from 15 to 49 years old. They rely on sign language to absorb knowledge. They usually work in accessible areas for them, such teaching (sign language) and being a translater. At Signa we have over 1200 students learning different topics, getting new skills and being confident with their potencial. You can check the type of courses here: https://signaedu.com/cursos.html
We are also giving a opportunity to get extra money though learning how to created online courses for deaf community and opening our platform for them to sell it. You can check this specific course here: http://bit.ly/PC3Lancamento3

Nowadays we have 17 courses in our platform and over 1200 students taking a course with positive feedback. It is indeed one of our challenges to measure such a big impact.When we go besides training, connecting our students with the vacancies in the marketing so we will be able to measure the impact by the number of hirings also.

The organization was founded buy the current partners and directors: Fabeola, Icaro e Leandro.They are all still leading the business. They got to know each other within a Startup Weekend event, in Floripa. The founders did not face it strongly but saw other people facing it. The CEO, Fabiola, is a child of deaf parents. Then, she knows how difficult it is form deaf to have access to the digital economy.

We have been already solving this problem. We created our own accessible e-learning platform for deaf, due the lack in the market. Most of the courses we have in our platform were created from us. After we start to become a reference in courses for deaf people in Brazil, we started to open our platform for other people to be able to post their own courses and get some money from this. This is our strategy to get scalability in Brazil and internationally. By this we are also providing an opportunity for the deaf community to transform their current knowledge in courses that can be sold and give an extra passive outcoming. Our metrics are the number of the courses and the quantity of students. Once we started to go to a new market (North America), our job will be to translate the platform, develop the producer community and apply a process to ensure that all courses are created in our quality standard. In order to increase our impact and reach more people, we are also starting to aplicate a process for people to be able to sell Signa's course and get some commission from this.

We have many parts of the business to improve to get in the next level:
Technology: - our platform needs to become prepare for the marketplace version (sale of other people courses), with dashboards and the possibility for a teacher changes his course informations and videos by himself.
- improve the customer experience creating interactive areas between students and a better interaction with the teachers.
- mobile app for who does not study through a computer and needs to watch the classes offline.
- to hire 2 devs and 1 tester
Marketing:
- create a blog
- create free contents
- hire 2 people
Financial area: hire 1profissional

We have the external risks of having a big competitor and not find capable people to create their own courses for our marketplace. We are managing it by offering a training for those people. We are preparing people to be able to create their own courses. Internally, our risks would be having problems with the platform that were created over fast codes and not having enought revenue to pay all our expenses. We are managing it by launching our new platform version this month and getting the support of an accelarator to help us to grow faster.