Answers

Who will create the content?

Me and two of my friends are contributing course and sparks at the moment. Requested a few educators I found on dev.to and twitter to contribute, but that's lagging. Still pushing on that front.

Why someone will take this over the likes of Udemy?

Udemy is paid. They do have quality content, but platforms like them (Coursera, EdX) are video-centric, academical, and extensive for a casual learner.

And they lack the 'social-learning' component.

Mindspace has text-based crash courses, that are short and straight to the point with max 3000 characters for each lesson and a social component called sparks (think of it like a twitter-like feed for learning). All with no dark patterns or paywalls or signup checkpoints. A very minimal, easy to use design for all age groups.

Contents are similar to what you find in /r/ELI5, /r/askscience, or any stackexchange sites.

Scenario: A product manager in a company wants to know what ML is all about. He needn't go to Udemy or Coursera if he knew that Kaggle has micro-courses on them that gives a top-down insight on the concepts.

Scenario: A self-learner like a student wants to know how steam engines work. Instead of reading the long-form Wikipedia article or watching a twenty-minute youtube video, he could check out an intro to steam engine course on Mindspace.

How will you get the money?

Two streams planned.

Enterprise:

When I was in Mango we tried many platforms for internal KB and training software to get the interns and new employees trained. From Google docs to gitbooks, we tried all. And existing tools like Gsuite, Mediawiki, Confluence, Document360, Freshdesk don't work for small teams. They are an overkill!

So my plan is to use the public platform as a proof of concept and sell private instances of Mindspace to businesses like the above. With multitenant structure I can give them spaces like acme.arclind.com and abcbusiness.arclind.com to have their own internal mindspaces.

Public:

This is not the main focus, but this will be a viable choice if community grows.