Life Design

Up to 68% of millennials do not feel passion about their productive lives (either their jobs or what the are studying). Furthermore, we believe this lack of connection to a purpose has a direct impact on rates of access and drop out to higher education in Colombia, Latin America, and the world. In fact, Colombia has one of the lowest inscription rates for higher ed (51%) and one of the highest drop out rates in the region (46%, 36% in the first year alone).

We have designed a platform based on the japanese concept for life purpose (ikigai) that helps people recognize and work upon their life purpose based on what their good at, what they like, how they want to impact the world and how they can get paid. With this initial assesment, our users can explore and design their lives. We also have modules for schools and universities.

At a time where access to education is facing its most relevant challenges in the last few decades in Latin America, geting to choose your education and career path connecting with a life purpose is paramount in order to respond to a new world full of volatility, uncertainty and constant changes. 

We have designed our platform to respond to this new world as a constant companion to make decisions based on your life purpose in a lifelong learning world. Where career decisions need to be made constantly. In fact, our tools developed for universities and schools align to provide each user a better, efficient and easy way to receive proper  vocational orientation to which most of Latin Americans have not access as of this day. In Colombia there is about one orientator for every 700 families. To try and make this work through manual labor is impossible.

As mentioned before, more than two thirds of a whole generation feels disconnected from their career decisions (68%), which is a tragedy on many levels: personal and comunal, economical and on our youth mental health. We aim to create a world with more and more people connected to a purpose.

Life Design is an online platform that offer users an easy and friendly way to make a self-reflecting process in order to improve self knowledge, thus providing them with results in terms of knowledge areas with which they can develop a life purpose. 

After an initial registration (free for all users), the platform presents a set of questionaires inquiring each user about talents, tastes and how they want to impact the world on the long term (specifically which SDG's they want to support through their lives). At this point, each user receives, in real time, a report with results about each of this steps and three knowledge areas that our AI algorithm provide as options for this particular user to investigate and build upon to make better educational decisions. We offer, also, additional modules for each user to research each knowledge area: registered programs, videos and blogs, and curated courses that they can save as favorites for any time.

For schools, we developed a specific module that helps orientation professionals to carru out their entire process through our platform, including interacting with each student through tasks, statistics and analysis. This product has a cost. 

There are 53 million youngsters in the Latin American education system between 12 and 19 years old. This are our main potential users. As mentioned, this population is severely underserved in terms of having a complete process of socio vocational orientation during the last years of medium education. There is close to 1 orientation professional per every 700 families, it is noteworthy that this person is also in charge of other psycological support, not only vocational orientation.

As such, we developed a tool that helps each user to do this process for themselves if necessary, offering our platform for free on our website www.lifedesignglobal.com. Furthermore, we develop a tool for orientation professionals that helps them make a more efficient use of their time through offering the power of technology for them to decide when and where to deploy the efforts in a way that serves better their students. This product has been developed after interviewing over a hundred professionals throughout Latin America and identifying which where their main needs as orientators. 

We aim to provide a tool that works for the future of education: lifelong learning, short courses, different professional carreers. As such, we believe that having a life purpose is a key ingredient in actually succeding when trying to get more people to higher education, getting into the labor market, and, in general, have more fulfilling and complete lives. 

We were registered as a company in Colombia on October of 2019, as of today, we have over 20 thousand users from various countries in Latin America, the US and Spain. Most of them, of course, from Colombia. Our clients include some of the largest and better recognized education organizations in Colombia: Universidad de Los Andes, Universidad Javeriana, Areandina, Colegio Claretiano, Orientarte, GPAC.

Our main business model so far has been to offer higher education institution our platform as a software as a service to support their own strategies for scouting and marketing of their programs. We have been integral parts of different types of approaches (visiting schools, part of an online journey, etc.). 

We recently pivoted towards high schools and orientation professional companies as we find that this market is closer to our vision about the future and also focuses on providing each student with the best tools available.

We use cutting edge technologies to serve individuals: machine learning to the process of self knowledge and finding a life purpose. We do believe we have a distinct and innovative solution as there are not available in the market tools that includes a larger impact in the world scenario, as we have through the Sustainable Development Goals.

Also, orientation tools provided in the market are, mostly, a set of tests that do provide a large amount of information but that don't try to make this process easier and more efficient as a whole. We give them an all around platform where they can interact and develop the whole orientation process in one place, offering the chance to assess where they can focus their efforts.

Our goal is to connect our users to a wider range of possibilities when deciding which are the next steps they will take in terms of education and carreer, always remaining true to a life purpose that they can continuously build and review in Life Design.

Life Design collects information from the user that allows us to process it and over which a previously trained algorithm executes. Its main objective is to identify knowledge areas kindred to each authenticated user. To achieve this, Life Design uses open source languages and technologies within its architecture (PostgreSQL for storage and data processing, Vue, a JavaScript framework as the Front End language, Python as the Back End language) all of these developed over a microservices architecture that allows a scalable development in line with our long term goals as a company.

We share two papers related to our technology framework.

The first related to architecture based on micro services: https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.unal.edu.co/science/article/pii/S0164121221001114

The second related to machine learning algorithms with supervised learning: https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.unal.edu.co/science/article/pii/S0010482521004662

The main risk is data processing of minors in Colombia and the region, with some of the most robust legal framework protecting them. We have been accompanied by two law firms expert on this matters to be completely covered on legal terms whem acquiring and processing this information.

We currently have 20.638 users in Life Design. We expect to close 2022 with over 150 thousand users and in five years have over 2 million users.

We are looking to grow in terms of users as fast as possible, mainly through our clients and allies. As mentioned, schools, orientation companies and universities are our clients, through them we scale our own growth. We are currently negotiating an alliance with one of the largest Pre-ifces companies in Colombia (pre-icfes is a series of preparation tests and courses in order to present the equivalent of the SAT's in the US for Colombia). This company has access to more than 4 thousand schools in Colombia, and our alliance aims to create a joint product that will be offered to this schools plus over 12 thousand additional schools in Latin America to which they are developing markets with their own allies.

Users: 20.638

Users in 2020: 9.868

Users of low income level (socio economic strata 1, 2 and 3): 84,88%

Users with ikigai results (knowledge areas): 70,8%

6 full time employees including 4 co founders.

We have a complementary team that has achieved a lot over the past two years. We were recognized by Holon IQ as one of the 100 most innovative EdTech companies in Latin America in 2020 and by Forbes-Colombia as one of the best 100 start ups in the country.

Yeny Téllez, our Head of Operations, is a Project Manager that has extensive experience on education projects. She has been working for over seven years with Ángel Rodríguez, our CTO, who is a Computer Scientist specialized in Data Science. David Aponte, Head of Growth, has had a successful career as commercial director for public/private companies. He knows Felipe Rojas, CEO of Life Design, since 2011, who has had various leadership roles on marketing and investment attraction companies. Maria Leal, our Head of Innovation, has over 15 years of experience in public policy for socio vocational orientation. She was one of the main brains behind Colombia's public policy on this matter as she worked in the Ministry of Education prior joining Life Design.

We always knew that the same level of diversity and inclusivity we wanted from the users of Life Design had to be reflected on the company itself. Two of the 5 process leaders are women. Furthermore, all of the leadership positions in Life Design come from various backgrounds and upbringings which have given us a wide view and the necesary imput to develop a tool well adjusted to different publics.

Àngel and Yeny studied in the best public universities in Colombia, Felipe, Maria Clara and David had the opportunity to study in two of the best private universities in the country. We grew up in different cities and have had very different working experiences in the past. 

María Clara is also an expert on matters of diversity and inclusivity, so she has been in charge of developing our strategies as a company to ensure the respect of these principles.

We would greatly benefit by the visibility, support and financial prize of the TPrize Challenge. Furthermore, we believe in creating an ecosystem that aims to transform education and lives for the better, and this platform allows us to do so and network with companies and potential allies.

We are still finding our fit in order to reach our clients as fast as possible. We know there is a latent need by orientation professionals, however, processes with schools and higher education institutions are often slow and complicated.