Corsidia

Executive Summary

Corsidia is an Italian course-discovery marketplace that makes money by selling qualified visits to vetted training providers. The mechanism behind its success is a three-part arbitrage. First, it owns the long tail of Italian local education search: programmatic landing pages shaped as "corsi di X a Y" (courses of X in city Y) capture buying-intent traffic that global marketplaces like Udemy structurally ignore and that small training schools cannot rank for themselves. Second, it inverted the directory business model: instead of listing every provider willing to pay, it rejects, on its own account, more than two in three applicants, which converts curation from an editorial cost into the product itself and into a trust signal that raises lead quality and provider willingness to pay. Third, it prices like a utility, not a SaaS: providers prepay a credit wallet and set their own cost per visit (CPV), so there is no subscription to churn from, no renewal negotiation, and the platform captures budget exactly in proportion to delivered demand. The local TrustMRR Stripe history shows what this compounds into: $2.86M cumulative gross charges since October 2017, gross volume of $909K in 2025 (up 68% from $542K in 2024), and a rising average charge size, from $189 in 2022 to $317 in 2025, which is the signature of providers topping up larger wallets as trust grows.¹

The core lever is that curation, normally a cost center, is run here as the monetization engine: scarcity of approved slots is what makes a visit worth paying for.

What this teardown is not: a recurring-revenue story. Corsidia's Stripe history is prepaid charge volume, not subscription MRR, and no source verifies recurring contracts. Third-party aggregators that label the trailing 30 days as "MRR" are mislabeling charge volume. That distinction shapes the entire fragility analysis in Part 3.