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From University Professor to MVP to Funded SaaS Entrepreneur with Lindy Ledohowski of Essay Jack

Lindy Ledohowski is the CEO and founder of Essay Jack, a fast-growing SaaS company that teaches learners how to improve their writing skills. She talks to Geordie about the events that led her into becoming a founder.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • The problem that Lindy and her co-founder wanted to solve when they launched Essay Jack
  • Who does Lindy and her team approach?
  • What is courseware?
  • Has Covid had a positive or negative impact on Lindy’s company?
  • How did Lindy and her team keep the business afloat without revenue at the heat of Covid?
  • How Lindy and her team build the Essay Jack MVP
  • Importance of having a business behind a product
  • Why did Lindy choose to raise money for the MVP?
  • How Lindy and her team got their first partnership

In this episode…

After being an educator for a long time, Lindy joined forces with her co-founder to develop the technology. This technology would help them solve one of the challenges they experienced in their classes. Listen to the podcast to understand the challenge in detail.

Essay Jack has evolved since its inception to accommodate different writing genres and can be used by students in various education levels. Unlike other tools in the market that help writers correct what they have already written, Essay Jack allows users to get writing ideas from scratch. Lindy discusses this idea in depth in this podcast.

Determining the effect a potential solution will have on your target customers is critical before embarking on its development. According to Lindy, they first sought to understand whether Essay Jack would be appropriate to both students and teachers.

From their research, they established that professors and teachers were among the first adopters of the solution. Many of the teachers were happy that Essay Jack could digitize and enhance their operations. Lindy and her team would later modify the program to ensure users could customize it with ease based on their needs.

When it comes to approaching potential users, Lindy says there is no universal way of doing it. Sometimes you may have to start from the top administration, while in other times, approaching individuals works better. Listen to the podcast to understand Lindy’s concept better. Lindy mentions a particular approach that she says works best. Listen to the podcast to know this approach and how it works. Lindy also gives a sales breakdown between the B2B and B2C concepts.

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has impacted businesses in different ways. Lindy admits that their business has not been spared. She says they are currently experiencing more growth in teachers, individual student subscribers, and classes. Lindy attributes this to uncertainty in large institutions, especially with the current lockdowns in some countries.

Many learning institutions are currently struggling with budgetary challenges and this is reflecting on the company’s growth. Lindy explains the effects the pandemic has had on her business. Listen in to find out and learn from her experience. Lindy gives Geordie a detailed explanation of how they build the MVP. At some point, they had to communicate their idea through pen and paper. Convinced that they had an excellent product, they needed to present it before interested people. Listen to Lindy as she reminisces about their visits to local schools in Kuala Lumpur and testing their product.

According to Lindy, the experience enhanced their confidence in the product. They would later promote their product in Canada at the University of Toronto before developing an advanced product. Seeing that Lindy had zero experience in the technology field, there are many things she was not conversant with. As a result, she needed to outsource her services to a qualified technical team.

Lindy says the product started growing, and they made money. She talks about their pricing then, in this podcast which you need to listen to find out. Lindy says they even had free services for B2C users. She talks about the MVP and how she managed to keep the cost down. Lindy also explains the process of building the MVP and converting it into a beta product extensively.

Lindy also talks about re-building the product. Find out the details from the podcast. She is happy that while numerous products are now available, their product is unique. Lindy concludes the podcast with tips about what they are doing to create real value and stand out among their competitors. Get all this information from the podcast.