Originally posted by MET student Sydney H on 25/05/2019
Layup is an LMS that has been created by a small eLearning company from Sri Lanka. They LMS was developed with social learning in mind, with the aim of making eLearning in the workplace more engaging. Watch their pitch below from the 2017 SeedStar Summit, then click on the link to their website below to learn more.
I like how the presenter talked about how the product they’re selling is different from their competitors in the venture pitch; however, I fail to see how the two social factors (one being each company using their LMS can customize their own certificates and the second being customers can like, share, and comment on others’ progress) mentioned would make a huge impact on enhancing user experience. The theories the presenter based on are good but the mention of the 400% increase of engagement is a bit fluffy without solid backup. I wouldn’t invest in this.
No, I would not invest in this venture. It comes down to differentiation, as Rachel implied above. Although I can see many LMS’s coming up short on user experience, this pitch provided little to back up his claim of a significant difference from the ‘usual’ experience from common platforms.
Saying this, I think he failed to capture my interest in another big way. I feel he didn’t really know his competition (or it may the case he didn’t articulate the knowledge effectively). One of his primary pain points is that other LMS’s don’t provide a social learning element. His solution to this is to build such a platform into the LMS. I have two concerns: 1) this is simply not true, social learning platforms are built into some modernized LMS’s and 2) I didn’t hear the benefits of having an inbuilt social learning platform versus the use of existing ones (like the ones he mentions: Yahoo Answers, Quora, etc). Given his goal is to take the venture globally, I’d want him to complete additional research, in the form of a competitive analysis, outside Sri Lanka before I’d further consider his pitch.
No, I would not invest in this venture. For me it was not the features of the application that concerned me it was the billing strategy which was a 3-year commitment with a $90,000 minimum price tag. This is a product moving into the LMS space and had features that filled a perceived gap of social learning. Unfortunately, this gap could quickly be filled by competitors especially when those competitors are Microsoft and Google. The presenter mentioned free options for LMS systems, such as Moodle, then commented on hidden costs associated with these services as a negative. I think where they missed the point was in the fact that their billing plan presents a barrier to on-boarding new clients. Other services offer free tears so that entry into the use of product is easy and low risk. If customers see value, then they will pay for added features, such as plugins, customization, increased traffic… By including these features as add-ons, the potential for subscription type billings could out way the upfront costs the company proposed which limits access. A second problem with the billing plan, because it represents a barrier to on-boarding new clients, is that they miss the opportunity to carve out a portion of the market. Companies or institutions rarely run paralleled LMS systems. So, if they had a free tier for easy client access then they would essentially take that client from a competitor. At that point the social learning features they boasted, if are effective, will keep those customers on the system and encourage them to spend more on enhances functionality such as the customizable badges because they see value. The presenter mentioned that he would offer demonstrations, but that billing plan eliminates a lot of customers from coming to the table!