Monetization of Knowledge Lessons with Panos Siozos, LearnWorlds’ CEO

Hi Shane, thanks for having me.

Yeah, sounds great.

Well, I’m Greek, so I grew up in Greece. I guess from my name, you can tell—I’m one of the three co-founders, and we’re all Greek, so that’s where we started.

I think we were small for Greek size—two siblings. I have a brother who’s 10 years older, so he was kind of the “early adopter,” taking the hits first, I guess. That meant things were easier for me with my parents. I grew up in a small city outside Athens, a shipyard area with lots of unemployment, heavy shifts, industrial accidents—tough conditions. My father was an educator, and the fathers of my two co-founders were teachers as well. We started out understanding how privileged we were in that setting, realizing that education could be transformative, giving us a chance to rise above our initial circumstances. I think those early lessons really made a difference in what we eventually decided to do.

Yeah, we didn’t meet in our younger years. We met in university, so we go back—maybe not super far in the past, but we’ve known each other and worked together for about 25 years. We met at the university, and we had a similar path. I guess we discovered a few years ago that this was probably one of the elements that brought us together—common values, a shared family tradition, and a belief in education.

Yes, well, as I mentioned, my earliest experiences were in a tough environment, which made me realize how privileged I was and understand my obligation to help others. My father was teaching students and kids, trying to encourage them to do something better with their lives. I think that was a very important formative experience for me. Another formative experience was that at age 12, we migrated for a couple of years to Germany. That gave me a multinational perspective—I picked up the language and saw the industrial side of Europe, how people and resources can really push you forward in a more organized society. So that was quite an important lesson for me at a young age.

No, I live in Cyprus, which is close by. It’s almost the same thing—different country, also part of the EU, mostly Greek-speaking, but much warmer. Taxation is great for creating and building a business. I came here with my wife, who’s a university professor; she moved first, and I followed so we could be together. Cyprus turned out to be a great place to set up the business and keep growing. From an organizational standpoint, you might remember that Greece was in a very deep hole a few years ago with the financial crisis. Once we started the business, it became difficult to sell to European customers—convincing them we could deliver on our promises. We didn’t face the same challenge with U.S. customers, who would say, “Wow, I’ve been to Santorini, love Greece, we’re happy to do business with you.” But Europeans were more cautious for two or three years, thinking, “Will Greece still be part of Europe? Can you support and offer these services?” It was a challenge—both practically and mentally—so that helped push us directly into the U.S. market. It’s a very mature market, more willing to test unproven, innovative products, and that gave us an edge for growing and advancing the platform.

It was a great lesson in how to grow a business. It forced us to be resilient—it made us be cash-efficient—and we were a bootstrap business. So, actually, we were spending our own money, and the money of parents and spouses. We valued every single cent; to this day, we value every single dollar that comes in. That’s super, super important, like no customer, no dollar that gets into the company is something we take for granted. We know we have to fight for everything, and we try to keep that mentality. Regardless of MRR and growth and all this great stuff, we still remember those days when we had to fight for a single year. We try to make it part of our culture.

I studied computer science. We all studied computer science. So that was starting in 1995—that was, I guess, the early ages of the internet and computing. In fact, my thesis was one of the first where I worked on a new learning application, using online active server pages back then. We were doing some pretty crazy stuff with server-side code and JavaScript. Fun days.

We started in ’95. My thesis was in 1998, so it was quite fun. All three of us studied computer science together, and then we all did postgraduate studies in e-learning. E-learning was part of what we were training to do—we were researching, creating learning applications, publishing papers, and going to conferences. My PhD was in computer-assisted assessment—how to set up questionnaires and applications for assessing knowledge. That’s where we came from.

We really have. We were looking back at some very old videos—grainy footage—of when we started working on our first e-learning platform around 1999. You can imagine the user interface was dreadful, but the features—the core of what we offer today—were already there because the science was there. But there was nobody around us back then who could tell us, “Why not create a business out of this?” People just didn’t do that in our part of Europe. Twenty years ago, it was nearly impossible to do a startup—you needed servers, hardware, all that. So it was unimaginable. If we’d been in the U.S. or elsewhere, maybe we could have done something similar 20 years ago, but we didn’t have the know-how for building a business. We were academic people, aiming to become professors. That’s all we knew back then.

I became a software engineer as soon as I got my degree, working for a small business. After five or six months, it was the .com boom, so funding started coming in. I found myself becoming the CTO, managing 10 developers working for me—and me working for them, in a way. That was pretty wild, and it lasted a couple of years. Then funding dried up, or maybe customers did—kind of like the stock market going down. It was a super fun ride while it lasted and a great experience—a big lesson in understanding that your value isn’t necessarily tied to funding or the stock market, but to actual customers paying for what you offer. You have to provide real value for your users.

So, as researchers, we were always focused on creating actual platforms that people could use. We were working in a university setting—an academic setting—with a couple hundred students acting like guinea pigs, testing what we built. Then we’d move on to something else, but we were always working because we were very hands-on, always building our own tools and platforms.

We’d wanted to start a business for a long time, but it was a slow process that took a few years. After completing our PhDs, we all worked on various projects. I spent some time in Brussels, working for the European Union on research and innovation policy, which is a bit like working in Congress but for R&D. Every few months, we’d talk about whether we could take the state-of-the-art in e-learning—the things we’d learned—and turn them into a product people would actually pay for.

By 2011, it became clear that there was a demand for online skills training. People were looking for new ways to learn things outside of traditional academia, and traditional academia wasn’t adapting quickly enough. You had companies like Lynda and Team Treehouse cropping up, where you could go online and learn things like Photoshop or web development. That’s when we realized all our expertise—like instructional video and computer-assisted assessment—could come together in a product that met modern learning needs.

Increasingly, if you want to become a web developer, the worst thing you can do might be spending years at a university and racking up hundreds of thousands in debt. There are faster, more efficient ways. Even companies like Google and Facebook hire some people fresh out of college, but for many roles, they focus on delivering the specific chunks of knowledge that new hires can apply immediately.

We also realized there was a gap in the market for better platforms than what was out there. Most of the existing ones seemed to treat learning as if throwing a PDF or a video at someone meant they’d been trained. But that’s not how real learning works. You need proper engagement, interaction, and a network of peers to learn from and exchange knowledge with. Our research taught us that. We saw an opportunity to build an innovative business, make money, and help people learn in a more effective way.

Well, we spent—we were, I guess, anti-lean. We spent a couple of years creating the platform without really showing it to anybody, which is unusual for e-learning. Learning is a slow, deep process, so just doing a prototype in a weekend isn’t enough to decide whether you’ve built something sufficient and substantial. It took us two years. We were perfectionists—which is something we hope we’re now immune to. We wanted to build the perfect platform and include everything.

In fact, the first iteration of our platform probably had more e-learning features than what we have today. At some point, though, we had to make it more practical for actual users and trim some features that were less essential—ones the market told us weren’t as important. So that’s how we got started: a couple of years spending our own money, creating the business and building the platform. Then at some point, we launched it and started looking for customers. It wasn’t the best approach in terms of starting a business with an MVP and refining from there, but because e-learning is a difficult subject, you can’t just do it with a small prototype. You have to go deep and identify the real problem first.

We were lucky to already have a successful product with a great working funnel and some solid branding. We started from a good place, but COVID really blew the lid off. Almost overnight—after around March 15, 2020, when most countries began going into lockdown—our entire funnel essentially tripled. Everything related to acquisition, across all channels (organic, affiliates, etc.), and our conversions, started working much, much better. It was great that we were already in that position.

In fact, we truly believe COVID didn’t create new trends out of nowhere—it just accelerated trends that were already there. All the work we’d done over the past few years—building the platform, creating our branding, and developing tools for early adopters—suddenly became self-evident to everyone. In 2020, the world realized you had to be online. Of course, 2020 will be remembered for years to come because of the devastation around the world and the loss of so many lives, but it’s also the year when learning turned digital.

Now, everyone understands the need for a business model that can adapt to going online. Even when things go back to normal—hopefully soon—some things will remain different. I don’t think we’ll ever see a company gathering 200 employees in a hotel for five hours of PowerPoint training again. Maybe they’ll still get together for a cocktail or a party, but not for training. There are far more efficient, effective, measurable, and scalable ways to do it, and everyone sees that now.

People who considered learning a “nice to have”—like trainers who traveled, coached, or ran webinars—now realize that e-learning is a must. The potential for scaling is huge. If you’re a yoga instructor or a coach, there are only so many hours a week you can teach—40, 50, 60 if you’re lucky, and then you’re exhausted. Once you take your business online, you’re no longer limited by the number of students in your city or country. You’ve got a global audience, 24/7, ready to buy your courses.

That’s the shift we’re seeing. Even when COVID finally goes away, the way we do business and the way we train people online will be changed forever. We want to be part of the solution for the post-COVID era of learning, making it better and more scalable for our users.

It’s something I like to say: online courses are basically the eBooks of 2020. Everything we used to do 10 or 20 years ago with an eBook—positioning ourselves as experts, growing a personal brand, attracting leads for a business, and most importantly, directly monetizing or selling a digital product—can now be done more effectively with an online course.

The easiest thing people can do is just create a free course. We always say that’s the best lead magnet we’ve ever used. We still do checklists and eBooks, but online courses work better than anything else as a lead magnet. From there, you can build a powerful funnel to attract more people, even to your main business or shop. It’s crucial, because education is the best form of marketing. It’s subtle—it’s not pushy or aggressive, and you’re not really selling. You’re giving people something valuable.

The first step is just getting them in the door, and you can do that with a simple mini course. Sometimes people try to create a big, elaborate free course that takes hours to go through, but you don’t have to. You can start by teaching one concept in 10 or 20 minutes, something your audience really wants. Once you validate that there’s demand—that people do want to hear from you—then you can create a paid offering.

It really is that easy, and you can play to your strengths. You can use video, text, audio, or assessments—whatever you’re comfortable with. These days, it’s super easy to package different types of content together and sell it as a digital product. We’re always amazed by how inventive our customers are and the kinds of courses they come up with, often in very niche areas. It doesn’t have to be an academic subject or something super elaborate. We’ve seen people build thriving businesses in all sorts of interesting niches and make good money doing it.