Disrupt by being fast and brave - Lula de León (Leemons)
Hear from startup founder Lula on how she is building an open-source Learning Experience Platform that is pushing the traditional LMS/LXP industry players.
The Guest
We know a lot about a person, to whom we want to sell a T-shirt. But, we don't know anything about a person who wants to learn something new.
Lula de León is a designer, teacher, entrepreneur and mother. She founded her first strategic design and UX services company in 2007 working for big projects in banking, travel, ecommerce. In 2018, she invested in Woonivers, a travel tech where she learnt a lot about the world of startups.
After having been ill with long COVID for a year and a half, in 2021 she left her company and founded Leemons, a platform to digitalise learning processes (LMS/LXP) based on data-driven learning. In this startup Lula has poured all her experience as a designer, her vocation for training and her passion for what technology can do to improve people's lives. Leemons has just closed its third seed investment round for 1.5 million euros and will launch the SaaS version of the product at the end of January.
Company profile
Segment: K-12, Higher education & Corporate education
Business model: B2B & B2G
Year started: 2021
Funding: Seed
Location: Madrid, Spain
Listen to the story
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👓 Can’t listen? Read the full transcript here or see more below
Episode summary
In this episode, Lula, founder of Leemons, shares her journey of building a cutting-edge learning platform on a software as a service model.
Lula talks about the ups and downs of developing Leemons from scratch, going open source, scaling the product, and pivoting to a SaaS model.
She highlights the importance of AI in education, helping in predictive analytics and data-driven decision making.
Lula candidly shares about the pressures of entrepreneurship, the importance of having a supportive community, and maintaining mental health.
She ends the episode announcing the successful close of a €1.5 million funding round for Leemons.
Extracts
The lack of innovation in the LMS market and opportunity
And then I entered education technology, and I thought, what, what is happening in the LMS or in LXP technology? That the companies that are developing this kind of software for educational centers don't need to innovate at the same level that the e-commerce, travel banking industries do. And I thought that I have the team, I have the experience, and I have maybe a vision that comes from other industries. And then I thought, why not.
Speed and disruption
When you are trying to disrupt… You need to be faster. You need to, I don't want to say smart, you need to be brave, be brave to try things that the rest of the industry is not trying to do.
But, there are a lot of startups that are trying so hard, that have great products and they are now in danger of closing because the market is difficult and the moment is very complicated. So even though you have a secret sauce, you need to be prepared always to move, move forward because things are not easy, not easy in this industry.
Measuring impact
We are social impact, so our impact is measured in the amount of help that we provide to the teachers in their lives, in their everyday work.
Coupled with diversity, for example, and trying to reduce the amount of bureaucracy that they manage every day. When it comes to relate these KPIs with the business; with the number of teachers that are active in the platform and then that are using the features that have to do with metrics with these pain points.
AI in education
There is a lot of over-promising, and I think that when we see that education in terms of technology is an old fashioned area, they have a low level of digitization.
We cannot attack with AI that makes a 100% substitution of the teachers. To us teachers, teachers are the core of the learning processes. So in this case, AI is a co-pilot for the teachers, and the approach of Leemons is a co-pilot for teachers. Virtual tutors, for students, have to be more effective, more efficient. And to help the students read the data about the things where they need more help.
We're not going to present a crazy thing about AI like you having a virtual person that is talking or acting as a teacher. I think that this is not useful at all and AI needs to be in the context of learning and teaching processes in small pieces and with small changes because the user is not prepared for a crazy AI doing crazy things.
Mental health and support
It's the hardest work that I have ever done and I've been working for 30 years of my life. The hardest work. You are brave. If you are here and you have a company that you are leading you are smart for sure. Probably you are brilliant.
Don't be afraid to fail. This is not going to be your last project. So do your best. And if everything fails, your project is not doomed. And this is the moment when you can exhale and say, okay, I'm going to do my best. I'm going to be as engaged with this project as I can. But your health, your mental health is first of all. Everything is going to be okay.
What’s new in the Garage?
Happy New Year (as we’re still in January)! Hope that the year has started with exciting projects and opportunities 💪
We wanted to take the opportunity to thank all of you for 2023 where we had 5 in-person Meetups in London, Paris and Oslo, ran 15 virtual members-only Founder Huddles, opened our internal newsletter to everyone through Substack, beta tested a new matchmaking service based on skills & needs and got 500 new LinkedIn followers 🎉
What’s in store for 2024? Stay subscribed and you will soon find out. In the meantime, we’re at BETT in London this week to meet the ecosystem and many of you friends 🇬🇧
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That was all for now. Take care until next time.
Frank Albert & the EdTech Garage crew