Go learn something new: CuriousBee helps you find classes in Philly

Sarah Huebscher was always calling her long-distance best friend in Philly, Anna Vresilovic, with business ideas.
What about a startup that sold custom-made bras? Or a water temperature regulator for your shower?
None of her ideas ever stuck, until this one: What about a tool that helped people find classes in their cities? Huebscher, who moved to Detroit after she and Vresilovic graduated from Brown, wanted to take classes and learn new skills — it was also a great way to meet people in her new hometown — but she didn’t know where to do it.

The pair, both 27, applied to the Milken-Penn Business Plan Competition last year, got into the semi-finals and accepted an invitation to join Penn’s Education Design Studio, Inc. (EDSi), a five-month business bootcamp that met monthly in Philadelphia.
Now, their startup, CuriousBee, is live.
It currently lists 40 different classes in Philadelphia from glass-blowing to tango to wine tasting, some run by schools, others run by individuals.
Find classes
CuriousBee takes a 5 percent cut of every student who signs up for a class on the platform.
The startup took a $10,000 investment from EDSi in exchange for 8 percent equity. Aside from the investment, Huebscher and Vresilovic said that EDSi was a great way to learn from a diverse group of entrepreneurs — it wasn’t just full of young, white male founders. (Other EDSi participants felt the same way.)
Like with other EDSi participants we’ve heard from, EDSi was the catalyst for Huebscher and Vresilovic to take the plunge into entrepreneurship. That’s because of EDSi’s unique feeder system, where it looks to a business plan competition for its startups, instead of soliciting applications for already-formed companies.
Huebscher, a former design engineer, works on CuriousBee full-time, while Vresilovic, a Masterman grad who lives in West Philly, works in digital advertising and is getting her master’s in counseling from Penn.