The Linum platform is the first microlearning startup in the country
One of Raymon’s offices is a colorful and special office with a lot of effort. In this office, the forces are often young and energetic. The traffic of the Raymon Cafe manager to this office is high, which means that a lot of energy is spent and must be replaced. Sand sofas are placed in the corners of the office, people rest on it to think with a more open mind. A colorful logo shines on the desk: Linum!
What is Linum?
Linum is the first startup and the first Persian microlearning platform. Microlearning means training based on small steps. Linum platform started its activity in the field of university education since 2018. The Linum site is actually a bridge between the professors and those interested in learning.
The special feature of Linum is that it offers training videos to people in the form of microlearning and in the form of compressed capsule videos. The effort of this startup is that in addition to saving time, learning happens with speed and quality. Training at a reasonable price and with high quality in the shortest time has made Linum popular.
The Linum site includes all kinds of training courses. Whether you are an engineering student or a medical student, Linum will definitely be useful for you. The Linum platform covers a variety of courses from academic mathematics to courses related to law, histology, embryology and Photoshop.
The director of Linum is Amir Aqiqi, 22 years old and a student of medical engineering at Amirkabir University. He says: “I was very interested in entering the job market sooner, and that’s why I became an entrepreneur after trying several different jobs, and it’s been 2 years since Linum was born…”
Great, now tell us about the birth of your business:
The story was that we were a group of children from Allameh Hali High School, who after the entrance exam of 2016 studied at Sharif, Amirkabir and Tehran universities. What we thought in common was that our expectations from university were a little different and we thought that it was supposed to be different from high school and not just study, but unfortunately it was not. That’s why we thought of working.
After a little investigation, we found that the main problem in the university is the lack of compact and short educational content. Especially people who did not participate in classes or were absent for several sessions, their ability to learn is gradually limited. We examined this problem and decided to hold a number of conferences at the university at the end of the semester, such as reviewing zero to one hundred or summarizing lessons.
These conferences taught the whole lesson in 8.9 hours, using the 20-80 method, in such a way that the 20% they teach solves 80% of the need. These conferences were very well received by the students, and even outside Amirkabir University, they took place without any registration advertisements. This is where we decided to expand this type of training and move it to the majority of the site so that it is scalable. This spark was Linum’s microlearning platform.
It is true that you started working in the educational environment and you had challenges in the university, but what made you think of education?
We were students ourselves and we felt this void that if you miss your classes in a few sessions at your university, you fall behind completely and you have two options, either go to the references, which have a large volume and little time. Or try to find the professor’s handout, which you need a lot of time to understand. This is why we thought of training with the microlearning method. Short, compact content, problem-based learning and gamification that motivates the individual.
Given that education exists in different cases and ages, who are your target audience?
Our main audience are students in various fields who for any reason such as laziness, working while studying or other activities fell behind in their class and want to learn their lessons in a short period of time.
How many users do you have till date?
We have had more than 2,000 customers so far, and each user has bought 1.3 of our products on average, and our website is visited by about 1,000 people daily.
How did you meet Raymon?
Linum Investor Davin’s group is and collection Raymon Media It was in Davin’s portfolio that we were offered to be based in Raimon.
Considering that your work is in the field of content production and education, what facilities did Raimon provide you?
Due to Raymon’s extensive and advanced infrastructure in the field of audio and video content production, including various types of studios and rendering farms, we can increase the quality of our training in this way.
Tell us a little about the challenges of the route:
In general, having a startup is a difficult and challenging path, and that’s why it’s attractive to me personally, because it’s never monotonous and every day I face new issues that I have no experience with and I have to learn quickly. If I want to say, one of the most difficult challenges was finding a young and motivated force, which, thank God, we managed to form a good team in the last few months.
Now that you mentioned it, tell us a little about your team building and recruitment process:
Linum currently has about 15 human resources, 10 of whom are working on a permanent basis every day. When we were in the accelerator, we tried to invest in our new forces and spent time on the talents we found and trained them in the form of trainees. Now we have 4 people who had their first work experience with us in the form of trainees, but now each of them has great responsibilities and they are able to train new employees.
Regarding the scope of the education discussion, tell us a little about the situation of your competitors:
This education market looks extremely crowded and red from the outside, but this market is so big that it still has a lot of space, considering the advantage we tried to create and thank God we were relatively successful, we want to use the education process as well. Make it more attractive and easy to use new technologies such as artificial intelligence, microlearning and gamification.
Education, since many strong traditional businesses are engaged in it, but the time has come for them to add innovation in their strategies and products. Corona themselves realized that they have to change their business model a little. Extracurricular and home school are our competitors, whose work seems similar to ours, but according to the target society we have, we are completely different.
One of the vivid memories of your journey?
The boldest memory in my mind belongs to the early days of Linum. It was November 2018. There were four of us who had a pre-acceleration course in the accelerator Diamond We had participated. We had held 7 or 8 educational events until then, and our idea was to design a website and present the method of these trainings in the form of a course.
We were able to prepare our initial site on 98. A very simple site with 3 products that they could buy and learn online. We didn’t have any money for marketing and in fact we didn’t know how to sell, we put money together and it was 500 thousand tomans, then within 20 days we were able to sell the product to 188 people and earn about 6.5 million tomans.
I will never forget those days, every day during those 20 days we earned 300-400 tomans from a simple site by showing our value proposition, which is training in a short time to our customers.
In short, in my opinion, the first earnings from what you just created, which is 30 days in total, are very pleasant and attractive.
Last word or advice for first-time entrepreneurs?
I’m too young to give advice to anyone, but my only experience in the startup ecosystem over the past few years is that, as Simon Sink said, business is a game, an infinite game, so You must have infinite vision. Winning or losing is not important, the important thing is to stay in the game and continue our presence.
