Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Varun Balsara, Co-founder of Let’s Level Up, a cohort-based learning platform based in the UK.
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Here’s what Let’s Level Up is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
There are some resources on how to build pre-recorded courses for platforms such as Udemy, but none teach you how to build cohort-based courses and learning communities. Most solutions simply provide the backend technology to host and manage courses. However, pre-recorded courses have a dropout rate of around 97% making them very ineffective for actual learning. Community is becoming significantly more important than content, but even those companies that are focussing on teaching cohort-based learning do this through webinars and pre-recorded videos.
The Solution:
Let’s Level Up is a full-stack platform for cohort-based learning communities. Creators can use it to learn and build their courses and learning communities and the platform will handle all the backend and administrative work, while learners can use the platform to find courses and creators they want to learn from. Unlike most platforms that only provide the technology to manage courses/communities, our platform provides continuous feedback and suggestions for instructors to build, market, sell, deliver and scale their learning communities.
The Team:
The team bring a strong industry-market-fit. We are three co-founders who have worked together for 3 years now. Previously, we built an Apple Top 20 Podcast called The Human Entrepreneur and went on to run a cohort-based learning community teaching this skillset. Hence, we understand the knowledge creator space very well. For Let’s Level Up, I focus on business development, Luke handles most of the operations and instructor community, and Samara is building the product and technology. We also have two more people working with Samara on the technology
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
I’ve been a podcaster for a while now, and as soon as our podcast started taking off, people started reaching out to us asking how we did it. We decided we wanted to create a course to teach other people how to start a podcast. We looked at the options available, and pretty quickly knew we didn’t want to create a pre-recorded course, mainly because they lack the community elements which are fundamental to engagement and learning (have >90% drop out rates). After further research, we came across cohort-based courses, with fixed start and end dates and a specific emphasis on community and live learning, but realised there was nobody really teaching how to build these courses.
We spoke to a lot of other creators in our community to see whether they had faced the same issue, and it turns out many of them had and were very interested in building a cohort-based course, but didn’t have the time or know-how to do so. So, we decided to solve this problem.
Our product now takes individuals on a journey helping them from start to finish to build their cohort-based learning community. The platform is filled with intelligent recommendations that enable creators to build their courses. We also provide the entire backend tooling solution for the course.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
Firstly, online education still doesn’t work very efficiently, and the entire education system moving online during the pandemic proved this even more. Additionally, there is an ever-increasing need for people to get upskilled to match the technological advances in society. About 54% of the workforce will need to be upskilled by 2030. There are not enough universities in the world to match this demand, and pre-recorded online courses are often already outdated by the time they are finally released. The only solution to this will be cohort-based learning, allowing people to learn from topic experts and community engagement.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
I’m very proud of the onboarding process we’ve built for our platform. We built a four-week accelerator, essentially a cohort-based course, teaching people how to make the best of our platform, and we recently had another cohort graduate. Most of the people coming onto our platform are being referred and most marketing is word of mouth, which is a huge success for us. It speaks to the fact that the problem we’re solving is very real.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
Patience has been a big problem for me. I always want things to be fast, and in that process, I end up irritating a few people. Learning to better manage this, along with the everyday anxieties of the job is a consistent challenge. To work on this I am trying to meditate more often to practice patience. We also practice radical honesty, so my team members will tell me if they are particularly bothered by something.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
What you start with will never be what you end up with. The fundamental premise of a startup is that you are building on a hypothesis that you are testing, and so you need to be accepting of the fact that that hypothesis will either be falsified or change over time. Going in with this mindset would have been helpful.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Competition is quite overrated and people place too much emphasis on it. Don’t shy away from a market because it is crowded. Instead, focus on your product and the customers you are serving because they are the ones who will guide you and stay with you. In the same nature, understand that the first mover advantage is overhyped. Usually, it’s the second and third movers who win more because they can learn from the first movers’ mistakes.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Don’t fixate too much on fundraising. It’s very easy to get stuck in the noise of people fundraising and feel like you aren’t succeeding with your startup if you aren’t raising money. Try to not compare yourself to others. Disable the notifications. Do what you need to do to focus on the things that are working for you.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Focus on solving the problem you’re trying to solve in the simplest way possible. Use anything but code to build your first MVP, test it, see if it works, and only then write any code to start the first technical MVP. For most startups, technology helps scale your value proposition, it is an enabler, not the solution itself.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
The creators we work with inspire me all the time. We’re a new company, and they have put their faith in us, and I get to learn from them every day.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Amazon Unbound - Brad Stone
Shoe Dog - Phil Knight
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries