LessonsUp

Problem: People don’t have access to the professional network they need to build their career or business.

Solution: An on-demand platform that puts you face-to-face with working professionals to build industry-specific skills, get career coaching, and grow your network.

Product: Live group lessons over video chat to learn skills in tech, marketing, and design directly from working professionals. Lesson content is curated to meet the needs of hiring managers and employers. Instructors welcome you into their network and offer valuable warm introductions and insights.

In five years LessonsUp will be integrated into everyone's work life. If you're struggling with a work scenario, drop into a lesson with a professional in your field. If you're a company, license LessonsUp to hire diverse talent from our pool of learners, and continue developing your current workforce.

Problem

• People don't have access to the people that they need to upskill and get ahead in their careers. This is bad because:
• Networking is one of the most important factors for staying competitive in the workforce.
• Human-centric skills like communication, social/emotional intelligence, and industry-specific decision-making, which you can best learn from interacting with people are the most important for the future of work (pew research).
• Skills needed in the workforce are constantly developing and changing. People need access to the most current skills and knowledge, not learning modules recorded 3 years ago.

Scale: TAM = the size of the entire workforce, or 160 million people. 87% of workers said building new skills is essential throughout their career (pew research). We're focusing on that percentage of the workforce actively trying to upskill on sites like Udemy and Coursera, or 35 million people (unique visitors to our top 5 competitor sites). We're targeting 5% of the market, or 1.7 million workers. 

• Learning marketplace where experienced professionals conduct live trainings that anyone can join.
• Join live lessons over video chat with experienced professionals.
• Seamlessly join from our lesson calendar and meet instructors and learners face-to-face.
• Professionals have 10+ years experience in their fields: tech, marketing, design, and career development
• Calendar includes career development sessions and live Q&A everyday to supplement lessons in hard-skill areas.
• Lessons range from 20, to 40, to 60 minutes so you can upskill at your convenience.
• It costs $200+ an hour to talk to mentors on ProductHunt with equivalent experience, LessonsUp costs $60 a month for unlimited access.

• Unemployed/job seekers who need to learn skills, make connections, and support navigating the job-search and interview process.
• Recent graduates who are on the job search for the first time. Vanessa came to us after 6 months of searching, growing desperate. A week later she had her first conversation with a tech founder in her dream field who gave her more introductions, resume advice, and a possible job.
• Business owners and entrepreneurs who need support to grow their business. Sabine, owner of Pizzeria Trasimeno in Memphis, TN, learned SEO tactics from Irah Nor, a 10+ year Brooklyn-based growth marketer, so that she could drive traffic to her website during COVID-19.
• Career pivoters. Leigh, a nerdy game developer in his late 30s has had a lot of challenges integrating into his industry, has been searching for a job for 6 months with the goal of getting into product. He attended career development sessions with a tech hiring manager of 10+ years, revamped his LinkedIn profile and job application assets, and a week later had his first call with a recruiter for a product management role. 

We're reimagining pathways by giving the workforce, with a focus on underrepresented populations, instant access to  professionals for networking and training. We license our platform to companies as an upskill solution and talent pool. 

We curate skills that meet the needs of the job market, and coach people to transition to new industries, like Camille Alfaro-Martell who went from banking to FinTech. We also focus on insider tools, like no-code and no-design, that give people instant leverage in their career.

Our career and business coaching sessions enable people to make informed decisions about which pathways are best suited to them.

3 full time

2 part time

We intentionally diversify our team, pulling from our diverse networks: Malinda built a diverse, blue collar community at iCracked; a bilingual/latino Customer Success org at Aura, and is lower socioeconomic herself (single mom in Stockton raising 3 kids, sharing house other families to make ends meet), as is Eric, and Sanyukta a WOC immigrant from India. 

Instructor community: 12 professionals: 8 women, 4 WOC; 4 men, 3 MOC.

HQ: Female CEO, WOC CTO, Male COO, WOC Marketing Associate

To continue we :

• Search for fantastic people that are less noticed in the talent market. We find they are the most committed, talented, and we can fill in the skills if needed.
• Track stats and keep to a firm commitment to building a diverse team and community.
• Draw from and partner with diverse communities, and collaborate with people who make the same commitment to serving underserved communities.

Incumbent upskill platforms removed human contact from learning models in order to build scalable solutions. Think Udemy, Udacity, MasterClass.

We're building human-contact into a scalable learning model accessible to everyone. Instructors sign up for a few time slots a week to do lessons. Subscribers join lessons from a calendar over Zoom. 

There are thousands of experienced professionals who want to give back and want to earn supplemental income in a meaningful way, or build thought leadership, develop talent for their own teams, or build clientele.

Instructors conduct trainings for 20, 40, or 60 minutes a few times a week. They answer questions and provide highly nuanced feedback based on real work experience. They offer warm introductions as make sense and support pathways to jobs or business opportunities.

In addition to our B2C model, we're building a robust learning marketplace  that allows companies to license LessonsUp for employee development.

Learners say: 

"You can't find this stuff on Google," 

"No one teaches this stuff in universities"

"I use Slack everyday and never in a million years thought about using it to network for my job search"

"I had a phone call with a tech founder in my dream industry after two weeks!"

"I got a recruiter email in my target industry for the first time after 8 months of job search!"

We have an operating proof of concept built with scrappy no-code tools, with plans to build a robust platform to support millions of people. Currently:

• Squarespace
• A google calendar embedded into squarespace
• Google forms for managing RSVPs
• A simple script that runs in G-Sheets to send email invites to people who RSVP to lessons
• Zoom for live lessons with links in the G-Cal to make it easy for people to join
• SuperPay for payments and subscriptions

It's absurdly simple. It's not scalable. It's MVP but it's already working!

This technology does not work. It functions today with almost no problems, meaning people subscribe, sign up for lessons, and attend lessons, but we are moving towards a robust marketplace platform that allows anyone to sign up to conduct live lessons, and allows anyone to subscribe and attend lessons. 

See product roadmap here.

See the model here. 

Inputs

• Video conference technology 

• Experienced working professionals

• Job seekers, people stuck in their career, new entrepreneurs, underrepresented populations

Activities

• Lessons curated to meet the needs of today’s job market

• Topics developed in collaboration with top professionals, hiring managers, organizations

• Career and business coaching

Outputs

• Traditionally marginalized populations are equally as skilled and well connected as traditionally privileged populations. 

• Big tech and leading Fortune 500 companies use our community as a talent pool to develop more innovative products that meet the needs of a diverse population, and to meet their own diversity goals.

• Marginalized populations have equal representation in positions of power

• Why will companies participate? They’re desperate for a solution. From 2014-2019 Facebook, Google, in spite of efforts to diversity, made almost no progress. In 2019 Facebook had the same share of black and Latinx employees in technical roles as it did in 2014, 1 and 3% respectively. Facebok Diversity report.

Outcomes

As we democratize access to powerful networks, underrepresented populations, like women and people of color, or lower socioeconomic background, will have equal access to lucrative jobs and business opportunities. They have the skills necessary to get in the door, and know the language and processes, or “culture” that it takes to break into and succeed in positions of influence.

Impact

Greater representation of women and minorities in positions of power. Business decisions that impact millions of people will be made with diverse voices at the decision-making table. Discriminating policies and practices in business will become more inclusive. As access to power is equalized we will see less poverty, less crime and violence, and less drug use - all associated with populations chronically oppressed. 

Risks

The digital divide, those who have access to internet and basic devices to stay connected, is at risk of growing even worse. As LessonsUp helps promote marginalized classes into more powerful and lucrative positions, we will develop new models to continue reaching those most in need.

Goal in the next year is to achieve product-market fit. We're building a robust marketplace platform based on the success of our proof of concept.

Our 5 year plan is to integrate into everyone's work surface. We'll do this by partnering with companies, and licensing our platform to companies as an internal or external training platform to meet employee needs. In turn, to continue scaling our instructor community, employees at these companies who are qualified will conduct lessons. 

The platform acts as:

 - upskill and reskill solution for organizations or individual consumers

- thought leadership and leadership platform for experienced professionals

- talent platform for companies

- data and analytics resource for companies regarding their internal training needs and results, as well as training needs and trends in the greater workforce

Funds needed for next year (product-market fit)

• Design team: build sleek platform that tech and fortune 500 companies trust
• Engineering: build a solution that supports thousands of users
• Head of Product: translate user features into roadmaps for design and engineering
• Marketing: test messaging and value propositions. We have proof on a small scale, but need budget to run campaigns. 
• Operations: Hubspot, Sharetribe, Stripe, and so on.

Resources for 5 years (scale to household name)

Get Buy-in from stakeholders: We need the support of influencers in training/education etc to evangelize our vision. If they tell leading companies to trust us, we'll achieve mass adoption. We aren't doing this for the sake of growth, but because feedback from key stakeholders helps us shape a solution. Access to key stakeholders is partly why we're participating in MIT Solve.

Results: Learners get jobs

• Relationship-building with organizations to develop paths to jobs, likely reimagining hiring processes to rely less on interviews and more on apprenticeship, skills, results achieved.
• Learners: Need to design a product that motivates them and incentivizes them to move forward in their work life. Is it dashboards that show skills related to salary? Instructors based on potential warm introductions in their target industry? 
• Professionals: Need to design our product to motivate and incentivize professionals to create the best possible learning experiences. Are they motivated based on jobs filled by people who take their classes? Or  appreciation from job seekers? Recognition at their own company? Access to mentorship?

• Funds for year one: 
  • apply for grants, crowdfunding, raise angel or seed round, or get teams to work for free or for equity 
  • Continue bootstrapping, iterating more slowly on our scrappy solution. I've joined CEOX and other communities to get support to make the most impactful product decisions at this early stage where we have little to no funding
• Five year plan:
  • Buy-in from stakeholders: We're networking with our most influential contacts to get introductions to key stakeholders. Eric (COO) has strong ties to academic and EdTech networks.
  • Relationships with organizations/companies: We plan to pilot with a few key organizations who's founders are in our network to build trust, as well as conduct user-research.
  • Learners and professionals: ongoing user-research and product tests to identify needs and fulfill them.

External to our platform:

• Current number of open jobs (can be thru Indeed, Greenhouse.io, Lever, or other recruiting hiring platforms) by:
  • Title
  • Salary
  • Top 3 required skills 
  • Length of time open
• Candidates rejected per job opportunity by:
  • Title
  • Salary
  • Top 3 required skills 
  • Length of time to fill
  • Rejection reason

Internal:

• New job interviews per subscriber
• Jobs filled per subscriber

n/a

We're uniquely suited, from our personal experiences and plights, and combined 25+ years experience in tech and education, to fulfill our vision. 

Malinda: Started as a teacher and was recruited into tech. She spent the last ten years building growth & operations teams at early to mid stage startups: scaled on-demand workforce from 250-2500 @iCracked; scaled bilingual customer success org from 10-250+ @Aura; built contributor community from 0-350 @Almanac.io. 

Sanyukta: Originally from India, 18+ years in Sr. engineering roles @Intel, @Boeing, startups. M.S Computer and Electrical engineering, Co-founded a group to support local seniors during COVID-19. Designed and coded platform to manage 70+ volunteers. Creating a platform to support elders and families to connect via meaningful social interactions. 2019 Graduate and 2020 Panel member in Univ of Washington, Women Entrepreneurial Leadership Program.

Eric: Eric, the only one in his immediate family to graduate college, received his B.A. from Harvard University at age 32, then attained advanced degrees in cultural anthropology, and library and information science. He ran the test-prep program for Huntington Learning Center in St. Louis, became an assistant professor and faculty librarian at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, and spent 6 years as Director of Learning Tools @VarsityTutors, where he led a team that developed over 200,000 free web-based resources for students.

• Rebound Asia: Developing workshops to help women in Malaysia get jobs or build businesses; provide trainers from LessonsUp to do trainings with Rebound programs, provide access to lessons at LessonsUp
• ConnectingTalents: Access to technical upskill sessions for job seekers in exchange for referring our community to ConnectingTalent for job opportunities
• SF Tech Council: Lessons in technology such as Excel, email, digital literacy for older adults participating in programs to help them build skills 
• Heights Business Incubator - Alamo Heights High School, San Antonio; conducting trainings with high schoolers in startup / business operations with a focus on marketing

B2C model

• $60/month subscription for access to unlimited lessons
• $12/single lesson
• Instructors are currently paid $25-$50 per lesson - to make this work right now the majority of lessons are conducted by LessonsUp leadership 
• 9 subscribers; 60 total paying customers; 400 total persons who have participated in lesson events

B2B model - under development

• Monthly license determined by total number of participating employees, OR total number of jobs to be filled for the year

Both our subscription model and/or platform licensing model are sustainable revenue solutions that cover costs and yield high margins. 

We can license the platform to companies and engage their qualified workforce to conduct upskill sessions to build our supply of instructors. Under this model we would not pay instructors, but work with companies to provide other incentives internally, as well as thought leadership externally. Conducting a few lessons a week thru our platform will be a pathway for people in the workforce to further advance their careers and build recognition.

Revenue: $2,800 to date generated by selling lessons and subscriptions

$100,000 angel round, equity

• $1,000-$10,000/month depending on how much we raise, or how much revenue we generate, which will determine what we can spend on team, product, and marketing

The organizations and judges involved in this challenge are connected to communities and organizations that we can benefit from, and can in turn benefit from LessonsUp. 

We're interested in partnering with organizations supporting job seekers or new business owners, and as we learn more about needs in the communities you support, we're happy to recruit professionals in appropriate skill areas and design appropriate training sessions. Our sessions range from 20 to 40 to 60 minutes to make it convenient for anyone to upskill and network.

We'd like mentorship or advisors to support our fundraising needs, strategy for partnership development with educational communities and employers, and marketing and exposure.

• Investors: Most important partnership for us to achieve Product-Market Fit. We launched B2C subscription in mid-Sept 2020 and by mid Nov have 9 subscribers, zero marketing budget, clunky platform. 
• Funnel: -> 200 people visit event page for a lesson, -> 20/200 people pay $12 to attend and convert to paid customers -> 1/20 people who attend converts to a monthly subscriber. Generates $240 revenue, $55 MRR from one event.
• Challenge: To get 200 people to our event page we post in social media, but reach is limited. 
• IF we had marketing budget: We do 25 lesson events a week. If we could market all of them and achieve a similar conversion rate, even if we only generated 200 views per event, that would be 25 new subscribers a week. Our goal would be 1,000 visitors to each event page, yielding 100 attendees, 10 subscribers from each event.

Isa Ellis: We'd love to explore partnerships with organizations she supports through the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, and have female black and latina instructors

Betsy Edasery: As we seek funds we seek to partner with investors that share our mission, such as The Workers Lab.

Jason Green: SkillSmart could be a valuable partnership to provide job opportunities for our subscribers. 

Freada Kapor Klein - big yes to having Freada invest in a seed round, exactly who we're looking to partner with

Alanna Hughes: Would love to talk strategy on building hiring pipelines w/ Fortune 500 Companies.

Dr. Angela Jackson: potential funding partner, most especially interested in learnings from the Global Language Project. We've been working with Rebound Asia on trainings for female job seekers/new business owners in Malaysia.

Sonali Joshi: Interested in discussing partnerships with Cell-Ed

Carrie Morgridge: Invaluable to us as an advisor/mentor in developing effective educational experiences and communities

Dr. Chris Meyer: would love to find out if there are members of Coeur d’Alene Tribe that we can support

Tonja Mettlach: we'd love to partner and act as an additional training and networking resource for apprentices/job seekers. We're happy to learn more about needs and develop trainings to meet them. 

Dr. Becky Takeda-Tinker: We'd love to support students and alumni with job-ready training sessions, training with industry experts, coaching and mentorship to develop job opportunities, warm introductions from professionals in our instructor community

Stephen Yadzinski

JFFLabs sounds like a great investor for us, we'd love to chat.