430: LearnWorlds with Panos Siozos

Panos Siozos is Co-Founder and CEO of LearnWorlds, an online course platform for creating, selling, and promoting online courses.

Chad talks with Panos about building e-learning platforms dating back to 1999, providing rich feature sets and catering to customers located in lots of different places, and deciding to stop bootstrapping and take investor money.

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Transcript:

CHAD: This is the Giants Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel and with me today is Panos Siozos, Co-Founder and CEO of LearnWorlds, an online course platform for creating, selling, and promoting online courses. Panos, thank you so much for joining me.

PANOS: Hi, Chad, and thanks for hosting me.

CHAD: You have been working on LearnWorlds for a while now. Where did the idea come from?

PANOS: I guess this has been brewing in our minds, mine and my co-founder's, for many years. We built our very first e-learning platform back in 1999, right after completing our studies in computer science. And we started postgraduate studies in educational technology. So in an academic setting, though, we had built many, many e-learning products, platforms, and authoring tools. And we were always exploring the state of the art.

And we always had it in the back of our minds the possibility and our obligation, I guess, to create a commercial product at some point and try to get the state of the art of e-learning that we were exploring in the academia and put it at the hands of actual trainers, and teachers, and give them the tools to create the best possible online courses that they could. That was always at the back of our minds.

And after completing our Ph.D. studies, after working in different jobs and different roles, we got back together at some point in 2012. And at that point, the conditions for e-learning were very, very mature. It was like bandwidth was in abundance. It was easy to create videos. It was easy to distribute videos. Cloud computing made it even easier to create software as a service platforms. And we understood that it was the perfect moment to come together, take our expertise, and try to put it in an amazing product that would be commercial and help all those people out there that wanted to create online courses.

CHAD: So I think you launched in 2014.

PANOS: Yes, we spent a couple of years. We started building the platform in 2012 in stealth mode. We were, I guess, traditional engineers. We had this build it, and they will come mentality.

CHAD: [chuckles]

PANOS: We had done almost like in the first year almost zero research on customer development and business development. We just had in mind to create the best possible platform that we could, and then obviously, people would just buy it because it's the best. Obviously, things don't always work that way. So we created the platform then we started talking with potential customers.

We launched commercially in 2014. And this is when we had our very first customers, people who had the online courses. They had the online content. They had audiences, but they didn't have a platform. It seemed a huge burden and a huge task to create an actual platform to deliver and sell their courses. And this is where we came in and started providing our tool as a software as a service solution.

CHAD: So in 2014, I'm sure that there were other competing products on the market. Today, there are probably even more. What makes LearnWorlds different from all of those or better from those?

PANOS: In 2014, it was very early, I guess, in online courses. Most people were going to marketplaces like Udemy or Coursera. It was very difficult back then to create your own online school, to own the website. We had people who were either using traditional clunky Jurassic; I would say, learning management systems.

CHAD: ...