Name: Leada Website: www.teamleada.com Headquarters: Mountain View, USA Vertical: Coding, Higher Education Tech: Web App
Introduce your startup and give a short description of what you are doing.
Leada is the best way to teach data science skills online. We sell our content to professors in a 'Build Your Own' style. In contrast to all other ed-tech companies, we seek to complement rather than replace the university professor.
Who are the founders, how did you meet, what are your different roles in the startup.
We are childhood friends from Davis, CA and recent graduates from UC Berkeley where we both studied a combination of Statistics, Business, & Computer Science and co-founded the Undergraduate Statistics Association. Tristan is the CTO and Brian is the CEO.
How was the idea for your startup born?
Having recently graduated UC Berkeley we intimately experienced the problems with higher education. We felt college was important, but lacked employable skill development and industry relevance.
What is the main problem in education that you aim to solve.
Professors hate two things: teaching "skills" and providing industry relevance to their class. We enable them to do this with our online labs and real world projects.
Who are your main competitors? What sets you apart from them?
Coursera/Udacity - They are designed to replace professors, we are a product professors use and consequently we solve the attrition problem they are plagued with.
DataCamp - Like Codecademy DataCamp is effective to introduce data science concepts to beginners, but learning in depth is impossible via simply DataCamp
Pearson Textbooks - Their online content is purely homework/testing based, Leada has interactive teaching content and charges significantly less.
In which markets / regions are you active. What markets / regions are next.
We hope to be in over 30 universities in the Fall 2015 semester.
Who is your target audience.
University professors
How do you engage with your target audience. How do you convert them into users of your product.
Word of mouth, conferences, and outbound sales.
How many users / downloads does your service have?
In spring of 2014 we were used inside UC Berkeley, Notre Dame, NYU & University of San Francisco.
What is your business model. How much does your product / service cost.
Our business model is similar to textbooks. The professor will assign the content and the student pays. The cost is between $50 to $75 dollars.
If you raised funding, how much did you raise. Who are your investors. If not, are you planning to raise funding.
We're backed by ImagineK12 and Y Combinator (in the current batch).
Are there milestones you are especially proud of and would like to share.
The completion rates of our online content for our students is between 50% to 60%. Coursera is lucky to have 5%.
What are the next steps in growing your startup.
Evangelizing Leada as the best resource to teach data science & analytics in every program across the United States. Transitioning to other subjects such as design, software engineering, etc.
How can people get in touch with you.
Email: brian@teamleada.com
Room for anything else you would like to add.
Ed-Tech is hard, but you know what's harder? The lack of purpose most people go about their lives.