Lessontrek Pitch from Veteran's Day Online Demo Day

Thanks so much for inviting me here. Happy Veterans Day to everybody. My name is Jason Pessamare. I'm the co-founder and CEO of LessonTrek, and I've been with FI now. I think I'm in the first batch. I think, Ryan, am I in the first batch?

Yeah, you were one of the first veteran teams that went through Funding Lab directly. Yeah.

Yeah. So Ryan was talking about there was, I did a lot of Brazilian jiu-jitsu when I was in the Navy and I still do it. I still compete to this day. I've got 2 gold, 9 silver, and 6 bronze medals. So yeah, don't mess with me.

Yeah, that's great. So, and you know, a lot of you hear this a lot in the veteran community, that grit and determination and discipline are like the hallmarks of a veteran, right? And it's also the hallmark of a great entrepreneur. So Jason, you've got more grit and determination than most people I know. And so why don't you go ahead and jump in with the pitch?

Cool, thanks Ryan, appreciate that. Yeah, so my name is Jason Pessimer and this is LessonTrack. What we are, we're adaptive lesson management system that increases corporate education ROI. We're mainly an edtech-focused platform, so we're a software as a service platform that allows us to help scale really fast and really quick. So right now we have a problem in the corporate market, and that's basically a lot of old K-12 traditional edtech companies that have servers on-prem, they're not shipping software updates fast enough to corporations and colleges. So corporations are really being daunted by the task of slow software updates, or the way that people and employees learn today is a lot different than they were learning 10 years ago. And so there's a lot of outdated, antiquated software platforms that are in the corporations now that are just being eliminated and taken out. And so corporations now more than ever are trying to look for more of a modern cloud-based, web-based solution. And so that's kind of where we believe we are the solution to that. So the corporate education market is about $200 billion global and about $1,000 to $2,000 a year corporations spend on employee training. And so what we do is we streamline the employee education management and tracking workflows. We also provide updates and we also provide dashboards as well. We're really fast and agile. So we're a startup. And so most startups, as you know, from Silicon Valley, like Airbnb, Trello, Facebook, back to what Herbert was saying was, you know, move fast and break things, but at the same time build a really strong infrastructure. So you have something really foundational that's strong So you can keep building and adding on top of that. And that's exactly what Lesson Trek is and what I've built. We're also enterprise-grade software as well. So I have background in cybersecurity. So we're really focused in staying secure as well in our backend and our frontend. The FBI has been messaging a lot of warnings out there in the past few years with edtech companies being hacked by hackers. There's about, I think about $1 million to $2 million every, other few hours lost to cyber attacks. And so these hackers around the world know that these edtech companies are very vulnerable to being hacked. And so they kind of go after those. And so that's another thing where that provides us another advantage to us over our competitors. OK, so why now? Existing all-in-one solutions are quickly becoming a thing of the past. And so right now a lot of companies want to be able to have one thing either at the front end and be able to build a bunch of other things and allow that to be used across the middleware, the architecture inside. So that way they can have things like e-learning from YouTube videos or other web-based products and they can integrate that with LessonTrack seamlessly through APIs.

Okay.

So the team, myself, I got 10 years of software experience, some here at Microsoft, some with Starbucks. I've also co-founded a software agency, have an MBA, have a good designer team. He won a Facebook Design of the Year Award in 2016. I have a small early beginning sales team as well. Our advisory board is really strong. We have the Chief Content Officer of Coursera over at GSV Labs. We have Jim Connor, he's our advisor. He's the board member of Sand Hill Angels. And also we have Alex Burkhardt, who was former NSA Cyber. He was with Cyber Reason for a long time, and he's really experienced at selling enterprises. So right here, here's a quick picture of our product. We're really easy on the usability side of things. We're kind of like a drag-and-drop kind of interface where you can drag and drop your assignments and subjects and lessons. Okay, some of our traction right now, we're into some colleges, we're getting talking with University of South Carolina right now as we speak. We're actually also talking to some folks at Department of Defense, looking at getting into the DoD where a lot of their educational tools are also outdated and they're looking for modern solutions to help them with their future of education, training, and certifications. Another traction too, we're Silicon-based accelerators, Founder Institute, we're in with them, we're in with GSV Capital and also AWS EdStart member as well. So Amazon Web Services has given us $100,000 to use for cloud storage and also cloud compute. So our business model is software as a service. That's a really good model to use in this market, in any market to help scale fast. We are selling to both individuals and enterprises. We have about a 5% churn rate currently right now with consumers. We're using a lot of APIs to help us integrate. The API down there on the lower left is ADL. That's the military DOD compliant API. And we're actually working with the director of ADL currently to integrate with their systems. Corporate ed tech training market is pretty large. Total addressable market is $2.1 billion. And we believe we can get to $12 billion serviceable market market in year 3. Competition, um, we're up into the right. And like I said, a lot of people are still on spreadsheets. Some people are using things like Trello or MindTickle. Canvas is your typical college edtech platform. Canvas is seeing a large growth spurt in their revenue by going after corporations similar to what we're doing. That market is somewhat unsaturated, which is another good entry point for us as well. We're mostly software as a service, so we believe that we're better than the competition from that perspective. Blackboard, they're still trying to figure out what they need to do in their life. They're not doing too well as a business model because they're still stuck in the old on-site prem, you know, put the server in the closet or the basement at the college. And colleges and corporations aren't putting up with that. So this is our final slide. Our ask is $1 million series seed round. What we're planning doing with that $1 million is to achieve $500,000 $150,000 in ARR. We currently have $150,000 committed. Use of funds, about 60% of that will be sales and execution. The other 40% will be continuous improvement. So mostly, you know, backend work, engineering work, architecture work, frontend work. Our goal is to reach Series A by the fall of 2020. And our ultimate goal is acquisition year 5 or 6 so we can get a really strong, high ROI for our investors. And that's it. Thanks for watching.

Thank you, Jason. So while people get their questions ready, I will, I'll just ask a couple. Why you? Why Jason?

Yeah, so I started my first software company after the MBA program, and it was growing really fast, and it was in Southeast, and there was a lot of folks who had sold their edtech companies into big education software companies like Follett Software. and they saw my ability to build something that users wanted and loved and to be able to finish something from end to end, and they suggested I get into the education market. Well, at that time, the education market was really hard to get into. It was very political, and at that time, Blackboard was just crushing it. They were the unicorn, and no one wanted to get into the ed space. I saw that both as a challenge and also as an opportunity. A challenge for me was I like to go after challenges and things that I think that I can't do. I end up trying to do them. Opportunity is because I knew that the future would be today. The future would be Blackboard and those companies are gonna die off and something new needs to come up. And so that's kind of why I built LessonTrack the way I did, where it's more of the front-end focus, easeability, usability, and things for like the end user, not so much the administrator. And so now I built that in such a broad perspective, a broad way, that it'll now allow employees to use it.

So Great. Alexander asks, or he says, I know you're focusing on education and learning, but have you considered pivoting into a project management system? It seems like there'd be more money and users in that segment.

Ah, yes, good question. So, um, yes and no. The project management industry right now is a little bit wrapped up with companies like Asana, Monday.com, and Workday. And what I kind of wanted to do was take some of that user interface and user experience workflow and integrate that with the educational kind of workflows in corporations. So I wanted to— because we all have a certain workflow. When you're at work, there's a particular workflow I think we all have. And generally speaking, it's roughly the same kind of workflow. And I wanted to build that same ideology into LessonTrack within education.

That's great. And then, uh, he went on to ask about milestones. So proof of concept, prototype, beta.

Sure. Good question. So milestones. Yes, we were early on. It was really, really ugly. Like most things should be ugly early on. We shipped it. We got some good paying customers early on, got a lot of feedback. We kept iterating. And so, uh, right now we got about 1,000 customers. They're paying us and we got a lot of recurring revenue right now. A lot of our customers are satisfied. We've got a lot of good. Testimonials from customers. So right now we're at a really good stage to really, you know, scale up and scale out.

Okay, Mike from the audience asks, why does your company have a high growth potential?

Ah, yes, that's a really good question. I think number one, and I think you've already heard this before on this call, is we're a software as a service company, so we're very cloud-based. And what happens with cloud-based programs like Dropbox or Trello or anything else, anybody can go in and sign up and use it. And once you get a customer on, the idea is you want to retain them and keep them on as much as possible. And so that's one thing we're really good at is once we get them in there with the 14-day trial that we offer them, we have about 20 to 35% trial-to-paid conversion rate right now. And so that's kind of one way how you get things hypergrowth from that perspective. From the enterprise perspective, again, back to what I was saying is a lot of enterprises are using on-site prem applications and solutions. Since we're fully cloud-based, we're much easier to work with, and we can work with corporations a lot faster and easier, and we can integrate and tie into their endpoints a lot faster.

Great. Jeff asks, are you generating revenue?

Yes, we are, about $1,000 a month MRR right now.

And Rob goes on to ask, how can fellow veterans in the audience help?

Good question, Rob. Thank you. So if fellow veterans can help one or two ways, if you know anybody who— if you are working for a company, if you're a decision maker there for the corporate education or training market, I'd love to have a chat with you to follow up some questions and see if we can be of assistance to you too. If you know of any investors or if you are an investor, we'd love to also have a serious discussion with you as well. And, and 3, depending on what your experience is in the workforce, we'd love to maybe chat with you to see if, you know, you can come on board and help with our growth if you're an engineer or a sales and marketing person.

Great. And then one more question here, which is why do your customers care about your service or what do the users love about your service?

The number one testimonial I've been receiving is it's really easy to use and it's simple to understand when they first log in. I'm sure you guys have all logged into some software applications where it's really hard to understand, nothing's really intuitive, and you have to try to figure out and spend 5 to 10 minutes on where's this button, where's that button. What we've done is we've built a lot of familiarity inside of LessonTrack so where whatever you look at, whether it's an icon or whether you hover your cursor over something, it's obvious to you what the thing's supposed to do. And that's one of our biggest, you know, positive testimonials we received was it's really simple, easy to use, but at the same time it's very powerful and impactful. We drive results. One of the biggest thing that I wanna do in life is to be impactful for whatever I do, whatever I build. So I wanna make sure that my software, when I build software, it also has an impact on your life, but also it also drives results. And so that's what our customers are telling us.

Fantastic. And how can people get in contact with you?

Uh, right, so, um, you can either email me at jasonp@lessontrack.com, or if you know Ryan, you can get a hold of Ryan. I think my info is on there on the chat. You can see my LinkedIn profile is there. Um, yeah, that's how.