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- [00:07]
A
Hello everyone. Please join me in welcoming Anton Pavlovski, the CEO of Headway here at the GSB podcast. Anton, welcome. You have a very unique story from the time you founded Headway, which is one of the leading consumer learning platforms with multiple apps today. But I think you also have a very special and unique way that you started the business and grew it and it was mostly bootstrapped. Talk about a little bit of the early days where you come from also and how you managed to scale to where you are today. Just a bit that story.
- [00:50]
B
Yeah, well, absolutely. Hi and thank you for having us here. So I would say that constraints drive innovation. That's how I can put it. So we started in 2019 in Kiev, Ukraine. It all started with my passion for learning, for self learning basically that's, that's how I learn and I learn a lot, I read a lot and the idea was that technology can help people to learn more effectively, efficiently and have more fun in the process. So the approach to product development is and was and is extremely quantitative. The data driven again because we had these constraints in terms of capital and access to capital, we had to be extremely efficient in everything we thought through the distribution which is incredibly important at the start. I used to be a chief product officer so I was biased towards the, the product minimum viable product. We have to make product great. But then distribution is an integral part of your business model, of your business. And yeah, we, we thought it through. I learned it in my previous experience and applied in Headway. So it all started with one product, Headway. Now it's had it's Headway Inc. It's platform of five and counting. Now we're developing more products and so
- [02:48]
A
Headway, the first application that was, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, a book summary app also with micro learning in a gamified way. Then you added three other or four other applications. One called Infos, which is brain training app Nibble which is academic knowledge at Mile coaching platform and Skillsta which is a soft skills trainer. Talk about that vision of what you're trying to achieve by having these multiple apps around, you know, short bite sized learning for I was I assume mostly adults and probably less students in K12. But yeah, just talk about that. Just product vision and how it all ties together.
- [03:36]
B
Yeah, it all started with my love of reading with book summaries, but talking to our customers, doing customer development, customer interviews. Even though we were largely and are largely based out of Kyiv, Ukraine, but we had many employees around the world even at the time. Now we have more but then also Covid accelerated adoption of different tools and also people are more readily available online via Zoom via Google Meet. So we discovered that well no two people learn alike and it might not be a very deep insight but I was biased towards learning from reading or like from from books or listening to books. So we decided that we have to meet people where they are. Some people like to grow through cognitive training, that's Impulse with brain training games. Some people through explorations at Nibble. So I would say that's an empathetic approach to learning and since we are providing this lifelong learning for adults mostly yes then people have different needs and different products are better suited to these needs. Especially on mobile, iPhone, Android where the screen real estate is small and cramming everything in one product very often it doesn't work. So that's the idea and we continue on this strategy developing new products and launching new products like AI first products
- [05:41]
A
nowadays and is it that one leads to the next one and you start to see cross pollination or do you see one of the five apps really being disproportionately bigger than the others? So you're trying to get people to or users to come more into that. Like how is that decision making once you've launched an app and usually your apps go to the top of the rankings very quickly and so after 12 years like what is that decision making looking like on what next to build and where you want to connect it with what is existing?
- [06:19]
B
I believe and this emergence that we can't really foresee everything and in like ecosystem approach and platform approach where we provide all the tooling, the data, the know how for the teams to thrive and to use our playbook of like bringing products to markets and scaling them. So at first we had one flagship product, then like Headway, then second Impulse, then Impulse now is even bigger and but Headway is growing Impulse growing even faster. Other products are the also growing and even faster still and catching up through our our flagship. So the idea is to have been like pragmatic. I think that it makes sense to be like the number one, number two in your market and that's the plan and that's the reality for book summaries for cognitive development. Headway, Impulse, the same goes for other products. So we target market leadership and yeah we now developing our our portfolio of bets. So that's how we think about them Bets. Some bets are working, some, some don't. And maybe even if too much of your bets are like paying off, maybe you're not risking appropriately, maybe you should be like even more risk taking, bigger risk.
- [08:18]
A
Yeah, yeah. And so also most of the users then that you gain are truly international. Even though your team is, you know, you and your team are based in Ukraine. All the apps that you're building, I think they're very popular in the US and all over the world. So the question now is with agentic AI, with what all these new platforms are able to achieve, you know, cloth most recently, just tremendous growth. How do you think about the future of bite sized learning, what it means for headway and the type of offerings, applications for learning purposes that you need to put to the market also have defensibility because certainly there is fears that people now can learn for free by prompting themselves and getting something back. Right. So how do you think about this new world we're living in with AI and how you position the product for the future?
- [09:25]
B
We have a saying in Ukraine, maybe there is the same in, in English, but I will translate that. If you can't resist, then lead. So that's our approach. So of course we can't resist this wave AI wave. And yeah, you are right, our main market is the United States and given that Ukraine is a limited market, so we had to start with the bigger market, we started with the United States and it really helped, otherwise it would be hard to go international. And it's very often challenge for companies in Europe to get to United States and not just get, but make a success here. So coming back to AI, yeah, we try to lead that of course not developing foundational models and the talent is of course here for that. But just building on top of that, no one knows what the next best thing in applying AI to like educational domain, for example will be. And it will take time and will take many, many bets to figure this out. So we developing features that we are testing all the time and being data driven from day one, it really helps us to, to make it work, to analyze. So we're running hundreds of A B tests any given months and now they are increasingly, and I think predominantly even AI driven and then new products as well, new products that are AI first. And I don't claim that we know how it will work, how the education space will look like in two, three, five years. But we would like to be on the forefront of AI adoption. And now all of our new product launches, they're AI first, AI native.
- [12:05]
A
Right. And today you're almost entirely, if not 100% B2C. So selling to individuals and I believe you've achieved tremendous Scale in the hundreds of millions of revenue profitable. Do you expect to also be selling to enterprise customers at some point and going B2B direction like many others have done in the education space?
- [12:29]
B
Yes, we already have B2B team and B2B revenue as well. It's not yet enterprise, I would say so even though we sell to some of the enterprises, but mostly to some teams in the enterprises. And we would very much like to of course make it enterprise ready. And that's what we are working on right now. I was surprised. And how, how different is that from just B2C space? And now we have a very good phase of development of that product and very, very good client list already. I just really would like for some of these names to have their full employee base using our products now. It's not like that, but we're getting there.
- [13:29]
A
Yeah. What do you think is going to be critical in this new environment where suddenly AI is eliminating, for example the entry level jobs, easy to do jobs, and what is the employee? Because on one hand you have probably a lot of individuals who are working that are using it for themselves because they want to gain some new skills at the same time. Now you're going also in selling into companies and enterprises. And what kind of skills do you think will be critical in the future that people need to learn, therefore that you'll be trying to target to provide.
- [14:11]
B
Very simple answer, but I'll start with that. So it's like AI skills. Of course I like them, like most people like them. We are developing them and here we also try to lead that we have one product already that is teaching AI skills and it's more a prosumer type of product. Consumer product is something that we would like to launch as well. And that's something that I don't think we'll have this type of products in 10 years because everyone, not everyone, but most people will know that that type of thing because it's like Internet skills nowadays or computer skills nowadays. So everyone knows how to work on the Internet, how to work with computer. Of course there is a spectrum. So some people are more proficient and that's something that we are betting on. But at the same time you don't know what you don't know. So that's in general approach. So people learn continuously. People don't learn just in the classroom and then they're ready. No, because then you read, you listen, you engage with different types of contents or brands, products and then when something happens, you are prepared. So this is the lifelong learning approach that we subscribe to and that we try to popularize. So learning is fun. It's not necessarily easy, but it can be easy. It can be easy when you start then, because we make it easy to start. And then there are other products, other ways of learning, universities, postgraduate learning, that may build upon that. So that's something that we believe in an ecosystem of approach, where we're part of this bigger ecosystem. We are an ecosystem of products, but also we are part of a broader ecosystem that we are happy to be a part of. Because education is such a power to change the world.
- [16:58]
A
Exactly. Well, all the best. We're building for the future. I think you're doing amazing things. And thank you for being here on the podcast.
- [17:08]
B
Yeah, thank you. Thank you.