Episode 19: Making Studying a Team Effort

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Close your eyes and imagine you've thought of a brilliant idea and have built a prototype, an app that's ready for prime time. Now imagine that the app, after having been in the market for six months, has 700,000 registered users. Now imagine you're only 19 years old. This fantasy is reality for Lucas Hild, our podcast guest this week.

And why did Hild's idea hit big? Because, in a way, he and his young co-founder peers had only recently lived the experience of their target audience. They had real, true empathy for their consumer.

Hey, it's Luke. Welcome to another week of SphereCast, and this week Xenia and I interview Lucas Hild. Lucas is Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder at Knowunity. On Knowunity, students can view and download any relevant school-related study material or content, including presentations, flashcards, notes, and much more. The content on Knowunity is user-generated, uploaded by students, for students.

In only six months since its launch in September 2020, Knowunity has gained more than 700,000 users, even as the platform is currently only offered in Germany. However, Hild and his co-founders were not shocked by this outcome. In fact, their research showed that students were more likely to retain information when being taught by fellow students.

On the podcast, Hild, who is only 19 years old, shares wisdom well beyond his age and discusses the wild ride that is founding a company and learning to scale up at breakneck speed. So without further ado, here's our conversation with Lucas Hild.

Hi, everyone. Xenia's here with SphereCast. Today we're thrilled to host Lucas Hild from Knowunity. Hi, Lucas. How are you?

Thanks a lot for having me today. I'm doing good.

Could you tell our listeners who or what inspired you to join and co-found a company?

Yeah, sure. I think I was always very passionate about startups and also very interested in building up something on my own. People like Elon Musk always inspired me by the way they think about problems and approach solutions.

A few years ago, I was already working on a small startup with a few friends that was selling software solutions to school. When I met two of my co-founders a few years ago, they started telling me about the idea for a platform for students, I really didn't hesitate to join the team.

For me, it is also always very important that a business has a real impact and facilitates people's lives instead of just making money.

That's beautiful. Okay. I think we'll have an interesting discussion on that. Could you tell me a little bit more about what inspired you at that point? How did it all start? Was there a problem that you saw with your own eyes and experienced and then you said, you know, let's try and solve it together? What brought you together with the team?

Yeah. Basically, we had the idea for Knowunity one and a half years ago when we were still in school ourselves. Back then, we noticed that many students have a problem with the current education system in Germany that is designed to teach from top to bottom. However, many students are able to understand the content way better if it is created by people of the same age. This is why we were searching for a solution for this problem and came up with the idea for Knowunity.

In a nutshell, Knowunity is an interactive platform for students that allows them to share relevant school materials. This includes summaries, presentations, flashcards, and textbook solutions in all subjects and grade levels. Moreover, we are offering a Q&A feature that allows students to get an answer to every question within 30 minutes.

With Knowunity, we are building up a platform that solves all the needs of a student in one app. We build Knowunity not only as a content platform, but also like as a social media app. This means students can follow each other on Knowunity, like content, and leave comments. This makes the platform interactive and incentivizes students to upload their content.

I have a question. Is it subscription-based? How does it work?

Yeah. Basically, the app is completely for free. You can view all the content for free, upload content for free. There are some parts for which you would have to pay. For example, for being able to ask a question, you can either use like this currency that we implemented called Knocredits, or you can pay for a subscription, which is like €2 per month.

I see. Interesting. I use an app right now, I educate myself. So I'm based in Ukraine, Kyiv. Funny enough, I'm learning Russian. So I am using an application called Duolingo and yeah, so yeah, there are credits in that as well. So is it Germany only right now? And what ages, like students do you support? Are there any schools involved in this as well? I don't know. It's interesting. It's very intriguing right now, just to understand. Yeah.

Yeah. So at the current moment, the app is only available in German and we are concentrating on Germany. But there are also quite a few students from Switzerland and Austria using the app. Any student from grade 5 to 13 can use the app in all the different kind of schools that we have in Germany. And also, all the subjects that every student could have are represented in our app.

Interesting.

That's so interesting. Could I ask you, how did you go about creating a proof of concept? Did you go with the cheap and dirty MVP, or did you go with a full-scale, high-quality, future-proof technologies? Could you share with us?

Yeah, sure. After having identified the students' problems, we had several ideas how we could make studying easier and also more fun. To validate our ideas, we talked with a lot of students and also parents. After that, we were able to even better understand the problems that a student encounters in school and got a lot of positive feedback for our ideas.

Moreover, we noticed that many students spend a lot of time on social media apps instead of concentrating on preparing for the upcoming class tests. This is also one of the reasons why we decided to convert a student's smartphone to a digital study tool instead of a distractions. Therefore, we built the Knowunity app and launched it last year in September. Nowadays, we are having more than 700,000 students from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland studying with Knowunity.

Wow. 700,000 users. Yes?

Yeah, exactly.

Wow. Okay. Okay, so right. Okay, I'm amazed by that number. So you have a number of users there that is very big, I think. Yes? You know it's big, so okay, I'm just amazed how many users you've managed to get in a matter of less than two years, I think, yeah. Wow.

Yeah, in fact, it was less than one year since it was started in September 2020. In the beginning, we didn't expect such a rapid growth at all, but we are very happy that it's going that way and happy to be able to serve so many students here in Germany and Switzerland and Austria.

Amazing. So Lucas, you know, we speak with a lot of entrepreneurs who have gone on to build companies, and I mean, I'm talking, you know, they're thinking like 10,000 users to 50,000 and so on, maybe 100,000 in two years. That's what they're thinking. So we ask them this question, and a lot of the times this comes up, that they would start their platform with a certain technology, but after getting to a certain number of users, they are absolutely limited in terms of the technology. You know, the initial technologies they chose took them so far, and now they have to either rebuild completely or change the platform completely and build something new in parallel. So what has been your strategy here? How have you kind of accommodated this humongous growth in your user base? What were the pains maybe? You know, maybe you can shed some light on this story.

Yeah. For us, it was very important to be able to validate our ideas with real customers on the real market to see whether we are going in the right direction. But on the other hand, we were also expecting like some growth on our platform. So we had to find like a solution between a cheap MVP and also high-end technologies.

Therefore, we built up our tech stack over the summer of 2020 and created a product that contained the main features that were mostly focusing on uploading content and consuming content. After a few weeks before our launch, we started a closed beta with a few hundred users to make sure that everything was working as expected.

And then our launch went pretty well. We had already more than 20,000 sign-ups on the first day. But then after a few weeks of our launch, we had to rewrite some parts of our codebase because they were not really designed to scale up to thousands of users, and therefore, we had to change quite some stuff.

But in the end, we decided to use Flutter for developing our apps. Flutter is like a cross-platform framework that makes it easy to create performant mobile applications. This means instead of developing a native application, we have one application that we can distribute to Android and iOS without the user noticing any differences from a regular app. Consequently, we were able to start with one mobile developer instead of one developer for Android and one developer for iOS.

What was the infrastructure, you know, initially and how did you change it? I guess that's where the main, you know, did you start with containerization and Kubernetes or similar technology where the instances could, you know, be multiple if the load goes up, or you know, horizontally or vertically? I'm not really sure. I think you can highlight that better since you're the technological guru here, not me.

Yeah. So we decided to go with AWS as for our hosting partner. We chose AWS since it's very flexible and also gives us a lot of freedom. We are currently using a service called AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which takes care of all the scaling and the hosting for our backend. And we're hosting our database on Postgres, which is also like very flexible and also designed for a massive base of users.

Other than that, we have several containers running for our REST API, and we can also scale them up like very flexible depending on how many users we have. For example, on the weekend, there are always a few less users, but then on Monday when school is starting, there are a lot of users on our app, and therefore, we have to scale up our platform.

I think we hear this a lot and it's interesting how you've handled it. You know, Google Flutter Flutter is by Google, am I right?

Yeah, Flutter was developed by Google.

Yeah, yeah. So Flutter is very up-and-coming. It's very hard to find people who know Flutter right now. And yeah. So okay, great. Good to know this. That is that is very valuable, you know, this this last part that you shared with us. I think for listeners, this is gold, in my opinion.

Awesome. Lucas, what do you feel is the biggest strength of your company right now?

I'd say that we have two big strengths that distinguish us from potential competitors: on the one hand, our team, and on the other hand, our user-generated content.

First of all, we have a very motivated team that works with us towards our goal of building up the global platform for students. Most of our team members are still rather young and therefore understand the needs of the target group very well. Moreover, we are able to profit from the experience of our investors and business angels, such as Project A, Discovery Ventures, and Saarbrücker 21.

On the other hand, we have a big advantage compared to potential competitors due to our user-generated content. Other edtech companies need to have a very big content team that produces their whole content. This is very expensive and also very time-consuming. Moreover, most students rather understand a topic when it's explained by their peers. On our platform, the content covers all relevant topics and is created for students by students. This also makes it very easy for us to scale up our platform and launch it in other countries in the future.

You talked a little bit about the team. Could you tell us about the Knowunity founding team?

Our founding team at Knowunity is made up out of five co-founders. Two of our co-founders are rather on the non-technical side and take care of marketing, sales, and a lot of other topics, and the rest of us is working on the technical side and built up the whole tech stack at Knowunity. But in general, all of our co-founders are very product-oriented and therefore work very close together. We are a rather young founding team between 19 and 26 years and therefore also very close to the target group.

However, we soon realized that it was almost impossible to do everything on our own, and therefore, we started expanding our team in the beginning with a few interns to help us with social media and other daily tasks. And now after our seed financial round in April, we're now a team of around 17 people helping us to build a platform for students, and we are expecting to grow to a team of around 30 people by the end of the year.

How do you balance technological and business decisions, Lucas?

This is a very good question that is constantly in the back of our head as well. I think we found a pretty good split between the two of them due to our founder team and also our processes.

In terms of our processes, we work with OKRs to keep our focus on the topics that really matter to us. We define around 5 objectives per quarter. We ask ourselves, "How do we want our company to look by the end of the quarter, if everything works perfectly?"

Every objective comprises around three to five key results that can be used to track the achievement of the goal. Every key result is measurable. This means instead of stating increased user retention, we would define it as increase user retention by 20% until the end of the quarter. Moreover, we define one person that is responsible for the key result. This person is then not necessarily working on the key result, but rather planning how we are going to achieve the key result and making sure that we are on track with it.

So whenever someone is working on a feature, one is questioning oneself whether the current task is really helping us to reach the objective or whether this task might not be too important for our goal.

In general, we are trying to iterate very fast, for example, by launching several user experiments per week. Therefore, a lot of code is being written that might not stay in the codebase for a very long time. In general, we are trying to implement stuff in a way that it's maintainable without trying to reach perfection. To ensure the quality of our software, we're doing also a lot of code reviews. In between building features, we leave space for technical refactoring to avoid leaving a lot of technical debt behind.

In addition to that, it is very important for us that our developers understand the business impact of what they are working on. That way, no one works on perfecting a feature for several weeks that is not even important for us. In the end, I'd say our goal is to get new features out in a state so that they are good enough and then leaving space afterwards for removing technical debt.

It's a great goal.

Lucas, I'm just amazed, you know, how planned you guys have been and how you're doing things at such a rapid pace. Yeah, thanks a lot.

And you guys are so young, also. You guys are young and very organized.

You're making me feel bad about my, you know, my professional career right now.

No, no, no.

I think, you know, the only thing I kind of would want to explore more from you is this there's something we have tried to implement within our organization as well, the OKRs, and again, it comes from Google, I believe. So you set OKRs for your team, let's say for the quarter. So is there a person who's, you know, asking everyone or making sure, you know, people are reporting on the OKRs? How do you keep on top of this? How do you not lose track? Because on one hand you have the OKRs, but everything else is moving so rapidly, so you can easily lose sight of the OKRs and get lost in the problems, like I believe you said you're releasing new features, new stuff every week. So I think it's easy to get lost in the problems that you might see after you've released something and just lose track of everything else and try and, you know, fight fires all the time. So how are you doing this? I really would like to know.

Yeah. So first of all, for every new feature that we are implementing, we have like a document stating what kind of impact the feature will have on our users. For example, one feature could have like an impact of a rise of our user retention by 10%, and then we will definitely implement the feature. But if we see that a feature improves our user retention by, for example, 1%, we're probably not even considering to implement it. And then afterwards, for every feature that we are creating, we already define how we're going to measure the feature afterwards. And therefore, there's one person that is really responsible for this feature, bringing it from the start, from the planning phase until the phase when it's deployed and live for users.

And in general, we are also planning our sprints based on those key results and objectives. So therefore, in the beginning of every sprint—one sprint always takes around two weeks at Knowunity—we're defining 5 to 10 key results that we are going to be focusing on in the current sprint, and then thinking about what exact tasks can we do that would help us achieve this key result.

I see. A lot of meticulous planning goes behind this.

Yeah.

It's an agile methodology.

Yeah, it's something that we also use internally.

Yeah, perfect.

You know, they say that you can be agile. People think they're agile just because they use Jira and Kanban boards, but agile is mindset. I think it's very difficult to implement. I do find that, Lucas, I don't know if you would agree or not, but people who have worked before, if they were trying to do the same things as you were, they would have to unlearn a lot of the stuff they have been doing. That would make life, you know, very difficult to implement changes. But I see that, you know, that your team must be very, you know, in terms of their orientation, I think you guys are thinking the same, you guys are absolutely moving in one direction. So it makes a lot of difference. So yeah. It's really making me think a lot today. Making me question a lot of things as well, Lucas. So thanks for doing that.

All right. I want to address the global COVID situation. How has COVID-19 impacted your business, Lucas, and what steps have you taken to adjust to the current situation?

They were born out of COVID. So I mean, like you were did the company release the first product after COVID? Correct? Is that right?

Was it after?

Yeah, exactly. COVID hit Germany and the rest of the world in March, and in this time, we were building up the platform. And we also initially planned to launch the platform a bit earlier, but then due to COVID, schools were closed, and therefore, we were unable to launch the platform since not much was going on in the whole education area in Germany. So we postponed our release to September 2020.

But since Knowunity is a digital product, COVID-19 has not affected our business as much as other companies were affected. However, our target group, students from grade 5 to 13 in Germany, has been heavily impacted due to the closing of the schools. Therefore, less exams have been written, less presentations have been held, and therefore, also a few use cases dropped out of our app. So after COVID, we are expecting kind of a higher organic growth since when school starts to open again, people will start talking more and then we're expecting that the communication will increase in the classrooms and therefore more people will discover our app.

As far as our workplace is concerned, COVID-19 only had a small impact since we are kind of a hybrid remote culture with some employees that come to the office for a few days per week and others that work completely remotely.

I see. I don't know if I can make this point or not, so I'll say something, right? So I find that, you know, a lot of the applications or things we see on our phones that are developed, they are made to to grab my attention and keep me there for as long as possible. So people deploy a lot of a lot of organizations deploy these tactics where they are very exploitative and make people very impulsive, instant, you know, gratification kind of thing. They exploit those psychological behaviors to make people want to use their application more.

But I'm seeing a different use case here. I don't know, Xenia, if you agree or not, but I'm seeing a use case here where, you know, I'm not sure if you've tried to keep people on the phone, you know, on their phones or not, but it seems like it's helpful for them. It's making them use their phones in a positive way. And and there is a bit of content sharing as well. So this positive influence in your application, was it did did you try and tackle that kind of problem that existed in this space? What was your view on that before you went to launch this particular application? I'd love to just understand like what was going on in your minds when you were doing this.

Yeah, definitely. We notice so many students are just on social media all day long and get push notifications from different kind of applications that just want them to sit down and relax. But for our platform, I think it's a bit different. For sure, we're also sending push notifications, but those kind of push notifications, they are really designed to help the student study. For example, before a class test, we're sending the user a push notification that reminds the user to prepare for the class test. And then when the user taps on the push notification, we're showing the right content that is helpful for the student in this moment. And we're definitely not trying to just getting the user to use their phone more without having any impact, for example, on their school grades.

I have a question, if I may interrupt here. How easy it is for students to cheat, for example? Is there a kind of monitoring system that maybe records so they don't look to a side, or how do you ensure that, for example, on a test, students don't cheat and get an A or, you know, highest grade?

Yeah, this is a very good question. In general, I'd say since most of the content that is uploaded to the app is not really the content that you directly need during the class test, but more like the content that you would need for being able to prepare for the class test. So in general, it would work like this. For example, you have a topic that you have to study for your class in math, and then we give you different kind of content pieces, we call them Know-hows, and then the user will have to find the right information in the right know, which takes some time. But at the current moment, we don't have like any direct cheating system implemented since most of the real class tests still take place in person in Germany.

Oh, gotcha. That's excellent. Because in America, I know, I'm asking, my brother is taking e-learning right now in high school, and sometimes I can see him cheating. I'm not going to name names so that his teachers don't know that he's cheating, but I can see sometimes on the test he puts a little notes on the side. And I don't think there's monitoring. I can just see his eyes going to the side and he's copying, you know, the notes. So I was wondering if you guys have some kind of safeguards in place to prevent that from happening.

Yeah, in Germany it mostly works like this. There is online education for most of the times, but then for those days when you have a class test, you're going to school for a few hours, have to do a negative test before. So Knowunity wouldn't help in this case.

Amazing. Wow.

Yeah.

I think we've come to the final part of our podcast. This is where our last final questions can get a little tricky. Lucas, what are the most important attributes of successful leaders today, in your opinion?

Successful leaders should create a vision and impassion other people to share that vision. In my opinion, it's also important that every team member understands the mission and the goals in front of them. You must remind them of the big picture and challenge people to outdo themselves.

Amazing. Thank you.

Yeah, that's that's very wise. But I think, Lucas, it's it's been pleasure meeting you, you know. You guys have done so much. Lucas, for our audience, I hope you don't mind this question. We can delete it if you like, but we'd love to know how old are you you are, you know. What's your age? So you look very young, so I'm guessing you're in teens or 19, 20 maybe, you know, but you can tell us how old are you?

Yeah, I'm currently 19 years old.

Okay. 19. Wow. Okay. I'm double your age. I feel old. Okay. Well done. You've done amazing, I think, and yeah. So wherever your career is heading, I think from the conversation, I sense that you you're driven by problem solving rather than other motives, and I think it's a it's a great way to take a problem in your stride and solve it. And I think in in the coming years, I believe you will be, you know, seen as an example, if not already. You know, you're doing some great stuff. And I'm very very impressed, and I think the audience would love this episode because this is quite amazing. We are meeting an entrepreneur who is 19 and they have an application that was released in less you know, less than a year ago and they have close to a million users. So yeah, pretty amazing.

Thanks a lot. I'm very happy to hear that.

I'm just really happy and impressed with meeting you today. I would probably follow you and your career path as you're growing. And all the, you know, the kind of best of luck with your business. And thank you so much for joining us today. It was very enlightening.

Thanks a lot for having me. I really enjoyed it.

A special thanks to our podcast guest this week, and once again to our sponsor, Sphere Partners, for bringing this episode to life. If you enjoyed this episode, drop SphereCast a five-star review on iTunes and share this content with your network. For any relevant links or notes from this episode, check out our podcast website at www.sphereinc.com/spherecast. And always remember: when you think you can't, technology can. See you next time.