#3 Founder’s Showcase: LevelUp (Simon Bathula & Shay Webster)
This week we dive deep into LevelUp Learning, co-founded by Simon Bathula and Shay Webster.
LevelUp Learning helps startup & scaleup businesses learn and grow faster. Their mission is to ensure every startup, scaleup, and their people, have access to the knowledge they need to be successful!
What is the problem you’re solving, and how are you solving it?
The startup sector is growing insanely fast globally — there are currently more open roles than there are fully-qualified people to fill them, and, over the next 5 years, 150 million new roles will be created in tech startups in emerging industries & technologies.
In order for startups to be successful, their people need to be upskilled to fill these roles, and they need to be able to access the knowledge & experience of domain experts when they need it.
There is currently no easy & affordable way for startups & their people to access the knowledge they need to be successful or to upskill their people for the future of work.
LevelUp is solving these problems by connecting startups & their people with experienced experts who have been there and done that: we are creating a platform that makes the sharing of startup knowledge easy, so every startup has the opportunity to be successful!
Currently this involves us running training programmes specifically for startup people (like our Emerging Manager & Growth Marketing LevelUp’s), led by startup luminaries with real-world experience, which startups across Australia & New Zealand have found super valuable!
What do you love most about being a founder in NZ?
NZ is home for us so it’s obviously a special place. The community here is so connected, and the startup community is no different! It’s great to be in a place where everyone knows everyone, is super supportive & willing to help each other out — in a space where if someone wins, everyone wins.
Being an island nation at the bottom of the world also means you have to dream big and be global from day one. The whole ecosystem wants to see successful global companies built from New Zealand so the support is incredible where everyone wants to educate, connect and inspire founders to reach their full potential.
Why are you working on LevelUp? What was the trigger point that made you start working on this?
The LevelUp team are all failed founders. We have felt first-hand the pain that founders & early-stage startup employees feel: the anxiety, the stress, the imposter syndrome — we have all been there. Lack of a network, connections or access to experienced guidance led us all to abandon our own ideas.
LevelUp was founded to support others to tackle that pain — a way for us to help other startups & founders to succeed. As founders, we are thrilled to be creating something that makes it easier for our peers and their people to learn, grow and succeed.
What is the current state of LevelUp? What does the product look like and what is your team focused on right now?
We are currently in the MVP stage: we have validated the problem space & our ability to monetise, so we are now working on iterating our product & testing other potential solutions to develop a scalable product & beginning to develop our repeatable growth strategies.
We are also currently raising a funding round to help us with building our product, our team & beginning to scale!
Our product:
To date, our MVP solution has been our LevelUp training programmes — this has involved facilitating training on a variety of key startup faculties (incl. New Manager, Growth Marketing, Product Management, and many more), with domain experts from some of Australia’s most successful startups.
We are also currently working on some other potential solutions, including individualised coaching & 1:1 advisory services.
Our team is currently focused on a few key outcomes:
- Closing our first funding round!
- Finding startups who are keen to attend our November training programmes (Emerging Manager & Growth Marketing)
- Customer interviews with startup leaders & founders.
How are your customers doing? What is the traction like?
Our customers are going great — we’ve found that startups are definitely looking for something like us to support them as they grow and scale — which is reflected in the positive feedback we have received to date.
We have had great traction to our MVP to date! We have had over 150 attendees (users) from 80 high-growth organisations from across New Zealand, Australia & the US — ranging from super early-stage startups through to mature organisations with 300+ people: so we know the problems we are solving are relevant to a wide range of organisations!
- We have PMF on a couple of our programmes, where we have a clear understanding of the problem space & customer personas
- We also have an overall NPS of over 80 across our programmes to date, which is epic!
- We have also validated our ability to monetise our solutions, which has been awesome & has kept LevelUp viable (Simon & Shay are working on LevelUp full time!)
What is another start-up in New Zealand that gets you excited?
Our friends at Sugar Wallet are creating a platform that helps people save and grow their money. It’s an epic problem to solve and we can’t wait to see the impact they are going to make.
What would you say to someone interested in supporting or learning more about LevelUp?
We’d really love to speak with founders & leaders from growth-stage startups (10–200 person org’s) — we believe we can help yourselves & your teams, and we are continually looking to better understand the problems faced by you — please reach out to us at: hello@leveluplearn.co
We are also keen to chat with any experienced startup operators & leaders who are interested in helping out other startups — either via running a training, offering coaching or 1:1 advisory services — please also reach out to us at: hello@leveluplearn.co
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