How do you digitize implicit knowledge? - Michal Hudeček (Levebee)
In this episode we talk with Michal Hudeček the CEO of Levebee (K-12), a company making learning easier, more effective and fun for kids in math, reading and languages.
The Guest
It's important to be able to get it to the users quickly. This is why we try to have direct contact with the teachers and the students and to build the brand, to be trusted and have the expertise to build on.
Meet Michal Hudeček who is the CEO of Levebee and a serial entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience in online business. Levebee makes learning easier, more effective and fun for kids in areas such as math, reading and languages. His background combines deep technical knowledge with business skills proven by multiple exits.
Check out his book recommendations for how to practically apply educational research:
Company profile
Segment: Pre-K & K-12
Business model: B2C & B2G
Markets: Europe
Reach: 500 schools and 400k students (in app)
Year started: 2014
Funding: Bootstrapped
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
Listen to the story
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Episode summary
Levebee is an app that helps all kids learn math, including those with special education needs or from disadvantaged backgrounds. The app digitizes math interventions, including learning materials and pedagogy.
Starting from the early math concepts is crucial for effectively teaching all students, especially those with special education needs.
Levebee has more than 500 schools on an annual subscription and is financially sustainable.
The biggest challenge in the go-to-market strategy is the fragmentation of educational markets and the need to persuade administrators. The main challenge for Levebee is understanding and digitizing the implicit knowledge and decision-making processes of teachers.
The goal of Levebee is to build a personalized digital math teacher by combining technology, research, and pedagogy.
Support from Vodafone Foundation and participation in the Impact EdTech Accelerator have been beneficial for Levebee.
Understanding pedagogical research and focusing on the educational value is important for EdTech startups. Identifying the real problem and pain points in education helps startups make informed decisions and prioritize effectively.
Extracts
Go to market strategy
Especially in Europe, the biggest challenge is the fragmentation of the educational markets. And they are much more different than than I imagined before.
We come from the Czech Republic, so the schools here are very independent. I think the independency index is one of the highest in the world. It's on one side a problem for the government to enforce any kind of policies, which is troublesome in some areas, but for us, it allowed us to go from the bottom. So we could really persuade the teachers and show them; if the app is helping the kids, then they can just go to the headmaster and they will buy it.
But in most of the other countries this is not the case. You have to go through the municipalities or administrations. The schools don't really buy software themselves. It's usually somehow centralized. And that means for us that we are talking to completely different people. We have to persuade the administrators, not the teachers.
Discovering the implicit knowledge of teachers
There are a lot of other variables than just the knowledge that the teacher is monitoring, and simply we don't have the data for that. We are not able right now to measure how tired the child is, or what’s their self esteem. The teacher can see that the child may be on the brink of crying, which might happen in the special education environment.
We just had a recording last week with a child that was in the fourth grade and didn't really understand concepts from the first grade. But he knew that it is first grade curriculum, so when he failed at that, he was just starting to cry because he knew it's something he was supposed to know.
So, my colleague actually had to intentionally kind of break the methodology and go a little bit up, to try to explain the exchange in addition and subtraction on a little bit higher numbers, even though that's not usually what you should do. But it helped that child to feel a bit better about failing if he doesn't understand something that is maybe bigger numbers, then it's okay.
So these are the kind of decisions that a human has to make. And it's not that AI couldn't do it, but we don't have a way to measure it right now. I believe that's the biggest bottleneck. Maybe some technology will come in the future that will allow us to do that, but we are definitely not there and the knowledge part is just a smaller part of the whole package of what the teacher actually does during the math interventions.
More evidence based education
Regarding the know-how, what's been interesting in English speaking countries, mainly the UK, is that there has been a movement in the last 10 years towards more evidence based education and EdTech tools, of course, as well.
And I think what made the difference was that suddenly the teachers started to write about how to use this cognitive science research practically in classrooms. And this is something we are definitely capitalizing on and it allowed us to learn how to explain the research to the teachers as well.
Advice to other startups
Definitely look at the pedagogical research. For some reason that is still undervalued in startups. There are a lot of startups that still play on the learning styles, which have been debunked a lot of years ago. Or just focusing too much on the fun part. It's like making something fun, making maths fun, making reading fun. That usually leads to nowhere. I have a list of companies that died trying to do that. When you try to focus only on the fun, you are eventually competing with everything that is fun.
So I still believe that the educational value is more important, like finding a way to help teachers. It's probably going to work better in the long term.
And then there's the other startup general advice, just trying to understand what the real problem is. That helped us a lot - to be able to specify the situation. In our case, it is when teachers see that they are trying very hard to teach a student something, let's say multiplication, and the student's trying as well, but it's falling flat, it leads to nowhere. So this is the situation where we want to jump in because now we can help the teacher to find out what the students really do not know and they can go back. We have the diagnostic and everything kind of fits into place when we were able to find this specific practical situation, real pain point in the education and build everything around it.
It's very hard to come up with it from the blank slate. It takes time, a lot of feedback, a lot of thinking, a lot of trying to present the app to someone, but the clarity helps a lot. Once you get it, it suddenly makes it much easier to make the decisions and decide what the priorities should be and what you should do.
What’s new in the Garage?
We just ran our monthly virtual member Huddle and got the chance to onboard new members as well as deep-dive into topics that are on the mind of founders & players in EdTech. We’re currently experimenting with a new matchmaking platform to match skills with needs of professionals in EdTech. More to come on this soon 🤗
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Frank Albert & the EdTech Garage crew