Latest / The Founder's Journey with Fexingo: First-Time Entrepreneurs, Failures, and Lessons Learned / How Rejected Business School Cases Built a 50M Case Platform
Transcript
- Lucas: Priya Mehta was a second-year MBA student at Harvard when she wrote her first business case study. It was about a small Indian pharmaceutical company trying to expand into Africa. She spent three months interviewing executives, analyzing financials, writing teaching notes. Luna: And it got rejected by the publisher? Lucas: By three of them. Harvard Business Publishing, Ivey, and even a smaller European publisher all passed. Their reason? 'Market too niche.' Priya was frustrated, but she also noticed something: the case was actually good. It just didn't fit the template of what large publishers wanted. Luna: So what did she do with it? Lucas: She posted it on a blog for a few fellow students. Within a month, she got requests from professors at three other business schools who wanted to use it. And that's when the idea hit her — if professors couldn't publish their cases through traditional channels, maybe there was a market for those rejected cases directly. Luna: So she built a platform for orphaned case studies. I remember hearing about CaseSource a few years ago. Lucas: Exactly. She started by reaching out to professors she knew, asking if they had cases sitting in drawers that had been rejected. She offered them a 50% royalty on every sale. The first year, she had 200 cases on the platform, mostly from Harvard and Stanford adjuncts. Luna: And the buyers were smaller schools that couldn't afford the big publishers' prices, right? Lucas: That's the key. A traditional Harvard case study costs about $10 per student per case. For a class of 60 students, that's $600 for a single case. CaseSource charged a flat $50 per case, regardless of class size. Suddenly, a community college in Ohio or a business school in Nairobi could access the same quality of material for a fraction of the cost. Luna: That price difference is massive. How did Harvard Business Publishing not see that coming? Lucas: They saw it as a niche play. They were focused on the top 100 business schools worldwide. But Priya's research showed there are over 13,000 business schools globally, most of which can't afford premium cases. Plus corporate training programs. That's a huge underserved market. Luna: So she started with a marketplace model. But how did she get the word out? Lucas: She did something clever. She gave away ten cases for free to any professor who signed up. Those free cases were her best ones — the ones that had been rejected but were actually very well-researched. Professors tried them, loved them, and then started buying more. It was a classic freemium funnel, but applied to business education. Luna: And within four years, they hit 2,000 institutional subscribers. I think I read that in a case study about them. Lucas: Which is ironic — a case study about a case study platform. But yes. By year four, they had 2,000 schools and corporate clients, and revenue hit about $5 million annually. But the real inflection point came in 2023 when they signed a deal with a large online learning platform. Luna: The one that offers microcredentials and executive certificates? Lucas: Exactly. That deal alone added 500,000 potential users overnight. CaseSource cases became part of their curriculum for leadership and strategy courses. Revenue jumped to $20 million that year. Luna: And today, it's valued at $50 million. That's impressive for a business built on rejected material. Lucas: It really is. But I think the deeper lesson is about the rejection itself. Priya often says that the rejection forced her to look for a different distribution model. If her case had been accepted by Harvard Business Publishing, she would have just had one case published, earned a small royalty, and moved on. The rejection created the platform. Luna: There's something about that — the idea that when a gatekeeper says no, it might actually be a signal that you need to build your own path. Lucas: Right. And in this case, the gatekeepers weren't just saying no to one professor. They were saying no to thousands of professors every year. Priya estimated that maybe 60% of all case studies written by business school faculty are never published through traditional channels. That's an enormous library of orphaned intellectual property. Luna: Sixty percent? So if a typical business school produces maybe 50 new cases a year, that's 30 cases per school that never see the light of day. Multiply that by 13,000 schools... Lucas: You get roughly 400,000 orphaned cases per year. Even if only a fraction are high quality, that's a massive content pool. CaseSource now has about 8,000 cases on its platform. They've barely scratched the surface. Luna: And they've started to expand beyond business cases. Don't they now have cases in healthcare management, public policy, and even engineering? Lucas: Yes. They launched a vertical for healthcare administration cases last year. That came from a professor at Johns Hopkins who had written a case on a hospital merger that got rejected because it was too specific to the US system. But it turned out that a lot of hospital administrators in other countries found it valuable. Same pattern, different industry. Luna: Before we get into more detail, I want to pause on something. We do these episodes ad-free intentionally. If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, we keep the show ad-free precisely because listener support makes that choice sustainable. Lucas: Yeah, it's a deliberate decision. We don't run ads on these episodes. If you want to support that, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just an option for those who find value here. Luna: And it genuinely does help us keep the focus on stories like Priya's instead of selling something. Anyway, back to CaseSource — what about the quality control? With thousands of cases from different authors, how do they maintain consistency? Lucas: They have a peer-review system. Every case submitted goes through a blind review by two professors who are subject-matter experts. They check for rigor, clarity, and teaching utility. About 30% of submissions are rejected. So even on a platform built for rejected cases, there's still a curation layer. Luna: So the rejected cases themselves get vetted again. That must create a certain standard. Lucas: Exactly. And it also means that the authors who do get accepted have a badge of quality. Priya told me that some professors now list 'Published on CaseSource' on their CVs. It's become a credential in its own right. Luna: So the rejection from the big publishers actually created a new signal of quality. That's a fascinating reversal. Lucas: It is. And it's not just about the cases. The platform also provides teaching notes, discussion guides, and even video interviews with the case protagonists. Priya realized that professors don't just want the case; they want the full teaching package. That's something the big publishers also provide, but CaseSource does it at a lower cost. Luna: What's the most popular case on the platform? Lucas: It's a case about a failed startup in the food delivery space in India. The author is a professor at ISB in Hyderabad. It was rejected by Ivey because they said 'too many similar cases on food delivery exist.' But the case has a unique twist — it focuses on the operational failures rather than the funding story. It's been used in over 300 classrooms worldwide. Luna: So the rejection actually helped it find a more specific audience that appreciated that angle. Lucas: Right. And that's the meta-lesson. Priya says that if she had tried to make her case fit the template of what publishers wanted, she would have watered it down. The rejection forced her to stay true to the unique angle. And that unique angle was exactly what a niche audience needed. Luna: I think there's a broader takeaway here for any founder: sometimes the rejection isn't about the quality of your idea. It's about the fit with a particular distribution channel. Lucas: Exactly. And in Priya's case, she didn't just accept the rejection and move on. She analyzed why it happened, realized it was a structural issue in the industry, and built an alternative channel. That's the entrepreneurial instinct. Luna: So what's next for CaseSource? Are they going after the big publishers directly? Lucas: Priya says they're not trying to replace Harvard Business Publishing. They're going after the long tail of business education — the schools and programs that are not in the top tier. That's a huge market. And they're also experimenting with ai generated case drafts that professors can then customize. But that's still in beta. Luna: Interesting. I could see that being controversial in academic circles. Lucas: It is. Some professors worry that AI cases will lack the depth of real-world research. But Priya argues that AI can help generate the scaffolding, and then the professor adds the real-world data and analysis. It's a tool, not a replacement. Luna: That seems consistent with her approach — finding a way to make something that was previously exclusive more accessible. It's almost a pattern with her. Lucas: Definitely. And I think that's why the story resonates. It's not just about business cases. It's about the mindset of looking at rejection as information about the system, not about your idea. Luna: One last thing — what happened to Priya's original case about the Indian pharma company? Is it on CaseSource now? Lucas: It was the very first case on the platform. It's been licensed over 500 times. And it's still one of the top-selling cases in the healthcare category. So the case that three publishers said was 'too niche' turned out to have a very real audience. Luna: That's a nice full-circle moment. Sometimes the niche is exactly where the value is.