Panos Siozos, LearnWorlds

3 Years to First Customers - A Self-Funded SaaS Story

Introduction

0:00Loading…

Listen on:

Like this episode?

Get real founder strategies for the AI era. Delivered weekly.

Free weekly newsletter · No spam

Episode Summary

Three PhDs in Greece spent two years building a self-funded SaaS product in a bunker. When they emerged, nobody wanted to buy it. It took another full year before they found their first few customers.

In this episode, Panos Siozos reveals how LearnWorlds grew from that painful start into a multi-million dollar e-learning platform with 40 employees and customers in 70 countries - all while navigating Greece's worst financial crisis in modern history.

Panos Siozos is the co-founder and CEO of LearnWorlds, a white-label SaaS platform that lets you create your own, personally-branded online school.

This is a story of three guys in Greece who built an e-learning software product while doing research for their PhDs. At the time, they had no intention to start a business.

But some years later, after seeing how most learning management systems missed the mark, they teamed up and set out to build a better product.

Two of the founders kept their day jobs and paid the salary of the third founder, so he could quit his job and work on the product full-time.

It took them two years to ship the product. And then to their dismay, they realized that while people seemed excited about their product, no one seemed ready to buy.

It took them another year to find their first few customers - that's three years after they started.

And during those three years, there were times when they thought about quitting. But they'd invested so much time and money that it was hard for them to walk away.

They kept telling themselves - let's just get in front of people, let's listen to the feedback and keep improving the product. And maybe one day this will all pay off.

Today, they have customers in 70 countries, a team of 40 people, and have built a multi-million dollar SaaS company.

It's a great story and I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Topics: First Customers|Bootstrapping

Key Insight

Panos Siozos and two co-founders spent two years building LearnWorlds as a self-funded SaaS before launching, then waited another year for first customers. They broke through by targeting the US market instead of crisis-hit Europe, manually creating free trials for 3.5 years, and doing unscalable customizations for early customers until reaching 100 paying accounts.

Key Ideas

Two co-founders kept day jobs and paid the third co-founder's salary for over two years to build the initial product without outside funding
Manually created each free trial for 3.5 years - users would request a trial and receive credentials hours later via email while the CTO copied databases by hand
European customers took 4-5 weeks to decide while US customers made purchasing decisions in 4-5 days, prompting an early shift to the US market
Did unscalable code customizations for the first ~100 customers, learning critical e-commerce lessons that transformed the platform from academic theory to practical selling tool
COVID accelerated LearnWorlds' growth to 15% month-over-month as all training moved online and some schools grew from 20 to 60,000 paying students

Key Lessons

🎯 Target the US market early for faster self-funded SaaS growth: LearnWorlds wasted months pursuing European customers who took 4-5 weeks to decide. US customers made decisions in 4-5 days and cared about product quality, not the startup's country of origin.
💰 Co-founders funding each other enables self-funded SaaS survival: Two founders kept day jobs and paid the third's salary for over two years. This gentleman's agreement between 25-year friends kept the product alive without outside investment.
📉 Building in a bunker for 2 years cost LearnWorlds a year of learning: Panos admits they should have put the product in front of customers much earlier. Their e-learning expertise was real, but they missed critical e-commerce and selling lessons that only customers could teach.
🛠️ Do unscalable customizations until your self-funded SaaS hits 100 customers: LearnWorlds modified code in individual customer instances, creating merge nightmares during updates. But those customizations taught them checkout funnels, coupon redemption, and upselling - knowledge they couldn't get from research papers.
🚀 Manual processes buy time for self-funded SaaS founders: For 3.5 years, LearnWorlds' CTO manually created each free trial by copying databases. It was unscalable, but it kept the cost of automation out of the critical path during the cash-constrained early years.
🤝 Personal availability builds trust faster than polished marketing: Panos gave customers his personal phone number and took calls at 2-3 AM for US time zones. A four-person team appearing "always on" converted skeptical prospects who worried about the startup's longevity.
🧠 Domain expertise is a moat but not a go-to-market strategy: Ten years of e-learning PhD research gave LearnWorlds a genuine product advantage. But the founders had to learn marketing, sales, and business models from scratch - expertise alone doesn't create customers.

Chapters

00:00Introduction

02:00Panos' quote - getting better every single day

02:10What LearnWorlds does - Shopify for online courses

02:53UK company with a team in Greece, moving to Cyprus post-Brexit

03:22Multi-seven-figure business, bootstrapped with 1M euro raised

05:5210 years of PhD research before starting the business

07:47Three co-founders in a bunker - two years building the platform

09:25Designing from 2011, building through 2013

10:39Two founders paid the third's salary from day jobs

12:22Two years without talking to customers - the bunker mistake

13:40Tech stack - MongoDB, PHP, and hand-written JavaScript

15:07Launching into Greece's financial crisis

17:17Pivoting to the US market where decisions take 4-5 days

19:40One year to find first customers after launch

21:12Building during Greece's 8-9 year recession

23:05Overcoming objections - product love vs. startup skepticism

25:30Personal phone numbers and 2 AM support calls

27:10What kept them going through three years of struggle

30:00Learning marketing from scratch - first Facebook ads, first content

34:36Manual trial creation for 3.5 years

35:34Unscalable customizations for the first 100 customers

39:19COVID as an accelerator - 15% month-over-month growth

44:23Zoom integration shipped in three weeks

45:36Lightning round

48:57Where to find Panos and LearnWorlds

Episode Q&A

How did LearnWorlds fund development as a self-funded SaaS for two years?

Two co-founders kept day jobs and paid the salary of the third founder who worked full-time on the product. They also hired a junior developer fresh from university. The three founders, friends for 25 years, operated on a gentleman's agreement with no formal equity split for years.

Why did LearnWorlds take a year to find first customers after their self-funded SaaS launched?

They emerged from two years of building into Greece's financial crisis, where companies refused to invest in new software. European customers were risk-averse about working with a Greek startup. They pivoted to the US market, where buyers were faster and more willing to try new platforms.

How did LearnWorlds manually handle free trials for 3.5 years as a self-funded SaaS?

Users requested a trial on the website and received an email saying "the team is working on it." The CTO would wake up early, check overnight requests, manually copy databases to create each trial instance, and email credentials back. This unscalable process continued until they automated it.

What did Panos Siozos learn about US vs European customers for self-funded SaaS?

US customers made purchasing decisions in 4-5 days, were risk-tolerant, and cared primarily about the product quality. European customers took 4-5 weeks, asked questions about the startup's survival prospects, and worried about working with a company based in crisis-hit Greece.

How did unscalable customizations help LearnWorlds find product-market fit?

For the first 100 customers, they modified code in individual instances - a nightmare during product updates. But early US customers who knew e-commerce gave harsh, valuable feedback about checkout funnels, coupons, and upselling that transformed the platform from academic theory into a practical selling tool.

How did COVID affect LearnWorlds' self-funded SaaS growth trajectory?

Growth hit 15% month-over-month as all training moved online. Existing customers doubled or tripled revenue in weeks. They launched a Zoom integration in three weeks to support live classes, helping fitness instructors, yoga studios, and conference organizers transition to online delivery.

What role did PhD research play in building LearnWorlds as a self-funded SaaS?

Three co-founders spent 10 years researching e-learning, building non-commercial platforms, and publishing papers before starting the business. Their deep expertise in learner experience design became LearnWorlds' differentiator, but they had to learn everything about business, marketing, and sales from scratch.

How did LearnWorlds convince skeptical customers to trust a self-funded SaaS startup?

Panos gave his personal mobile number to customers and took calls at 2-3 AM to serve US time zones. The team fixed bugs in real-time, shipped improvements daily, and gave the impression of a much larger company through sheer responsiveness and round-the-clock availability.

What does Panos Siozos mean when he says "startups are a marathon, not a race"?

LearnWorlds took 3 years from founding to first customers and years more to reach multi-million dollar revenue. The PhD research background taught the founders that creating something worthwhile requires sustained effort over years, which prepared them for the slow grind of building a self-funded SaaS.

Book Recommendations

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

by Douglas Adams

Links

LearnWorlds: Website
Omer Khan: LinkedIn | X

Full Transcript

Omer (00:10.000)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I I talked to Panos Siosos, the co founder and CEO of LearnWorlds, a white label SaaS platform that lets you create your own personally branded online school.
This is a story of three guys in Greece who built an e learning software product while doing research for their PhDs.
At the time, they had no intention to start a business.
But some years later I after seeing how most learning management systems missed the mark for them, they teamed up and set out to build a better product.
Two of the founders kept their day jobs and paid the salary of the third founder so he could quit his job and work on the product full time.
It took them two years to ship the product and then to their dismay, they realized that while people seemed excited about their product, no one was ready to buy.
It took them another year to find their first few customers.
That's three years after they started.
And during those three years, there were times when they thought about quitting, but they'd invested so much time and money that it was hard for them to walk away.
They kept telling themselves, let's just get in front of more people, let's listen to the feedback and keep improving the product and maybe one day this will all pay off.
Today they have customers in 70 countries, a team of 40 people and have built a multimillion dollar SaaS company.
It's a great story and I hope you enjoy listening to it.
Panas, welcome to the show.

Panos Siozos (02:00.460)
Hi Omar, thanks for having me.

Omer (02:02.100)
So do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires you or motivates you or just gets you out of bed?

Panos Siozos (02:06.420)
Yes, it's getting better every single day.

Omer (02:10.840)
And for people who aren't familiar with learn worlds, can you tell us what does the product do, who is it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

Panos Siozos (02:19.640)
Effectively, we are a shopify for online courses.
So we're an elearning platform where people can create and sell online courses and our customers are professional trainers and coaches and speakers and training organizations.
So effectively we help them do retail E learning and sell directly their own courses to their own customers.

Omer (02:43.130)
Now the company was founded in 2014 and it's a UK based company but the team is based in Greece.
Is that right?

Panos Siozos (02:53.610)
Yeah, we were mainly we are Greeks and Cypriots.
We founded the company in the UK because as you remember, the financial situation in Europe and especially in Greece and Cyprus a few years ago was terrible.
So it wasn't an option to, to create a, a business here.
But now because of Brexit, actually we are moving our operations or the headquarters and, and everything out of the UK and into Cyprus, so.
Because we want to stay as part of the European Union.

Omer (03:22.010)
Got it.
Okay, so let's kind of set the scene a little bit and, and talk about the product, the size of the business.
So Learn Worlds currently is a multiple seven figure business.
For most of your journey, the business was bootstrapped, although you have raised about a million euros.
Tell me a little bit about how the product actually works and how it's different from maybe some of the other products out there.

Panos Siozos (03:55.850)
We're combining an E learning platform with an E commerce platform.
Perhaps.
Now this is something that seems like self evident and everybody wants to have seen platforms like that, or there are several.
Sometimes I think that there's one new platform being created, being launched every week.
But a few years back when we started, this wasn't very easy.
The people are mostly familiar with learning management systems which are like the traditional tools used for E learning, especially in corporate environments or in academic environments.
But these tools are what gives elearning a bad name.
So these are platforms dealing mostly with the management of learning, but not with the learning itself.
What we created, in fact with our platform, is an easy, lightweight learning management system.
So we're a course platform and we give lots of emphasis on the learner experience, like how people learn.
So we try when we're creating an online course, the usual experience that people had is they were just being thrown a PDF or a video and that was considered to be E learning.
And after watching a couple of videos or being sent a few PDFs, they were supposed to have learned something and have acquired a new skill.
But this is not how people learn, this is not how we work and this is our understanding.
That was the knowledge that we had acquired by our studies before doing LearnWorlds.
And we focused a lot on creating an E learning platform with stellar learner experience and giving people sleek, digital, beautiful experiences.
And this is what people are used to having these days.
I mean, we're used to having with our gaming devices and our tablets and our iPads and all this stuff.
So we want to create a great learning experience where people will go in, they will consume video, they will consume ebooks, they will be happy with their learning journey and they will be happy to be paying for a product, for a knowledge product that they have purch.

Omer (05:52.430)
So a lot of products that I've seen that in online course products, often they're built by founders who either had a personal itch they needed to scratch and build something or they'd maybe use some sort of learning management system and thought that they could do better.
But what I found interesting about LearnWorlds and you and your two co founders is that before you guys even thought about building this business, you spent years actually studying the whole concept of elearning.
So tell me a little bit about that because I think I want to try to sort of set the scene here in terms of how deep the three of you got into the whole idea of elearning before you even sort of got to the point where you said let's build a software business.

Panos Siozos (06:43.790)
Yes, we have a very strong background in R and D and in fact we started as researchers, not as an entrepreneurs or like wannabe startupers or anything else.
So after finishing after were three co founders after concluding studies in computer science, we did postgraduate studies in educational technology and two of the founders, we received PhDs degrees out of this process.
So in this process what we were doing, we were building E learning platforms, not commercial platforms, but we were researching and publishing papers and trying to see what is the state of the art and invent the state of the art or combine and create products that worked.
So we lots of research and lots of evidence based obviously efforts to create the best possible platforms around elearning.
So we were doing that for about 10 years, working in research projects, national and international research projects, publishing papers.
We never had an idea about actually creating a business and selling the software.
So we're creating a great platform, publishing a couple of papers and then off we went to the next project or to the next platform.
But during this process obviously we acquired lots of know how.
So we knew we were seeing the trends, we were seeing the state of the art and also we were, we were becoming increasingly very dissatisfied or almost pissed off I would say with the kind of platforms that were out there.
So people were using some products that we were considering to be very much behind of what we consider to be the state of the art of E learning.
And at some point after several years after completing our degrees and even working in different jobs as software engineers or researchers or stuff like that, we came back together and we still figured out that we had it, that we still knew what we could do better than the rest of the and we saw an opportunity in creating a product that would be commercial, something that would be far better than what the competition had to offer.
That was around end of 2011, early 2012.
There were some online companies being online learning companies being created back then, you might remember, you obviously know Lynda or you might remember Team Treehouse.
So we saw there an opportunity, all the expertise that we had, but now lots more new tools.
Like it was much easier to develop products.
Cloud computing was like prevalent.
So it was much easier to launch a company and even to do marketing in a global scale.
So we came together, took all our expertise and started creating a platform for this space.

Omer (09:25.790)
And so that was around what, 2013, 2014 when you started?

Panos Siozos (09:30.750)
We started designing at the end of 2011 and then it took us two years to create the actual platform.
So that was a very.
We were, I guess we were in a bunker.
We weren't lucky enough to have to have a garage.
That's the usual metaphor, you know, people starting a startup in a garage.
We didn't even have that.
We were a remote team in three different cities, two different countries and we were working, we had day jobs and nights and weekends we were working on the platform.
But also because E learning is kind of complex, so it's not really easy to do an mvp.
It's not really easy to just do a few pages and test it with people and say that you have something.
So we went all in and obviously we spent two years of our lives creating what we thought would be the best platform for creating and selling online courses.
So that was a very grueling process and also difficult process.
We were hunkered down creating the platform and, and that took us two years before we were able to go out and present the platform to potential users and potential customers.

Omer (10:39.510)
So the three of you were working day jobs at the time.
This was, this was basically a side project for you guys.

Panos Siozos (10:46.550)
That was a side project for the first few months.
And then when we did this, one of the three co founders, I guess sacrificed himself and went in the project full time.
So the other two had to cover his expenses.
So that was our experience.
We are friends now for about 25 years.
Years, the three co founders.
So we were family.
Probably the things that we did wouldn't have been possible with normal co founders that have like a professional relationship.
So what we did is actually we were financing one of us who went into the project full time and then we brought in one of our ex students.
So we got him out of the university and he came to us, started working for us as a junior developer and we were making do with the, with the funds that we had gathered from previous jobs and external projects that we were doing, just trying to keep this project alive and trying to give it the resources that it needed in order to be developed and developed into a full platform.

Omer (11:44.850)
So for almost two years, two of you guys were paying the salary of the other founder as well as this student that you brought on?

Panos Siozos (11:54.770)
Yes.

Omer (11:55.730)
Did you guys have a formal agreement or a company set up or was this just.

Panos Siozos (11:59.730)
No, never.
It was just a gentleman's agreement.
It was a project we really believed in and we still treated, we're, I guess, closer than a family in many respects.
So we didn't have any agreements.
It was only very late when we put things in paper and formalized it in terms of shares and stuff like that.

Omer (12:22.830)
So you said for two years we were in a bunker and that sort of suggests there weren't a lot of conversations going on with customers at that point.
Is that true?

Panos Siozos (12:36.110)
Yes, it's very true.
I guess we did everything the other way around.
If we started again, we would probably have been much more agile and try to create prototypes and put it out there.
We were certain, and in many respects we were right, that we knew what had to be done.
But we definitely, if we did it again, we would have put out the product in front of customers much, much earlier.
So effectively what we did is we created, we designed and created the platform for two years.
During this time we were speaking with potential customers, but these were usually like theoretical discussions.
People didn't really know what we had to offer and sometimes didn't even know their own needs and what they wanted from a platform like that.
So it wasn't easy to always find a match.
So yeah, that was a very introvert period where we were building the product, refining the product, but only based on our own feedback or feedback of colleagues, but not of putting it in front of actual customers.

Omer (13:40.770)
I was having a conversation with some of the members of our plus community yesterday and we were talking about tech stacks.
So just out of curiosity, like, what was the tech stack that you built Learn Worlds on?

Panos Siozos (13:51.990)
It was pretty, I guess, mundane.
It was MongoDB and PHP and lots and lots of custom handwritten JavaScript without any fancy frameworks.
It was just stuff that worked.
That was the expertise that we also had.
When you are working in a university or in a research project, you don't really need technologies that scale a lot, so you're doing things a small way and lots of custom handmade things.
So this is how the platform started Initially.

Omer (14:26.260)
Is that what you're still using today?
Is it mostly like PHP and sort of vanilla JavaScript or have you evolved from that?

Panos Siozos (14:32.180)
We evolved a lot.
There's lots of new expertise and new technology.
So the schools obviously that we're running are much, much bigger than what we had in mind at that point.
We were designing schools and we thought that if a school would have 1,000 customers, that would have been a success.
Right now we have schools that regularly daily run with more than 300,000 users.
So obviously lots of things have changed internally.
Lots of analytics, for example.
We have to use platforms for data analytics like BigQuery and stuff like that.
So there's lots of technologies changing every day.

Omer (15:07.730)
So the end of the two years, you sort of come out of the bunker, the product is ready and what happens when you.

Panos Siozos (15:17.010)
We come out of a bunker and we realize that Europe is almost in a state of.
And also in many ways the rest of the world is in a state of a financial war.
So there's a huge crisis happening around and we have a product that we are very confident about the product and we try to sell it to companies and nobody at that point, especially in Europe and especially in Greece, if you remember, we're coming from Greece, there is lots of discussion even if Greece should stay in the European Union or be expelled from the European Union.
So we don't even.
We're approaching companies and telling them to use a software product.
And that's obviously that doesn't work.
People are not investing and not testing new things.
Even if E learning seems to be the right thing to do, it's very cost efficient and it allows you to do things much more effectively without spending lots of time and money.
Companies are very, very reluctant to invest in a product.
And also professional trainers and all the people that we had in mind who would be our first customers.
So we had to find and hunt down our customers.
We did a couple of pilot projects, we were happy to find a couple of customers in Greece.
And we started like creating, launching the first online schools and seeing the first successful sales like actual students coming into one of our customers, online schools and purchasing one or two courses.
That was monumental for us.
But then we also realized that the European market is far behind us market when it comes to online courses, e commerce, and also the willingness to test a new platform, an innovative platform or something that is untested, that comes from a new startup.
So at that point it was obvious for us that we should really only address the US market.
It was strange, very strange.
Sometimes we were talking with European customers who were very reluctant to work with a startup from Greece.
And they were asking us things that were like, what will happen if Greece next month goes out of the European Union or if there's no way for us to pay you guys or to get paid.
So things that shouldn't have been an issue in a normal functioning economy and society.
On the other hand, we were talking with us potential customers who were much more risk tolerant.
They really liked the product, they were really excited that we were coming from Greece or wherever they really care.
If the product did what they wanted it to do, then they were really willing to test it and use the platform.
So we're very lucky at that point to get a few customers from the US who had experience in creating and selling online courses who really liked the platform.
And then the new things that we knew we were bringing into the market, they really liked those.
They gave us a chance.
They started using the platform.
They gave us lots of very harsh feedback and very difficult feedback, but also very valuable for us.
So we started working with them very, very fast, improving the platform, customizing the platform and making work for these customers.
So at that point we went out of this bunker, we faced reality.
We realized that we had to adapt very, very fast, adapt our understanding, conform to what the market actually needs and not to the theory that we had in our minds.
And at that point we entered a very fast cycle of development and continuous improvement and development and refine, which we still continue to this day.
So I guess that was the point where our theoretical understanding and our research background that we are the experts of E learning and we know how this works.
This is the point where we face the reality of actual E commerce and facing customers that have built already businesses, E commerce businesses and knew how to sell in a natural market.
So they gave us very frank feedback and very valuable feedback that we put into the practice.
And at that point our great platform, which was also very abstract in some ways became very, very practical and very much adapted to the actual necessities of E commerce and the way things work in the actual life.

Omer (19:40.200)
So when you came out of the bunker after two years, there was a period where once you got the product out there, you realized that nobody actually wanted it.
And how long did it take from that point to get to that first, first customer or the first 10 customers?

Panos Siozos (20:01.220)
I think that was, that was about a year.
I would say it was the whole of 2014 when we started showing the platform and going to like pitching competitions and approaching customers, cold calling mobilizing all our network and trying to talk with actual customers.
Also doing our very first basic, elemental kind of marketing with mainly with content marketing and producing a few videos and blog posts and trying to show what we do better than the rest.
And at that point we started, it was about a year where we had our first two pilot projects and then actually finding our very first customers who started selling online courses.
So at the end of 2014, our first customers had us launches, like launching online schools, and started selling.
Selling courses.
And that was the very first days where we saw our platform handling, I don't know, 10, 20 sales in a day.
So that was, for us, that was transformative.
We realized that, okay, it works.
I mean, people can actually go in and they purchase courses and they don't ask for refunds and they actually use the platform.
So this is something that we can scale much more.

Omer (21:12.850)
For people who might not be familiar with the situation in Greece, I think it's worth just calling out that this was.
This was a massive financial crisis and an extremely long recession that lasted what, like eight, nine years and you guys were building this business right in the middle of all of that?

Panos Siozos (21:45.050)
Yes, that's precisely how it is.
I guess one of our early mistakes is that even with all these things happening around, we didn't shift to external markets or like the US Market from day one.
But our first steps, because we had the connections in Greece and we had all these good feedback, we thought that we could also sell it, sell the platform in Greece to big businesses, but that really didn't pan out.
So I think we are very lucky that we were unsuccessful in finding customers in Greece and also having customers in Europe.
So we had to go very, very early to the US Market where things are much faster.
People know what they want, they're risk tolerant, they're testing new products, they're early adopters.
So it's a much bigger and much faster market.
And even to this day, I'm amazed by the selling cycle of our platform.
When we talk with European customers, it might take, I don't know, four or five weeks for somebody to reach a decision.
When you're talking with a US customer, giving them the same information, the same data, they would make a choice in four to five days.
So sometimes it's like the differences are vast in how fast things work in the US Market.

Omer (23:05.730)
So for that period of about a year where you're trying to find those first customers, what kind of pushback, what kind of objections were you hearing about the product?
You mentioned some of this in terms of people, some people seem reluctant to do business with you because you're a startup based in Greece.
But beyond that, when it came to the product or even the perception of the product through your marketing, and I know that was fairly limited at the time, what kind of pushback were you getting?

Panos Siozos (23:38.700)
Mainly people were worried, they really liked the product.
So that was the thing that kept us in the game.
Because even those that didn't at the end didn't work with us or didn't reach the decision to take the leap and faith and use the platform, they really had some great feedback.
So most of the difficult of the pushback that we were getting was about our ability to help them and to be there.
So are you going to be there next year?
So will you be able to handle so many customers or so many users?
Will you be able to assist me with support 24, 7?
Because you are based in a different time zones like seven or eight hours away.
So these were the most difficult things I would say and the way to overcome them was with much, much work.
So at some points we were, we were doing presentations to people and my schedule was starting at 10pm, my local time and ending 2 or 3pm 3am because we had to speak with people from the, from Pacific Coast.
So it was as simple as that.
We had to be there, we had to be present, we had to be able to give answers to people very, very fast.
So at that point we were still four or five people in the team.
So as you can imagine, we were wearing multiple hats.
People were doing, I was making presentations to customers and I was also the customer support representative, writing support articles and answering tickets at the same time.
So what we were trying to be, we were trying to be 24, seven ever present and give the impression that we are a much bigger company.
Never lying about how big we are or how many people we have in the team, but always trying to be there to make people feel reassured and make them feel certain about their choice.
So fixing stuff, fixing minor bugs very, very fast.
We were doing things that should probably are probably unsafe.
Like, I don't know, changing codes, changing the code, or putting new releases with minimum testing, breaking things and changing things very, very fast.
But we were trying to be better every single day.
Improve small things, even small things.
Writing a better article, sending a better answer, creating an app that would perform half a percent better, trying to improve all things more and just be ever present and give people that reassurance that we are improving this, that this is if they get something tomorrow.
Or one week from now they will have a better product.
That was something that helped convince people and help them stay with us.
They understood that we had the depth about E learning and we were understanding what we were building.
We had a vision.
So this vision and our passion about E learning really resonated with them.
But we also had to convince them that if they build a product, people were effectively building a business on top of our platform.
So we had to convince them that the platform would be functional, that our support would be there, and that if they need something, they had my mobile phone.
So you can imagine people were calling me like 2am, 3am but they knew that they could find me.
So even though we were small, that was the thing that helped them take the leap of faith and invest in our business effectively.
We were a bootstrapped business or first customers were our investors.
And we still think of them this way, that our best investors are our customers.

Omer (27:10.870)
So you'd been thinking about elearning for a long time.
As we talked about during getting your PhD, you guys are starting to see opportunities.
As you look at other elearning products out there, then you spend two years building the product and then it takes another year before you're finding customers.
What kept you going through that time?
Like, why did you keep going when a lot of people might have just said, okay, look, we kind of spent two years building this product.
This doesn't seem like there's the market opportunity that maybe we thought that there was.
And you know, we're going out there and people are sort of saying nice things.
They're telling us they like the product, but they all seem to have excuses or objections.
Maybe they're just trying to be nice.
Maybe, maybe we just built the wrong product.
Like, what kept you going?

Panos Siozos (28:02.970)
Well, sometimes I think that probably we weren't very smart.
And it also has to do with what you said before about the general environment and like a crisis being there.
So if, I guess if we were in a different environment with many more options, I mean, we could, where we could, I don't know, quit our, our startup and start working for like one of the big tech companies or, or whatever, this is perhaps something that we might have done.
But I guess we have lots of like sunk cost, lots of investment already.
So we thought that, okay, this is going somewhere, this is going somewhere.
And we, and it's lots of grit and lots of determination and lots of, at some point might even false hope, but we were really believing that this would go somewhere.
So it was a very difficult situation.
There weren't many chances around, but we were creating the chances ourselves.
So I guess that was what made us stay in the game.
And also I believe that we wouldn't have done that if we didn't have the previous experience of doing postgraduate research, which is something that is very difficult, very time consuming.
You have to invest your whole self for several years in order to get to a result that you like and get accepted by, I don't know, by your thesis expert and other professors and the scientific community.
So we knew that it takes lots and lots of work to create something that is worthwhile.
So I guess it's a mentality of having to put the work, even the difficult work, in order to get to a place where you get rewarded for that.
So that's, I guess what kept us in the, in the game and the little improvements that we were doing that we were seeing every day.
So there were little even, I don't know, it could have been like false signals of hope.
But these little things like getting some good feedback and getting a potential customer from here and somebody who's interested from, from another place, these are the things that were keeping us in the game.

Omer (30:00.410)
Now all three of you are engineers and so at some point you realized we need someone to be doing the marketing and sales as well, and that needs to be us.
How did you go about learning how to do that?

Panos Siozos (30:19.890)
Well, I'm the one that was tasked with this.
We were three co founders.
I was the one that was further away from coding.
I had a previous job at the European Parliament in, in Brussels.
So effectively for US listeners it's something like being a chief of staff of a US Senator.
So I was working in this capacity about R and D policy in European Union and stuff like that.
So I was already a few years away from.
I had left coding for a few years and also I was, I guess, the more extrovert of the team.
So I was tasked with marketing.
So obviously had no idea about all this stuff.
So I started reading every kind of blog and podcast and everything that you can imagine about like what is a startup and what is marketing and what is content marketing.
So I was discovering all these things.
And also what we understood that we knew that we needed to do is do all sorts of startup training that young people do these days.
Like we were going into, we participated in startup competitions.
The rest, I guess were guys that were 20 or 25 years old.
We were 35, so a bit older, but still we knew that there was something that we needed to learn there.
We needed to learn how to pitch, we needed to learn how to make our value proposition concise.
We needed to learn how to do a business model canvas and start to see what we have to what is it that we are selling, what is our business proposition.
So these were baby steps, I guess, but, but these were things that we understood that we lacked and we needed to create this understanding.
So I guess we started from a very basic understanding of business.
Effectively, we thought that we just create the best possible product and it will sell itself.
And when we got out, we realized that it doesn't work this way.
So we had to do all the learning and start acquiring this knowledge.
So effectively I beat our first digital marketing campaigns, like created a Facebook account and obviously created a few terrible campaigns that didn't work or we didn't know how to measure our conversions.
All the mistakes that you can see in a startup, we probably made them, but we made mistakes and we tried.
That's, I guess what makes effectively what can make a startup successful is not what you know, but how fast you learn.
And we were very fast learners.
So we were making mistakes big and small, but we were trying to do something better the next day, like a better ad.
Copying an ad or stealing another idea from a competitor, whatever, anything that could make small things work and bring some people over to our website, like creating a website, all the basic stuff to put our platform in front of people's eyes and have them test the platform because we knew that once they actually saw the product and use the product that they would value it and get hooked.
But it was a very difficult task for us to get them there, like create awareness around our platform, get people inside and get them to start using the platform.
So something that I can mention is that for the first three and a half years, the trials of our, I mean it's a SaaS product.
So obviously people want to start a free trial.
That's the best way.
We are trying to be product led.
So people want to just do a free trial.
So for the first three and a half years we were creating the trials manually.
So people were coming to our website, they were like asking for a free trial and then obviously thinking that they would get it immediately on the spot.
And then they were receiving an email that says the team is working and we will send you the trial in a few minutes or hours.
So my co founder, our CTO Fanis, was waking up early in the morning and trying to see how many trials we had overnight.
And he was manually copying and pasting databases, creating a New trial.
And then we were emailing the credentials to the potential customer to come inside.
These were the things that we were doing and trying to get as many people as possible to actually test the product.
And then we were hoping that the product would do the rest.

Omer (34:36.199)
We've all heard, you know, Paul Graham and the whole, you know, do things that don't scale yet.
It's very easy to spend your time trying to come up with scalable solutions too soon.
And one interesting lesson, I think, with you guys is that you really took that sort of advice on board and you spent a lot of time and effort creating very customized solutions for some of your early customers, which wasn't scalable, which was expensive, but was probably the right thing to do at that time.
So tell us a little bit about that and like why you took that approach and what you learned from doing that.

Panos Siozos (35:34.470)
Yes.
So I think Paul Graham is very right to say that you have to do unscalable things.
The catch here is that you don't know which unscalable things are worthwhile or are the ones that will lead you to success.
So we're probably doing lots of unscalable things even today, and some of them we shouldn't.
But one of the things, as we mentioned, that we were doing back then, once at that point when our E learning expertise faced the marketing, digital marketing and E commerce reality, this is where we had a couple of customers who were very lucky to get their feedback.
So when they were asking for something, we knew that it had to be done because it wasn't like some kind of.
It wasn't a weird request, but they knew because they knew how to sell.
So anything that had to do with E Learning, we were very reluctant to change.
And we were insisting, and we were insisting on our vision and why, for example, the videos should be shown this way because we knew from research and papers that this is the way to show a video or that's the correct way to show text on the screen or to navigate within an online course.
And we were sticking to this, our guns when it came to this.
But when it came to how you actually sell, what you tell to the customer, how you formulate your checkout funnel, how you set it up, how you should show your coupons, and the way people like to redeem coupons and how there should be like a thank you page afterwards and where you can upsell to customers, that was a treasure trove of knowledge that we didn't have.
So we knew that at that point we should sit down and listen.
And we were doing customizations which were very, very unscalable.
So we were changing codes in different people's instances.
And then every time we had a new release, it was a nightmare to go over the, I don't know, five at that point customers and try to merge the code so that we don't override any customizations that we might have done.
And in many cases we overrode this and we had to do them in get.
So that was very, very unscalable and impractical at the moment.
But we were trying at that point.
We were succeeding.
We had our first successes, I guess identifying the things that were meaningful for the e commerce aspect of the platform.
And then the product became much more balanced.
So not only could we create great learning experiences, online courses that people would love and they would use, but also we knew how to sell them effectively, how to create a great funnel and help people sell online courses.
So what we learned over time is how to make this more scalable and put this into the platform.
So at some point, Once we reached 100 customers, we stopped doing customizations or doing fewer of them and try to do things the normal way and just keep improving the platform.
So at that point we realized that we reached this elusive beast of product market fit this stage and we knew that we couldn't do customizations anymore.
But any valuable feedback, we should wait a bit and put it into the platform as a feature that all our customers would use.
Obviously there's a very delicate balance there and in many cases we made mistakes like either adding things too early or too slow.
But this didn't kill us.
And at that point we started protecting the platform.
So that was, that's when the platform really became a thing of its own top 10.
And we wanted to like preserve it and improve it and put it above any individual customer.

Omer (39:19.840)
So how have things been for you guys this year obviously with the pandemic?
How has that affected your business?

Panos Siozos (39:29.020)
Well, the pandemic is a once in a century event and we really, really hope that this will go away very, very fast.
But I have to admit that online businesses in general and elearning is our sector is one of those online businesses.
We're really helped by this thing.
So we really hope that it goes away fast.
But in any case we have to to be ready in case it doesn't.
And we try to help as many people as possible to make the transition into online businesses.
So as you can imagine, with the lockdown, all training overnight became online.
So if you couldn't do online training, Chances were you couldn't do any training, any training at all.
So I say that from our side, Covid was an accelerator.
So things that would have happened in 10 years really happened in two to three months.
So all the trends that we were seeing are still there.
So remote working isn't something that started with COVID We were a remote company from day one and more than 70% of our staff works from various places.
Greece, Cyprus and other countries.
So that's not a new thing.
Or people trying to do side projects or try to create side income for their businesses or try to portray themselves as experts and enhance their branding through the means of an online course or an ebook, these were new things.
But obviously with COVID all these trends really coalesced and all things really accelerated.
So it was some crazy times.
A few months with growth of about 15% per month, which also it was very difficult for our own people because as you can imagine, everybody was working from home, schools were closed.
So kids, families were trying to balance that and the well being of our employees and also trying to help many, many people, thousands of people who were panicking, who were losing their day jobs, who were losing access to their customers or ways to make money, who were trying to do what we call emergency education.
So you can imagine that you are a fitness center or, or, I don't know, a yoga salon and then overnight you don't have access to your customers and you are trying to make things do by using Skype, Zoom phone or an online course platform.
In certain cases there were lots of things happening at the same time.
We had our existing customers who already had understood the business models and had already set up some great online schools who started selling like crazy.
And in some cases they doubled or tripled in one to two months, like from mid March, effectively when the lockdown really started spreading around the globe to April or May, some schools went from 20 to 60,000 paying customers.
So as you can imagine, they doubled or tripled their revenues.
Also lots of people who were already thinking about online courses or it was, they seem, they thought that having an online course would be nice to have.
Immediately they realized that this is must have, they have to be online.
If they're not online, they're losing business, they cannot reach their customers.
So that was another huge growth factor.
But also there were other people who were trying to find a temporary solution like do emergency education.
As I mentioned, fitness, yoga, sports clubs, online summits and people who were doing conferences and events.
Everybody tried to transition into online business.
Model and try to find alternative revenue sources.
So we had to help them as well.
So one of the ways we did that is that obviously lots of people started using Zoom.
We know that's one of the huge success stories.
So our platform was mainly mostly tailored for self paced courses.
So people were recording their videos and then they were putting them up.
But we really understood that we needed to help people, even people that don't have ready made curriculum and they want to teach live courses.
So we gathered our team and in about three weeks we released a Zoom integration so that anybody can use our platform even for teaching live classes.
Either one on one small group or do a whole webinar with 500 people.
You can just plug in your Zoom account, even a free account, and you can start teaching overnight without having anything pre recorded.
So these are new, lots of new things happening.
Obviously that's a huge experiment.
Also, when it comes to online training, even the school system and the whole academia is trying to find its steps and its path in this crisis.
So there's lots of unexplored things and lots of potential that is ready for harvesting or at least for trying.

Omer (44:23.060)
Yeah, I think elearning is a fascinating space and you're right that one of the things that's happened with COVID it has accelerated a lot of that and been a forcing function for people to start thinking more about taking learning into elearning.
And I think if there's any kind of silver lining here, I hope that this is also going to be an opportunity for us to really do a much better job with, you know, children and education and using technology in better and smarter ways.
Because it feels to me like, I mean, my kids go through this, you know, a lot of the times they're still doing, you know, very, you know, synchronous education.
And do you really get that much value by staring at your computer while your teacher is talking live for an hour?
And are there, you know, smarter ways to teach and educate, you know, using, making use of technology?
So I'm hoping that, you know, we're going to see more and more of those things coming along and it's great to see what you guys are doing.
So we should wrap up, we should get onto the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
Just try to ask them as quickly as you can.

Panos Siozos (45:36.640)
Sure.

Omer (45:36.960)
Ready to go?
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

Panos Siozos (45:41.850)
That startups are a marathon, not a race.

Omer (45:46.170)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Panos Siozos (45:49.130)
Always Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I think it breathes innovation and radical way of thinking and approaching things.
And that's always useful, especially in days like that, in times like that.

Omer (46:01.370)
I love that book.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

Panos Siozos (46:09.260)
Patience.
I guess that's the best thing that you can have, especially with people who are the ones that need it the most.

Omer (46:19.180)
Yeah.
And I think your story also is a great example of patience and perseverance.
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Panos Siozos (46:28.460)
Sleep.
I think I missing a few years of sleep.
So that's whenever I realize, I know that lots of people, people are struggling with this, but I really know that when I can get, I don't know, seven hours of sleep, I know that the next day I'm gonna kill it.
So that's, that's the thing I miss the most.

Omer (46:48.580)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

Panos Siozos (46:53.300)
There's, there's lots of craziness.
Sometimes I think the most radical thing I think about is trying to do what we did now, again with the things that I know.
So I know that it might seem a bit strange or masochistic even, but I would try to build the same thing starting again with all the knowledge that we have that we have now.
That would have been a great experience.

Omer (47:23.310)
Yeah.
Very masochistic.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Panos Siozos (47:28.670)
Wow.
I don't know.
I guess I wore daily suit for five years when I was working in the European Parliament as a policy analyst and I haven't touched a tie since.

Omer (47:46.630)
Love that.
And what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Panos Siozos (47:50.710)
My family.
That's the thing that all of us, I guess the three co founders, because we're almost in the same age, raising small children and going through this with them.
Also going through Covid and the pandemic and the remote teaching.
This is the thing that keeps us working and keeps us alive.

Omer (48:14.190)
Awesome, Panas.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure and really enjoyed learning about the LearnWorld story and how you guys have built this business into multiple seven figure SaaS company.
And I think there's some really important lessons for a lot of people in terms of, you know, the three or four years of the journey from building the product to finding customers.
For a lot of founders, it's, it's, you know, that, that getting started is, is really hard and I think there's a lot of inspiration and advice that you shared there.
If people want to find out more about Learn Worlds, they can go to Learn Worlds.
And if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Panos Siozos (48:57.690)
They can just shoot me an email@helloearnwos.com I'm always there.
I'm always seeing all the incoming emails still, so we're happy to connect with anyone personally.

Omer (49:12.490)
Awesome.
Thank you so much Panos.
It's been a pleasure and I wish you all the best.

Panos Siozos (49:16.490)
Thanks for having me, Omer.
Stay safe.

Related Episodes

Joel Griffith, Browserless

$200 First Customer to $4M ARR Bootstrapped SaaS

Joel Griffith is a jazz trumpet player who taught himself to code. Before building his bootstrapped SaaS, he went through five or six failed B2C business ideas. Then he had a realization - the problems he understood best were the ones he dealt with every day as an engineer. The idea came from a side project. He was building a wishlist app and needed to pull product data from retail websites. That meant running a browser in the background to load pages and extract content. It was a nightmare. The browser would crash, run out of memory, and nothing worked reliably. He went to GitHub and sorted issues by most commented. They were all engineers struggling with the same thing. So he pivoted. Instead of building the wishlist app, he'd build the infrastructure to make browsers work reliably for developers. His first customer paid $200 a month. Total infrastructure cost was $50. He was profitable from day one. But growth was painfully slow. He ended his first year at about $1,000 in MRR. It took three years of working nights and weekends, writing blog posts, answering questions on forums, and building in public before he hit $500K in ARR. Even then, he waited an extra six months because COVID hit and he wanted a safety net before going full-time. He ran the business solo, getting to $60K in MRR as a one-person operation. But he eventually hit a wall - he didn't know how to hire, sell, or build a team. So he partnered with a small firm called Polychrome to handle the operational side of the business. Then AI changed everything. Joel had spent years building infrastructure for web scraping and testing. Now AI agents needed browsers to navigate websites, fill out forms, and interact with systems that don't have APIs. A whole new category of demand showed up almost overnight. Today, Browserless is approaching $4 million in ARR with a team of under 10 people. Joel has never raised a dollar. His bootstrapped SaaS survived Google Cloud and a $60M-funded competitor entering his space - his growth didn't even flinch because eight years of content and community had built something no amount of funding could replicate overnight.

Sam Darawish, Everflow

Why This Bootstrapped SaaS Founder Only Invested $400K

Sam Darawish is the co-founder and CEO of Everflow, a partner-marketing platform that helps companies manage their affiliate programs, influencers, and performance-marketing campaigns. Sam started in online marketing in the early 2000s, working at one of the first affiliate and pay-per-click companies in San Francisco. When the iPhone launched in 2008, he and his two co-founders saw a chance to bring what they had learned from desktop to mobile. They bootstrapped Moola Media, one of the first mobile affiliate networks, and built their own tracking platform because there were no good third-party options for mobile at the time. In 2013, Opera acquired Moola Media for $50 million. During the three-year earn-out, Sam kept hearing the same complaint from marketers: no one liked the existing affiliate-marketing software. When the earn-out ended in 2016, the founders invested a few hundred thousand dollars of their own money into Everflow and did not pay themselves for the first couple of years. The first six to seven months of their bootstrapped SaaS journey were spent talking to potential customers and refining ideas. Then they decided to go all in at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas, renting a booth with nothing more than screenshots of the product. Two prospects from that conference became their first paying customers - even though one made them sign an agreement to take over the software if the company failed. By early 2018, the bootstrapped SaaS hit $1M ARR with just 10 people and turned profitable. Today, Everflow has grown to nearly $30M ARR with 1,200 customers and 120 team members across San Francisco, Montreal, Amsterdam, and Dubai - all without raising external funding.

Kevin Wagstaff, Spectora

How 200 Free Websites Won Spectora's First Customers

Kevin Wagstaff is the co-founder of Spectora, a modern all-in-one platform for home inspectors that he and his brother Michael bootstrapped from $0 to $10M ARR before raising any funding. In 2016, Kevin was a realtor with a knack for marketing and SEO. His brother was a self-taught developer. When a friend mentioned how outdated home inspection software was, they spotted a niche no one was serving and went all in with $5,000 and a lot of grit. Getting their first customers meant winning trust in an industry deeply skeptical of technology vendors. Many inspectors were in their 50s or 60s, hated monthly subscriptions, and distrusted anyone trying to sell them something. So Kevin took a different approach - he started a separate blog called SmartHomeInspector.com 12 months before Spectora launched, writing content on how to market your business as a home inspector. He offered free SEO audits and even built websites for early customers - over 200 of them manually - just to get them talking about the software. Five or six of the first 10 customers were agency clients who came in through website projects and then asked about the software. Kevin and his brother also spent 10-12 hours a day in home inspector Facebook groups, answering questions genuinely without pitching. It took years of showing up before the skeptics softened. One pivotal moment came when a member of an exclusive mastermind group tested Kevin by requesting a 6am Sunday demo. Kevin said yes without hesitation, blew him away, and gained 50-75 referrals from that single relationship. Within two years, Spectora hit $1M ARR. They kept building from there - conferences, SEO, and word of mouth became the three pillars driving growth. By 2024, the company had grown to $27M ARR, serving over 12,000 first customers with a 100-person team.

←All Episodes