Today’s Guest

Panos Siozos is the founder of Learn Worlds (online course platform).

This is the 149th session of Smart Brand Marketing.

MY BIGGEST TAKEAWAY:

Research shows that people snooze after 12 minutes. 6-10 minute modules work best.

TOPICS DISCUSSED

• The beginning


• Why a course platform


• Target audience


• Making teachers better


• Customer success


• Acquisition methods


• Doing it the hard way


• Momentum


• The hosting solution

RESOURCES

• Twitter Profile


• List of top online course platforms

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, guys, we’re back with another episode of Smart Brand Marketing today with me, I have Panos, who is the founder of Learn Worlds. It’s an online course platform. And the goal here, for the most part, is to put a face to a platform, which maybe you’re familiar with, maybe you’re not. But I always think it’s like we had the founder of Thinkific Before and then a couple other people. And I think it’s always nice that, you know, there’s someone real behind it.

Thanks, Tom. Great to be here. Yeah. So when I looked at your website, like, I just got into it because I looked at the pricing. Right. And it was interesting because you had a couple different packages. Right. And the most popular one was for multiple creators. Right. Like most platforms will go after just one consultant, one expert. But yours was like the most popular was seemed like almost like you build a school on your platform.

So my initial question would be, you know, other than, you know, why you got into it, who are you actually going after with this platform? Yes, well, the other ideal customers are those that already have an audience and already have the content, so usually they are professional trainers or training organizations, businesses that already have a clientele of trainer of students and huge audiences. So they require something big. They require a platform that is powerful, versatile, that allows them to upload easily all their their content and start selling right away.

So effectively, we have some multimillion dollar businesses of the role that run completely on unleveled. So you can run an entire online school, an entire academy, and serve all the way from two hundred to two hundred thousand students with just one platform.

Yeah, that’s what sort of made me wonder about it. Right, because one of the most popular package, when it’s 20 instructors, that is much bigger than what I see offered on those platforms. Like most, there’s just one instructor, one on admin. So this seems like more targeted towards like coaching groups or companies, you know, and I wonder why you chose to really focus on that.

It’s it’s not precisely the way you position it, because that’s just one of the offerings that we have in our total package. So indeed, some people take this package because they have multiple instructors or in certain cases, there are folks that are building marketplaces. So they’re bringing in other instructors and they’re sharing the audiences and they’re also sharing the revenue. So that’s a new thing. And we’ve seen a great increase in that, especially under covid people like, let’s say, different coaches or fitness instructors or trainers that teach different complementary fields that were coming, joining forces, creating an online school and bringing in all their content.

So that’s why they needed more licenses so that they can have multiple instructors. But that’s just one of the extra things, additional things that we have in our total package, in our most popular package. There are other things that are a bit more high end. And in fact, we are the only ones offering something like that, such as the interactive video. That’s an amazing tool. It’s a cloud based tool where you can just upload your traditional linear videos and sometimes even boring.

We’re all guilty of that, sometimes creating like boring instructional videos. And you can give them a totally second life. So you can add on the fly, you can add titles, you can add subtitles, you can add pointers. You cannot we automatically create transcripts of the videos. And one of the most exciting things, and that’s my personal favorite. In the end, our customers really love it is the possibility of creating quizzes on top of your videos.

So imagine you have a scenario where you’re explaining how to do a fitness exercise or you’re explaining how to use certain equipment or how to do something on the software. So the video poses a question, pops up like a multiple choice question, and based on the user’s answer, they get different feedback or they even get sent forward or backward in the video where the right answer exists. So that’s a super paradigm change. Instead of having passing users, passive students that just go through the video and sometimes, I don’t know, fall asleep or something, you have a video that is engaging, interactive.

It asks you to do stuff on the video. So that’s huge we see huge user engagement and also user satisfaction with something like that. So our top package has a combination of features. And indeed, one of that is for larger schools or for schools that have lots of content and they have multiple instructors and they need that. In other cases, it can be just a small team like one or two guys, but they need the premium features, like the interactive video.

Yes, it’s interesting, I’ve been seeing of movement from one of the top creators, right, because there’s, you know, different segments. You have the new people and the more established into exactly what you’re saying and to into building brands and marketplaces and getting other instructors under them. So this is very interesting that you’re actually going after those more advanced users, which I really like. Also, why did you decide to go after this market? You know, because the online course space, it’s definitely growing, but you do have quite a bit of competition with the platforms.

Yes, indeed. I have to say that we have been preparing for years to get onto this path as a team.

We are three co-founders and we have a very strong background in e-learning. We have studied e-learning extensively and we have studied computer science and all of us did postgraduate studies in e-learning. So the two of the three co-founders have these in the learning. And we’ve been working in this space for about 20 years. Initially, we were just researchers. We were just seeing what is the state of the art of learning. And we were creating experimental platforms, doing experiments with students and publishing like in scientific journals.

That’s all we did for the I guess for the first eight, 10 years. But at some point and we didn’t have any entrepreneurial background, we didn’t have any idea. Some of our professors came to us and say, OK, that’s amazing platform that you built here. You could be selling that. But we always said it’s OK, we’ll just have another idea, will publish another paper. And we were happy about that role. But after we went out into the industry and started working in different projects and research projects and stuff like that, we showed that there was a huge gap in what was the actual state of learning that the actual platforms that people were able to use in the businesses and individuals.

And I have to say that we were allowed to say so. We were pissed off by the state of learning, by the kind of platforms that people were using that was so far behind the things that we were doing in the academia, the state of the art that we had. So we thought that we could do better. We knew that we could do better. We knew that we could take all the things that we’ve learned, how you can increase user engagement and participation, how you can increase user satisfaction.

And that’s what we started building into the language platform. So that was a long process. It took us a couple of years to create our super first prototype and to be satisfied with what we had in other hands before putting it out to customers. And in 2014, we officially launched. We had some great input by customers that wanted to use that. So in 2014, we started selling the platform. We incorporated a business and started selling the platform.

But still after that, we also had to learn lots of things about marketing. So I would say in terms of the competition and comparing to the competition, we are the only ones who deeply know e-learning other businesses. We have tremendous respect for them. They have created some great e-commerce products, helping you to sell courses and videos. But in terms of the kind of content and the kind of user experience that you are able to cre