When was your company founded & where is it located?
From our base in London UK 🇬🇧, we’re a small team who want to open up access to quality online teaching and learning. We started Steppit’s parent company – Workshop – in 2016, and launched Steppit in 2023.
What are past projects, failures, or successes you’ve had in your career?
At Workshop, we've produced high-end courses with a handful of partners ranging from world-leading cookery and art schools, to small coaches and creators in beauty and DIY.
Over the last few years, we've really seen Murphy's law in action (Sod's law to us English folks) – we knew exactly the courses we wanted to make, but every stage of the planning, filming, editing and uploading process uncovered a new set of brain-melting problems to solve. And that's not even mentioning the mountains of peculiar bugs and crashes we've faced as devs... 🤔
As we learned from our experiences and produced courses that tons of learners seemed to love, we also developed production methods that ended up as slick as the courses themselves. This is when we realised that we had all the component parts for the ultimate end-to-end online learning platform – one that could make it ridiculously easy to make top-quality learning experiences.
What is your team size?
5-10
Are you funded or bootstrapped?
We're a bootstrapped company, who have fed every penny we've made back into building our dream platform. We're currently considering funding options to help take Steppit to the next level. 🚀
What 3rd party tools is your product critically dependent on?
We have 2 main 3rd party dependencies – for our AI features, we plug into OpenAI's API, and for payment processing we use Stripe.
Where is your customer data stored?
UK
How many customers do you have today?
40k learners, 1k course creators
What’s the origin of the idea for your product?
Growing up, most of my classes were a real chore to get through. Occasionally though, a teacher would get out the Bunsen burners or microscopes and suddenly all that boring theory clicked into place and I could just learn the subject by doing it.
When online learning became a thing, I dreamed that it would let me pick up skills that same way. I hoped I could just open my phone or laptop, type in a skill and then find myself doing it like Neo's "I know kung fu" moment. 🥋😎
But I was constantly disappointed – it seemed like the only innovation that came with the internet was to film those long, overwhelming lectures and post them online, rather than to capture the magical times where learning was actually a fun and simple activity.
So that's where the idea for Steppit started – I just wanted a place where anyone could learn any skill by simply doing it one step at a time. Along the way, my team and I discovered that the key to making that possible was to make it easy for anyone to produce courses in this style, and so that's what we set out to do.
What problem is your product solving and how?
We're tackling 2 key problems around online learning:
#1. Most online courses aren't great 😵💫
#2. Great online courses are really hard to make 😤
We solve #1 by basing all learning on Steppit around active, step-by-step experiences (where learners are constantly doing and reflecting at each step, rather than getting overwhelmed with information and ultimately finding the whole learning experience one big headache), and tight-knit classes of learners (where they can exchange feedback, share ideas and give each other support throughout their course). Our goal is to give every learner on Steppit a truly great learning experience.
#2 is where we bring in our personalized AI assistant, no-edit course production workflow and growing base of resources to help creators fly through the course-making process.
In addition to this, we have a long list of features that we're working on behind the scenes to make it as easy as possible to make amazing courses. We'd love your help in laying out the future of Steppit – hope you'll check out our public roadmap or jump into our Discord channel to chip in. 💬
What’s the #1 thing you’re looking to gain from the AppSumo campaign?
A base of course creators who see what we're going for and want to join us for the ride, while letting us know all the feedback we need to develop their perfect platform. 👌
What are your plans with the customers, cash, and learnings from the AppSumo campaign?
Right now, our focus is to give course creators a fresh platform full of the tools and facilities they need to help them connect with their audiences, students and teams.
But as the number of courses created on the platform grows, our dream is to turn Steppit into a marketplace for stress-free teaching and learning – where creators can share their skills with an engaged and interconnected community, and learners can jump in and pick up any skill with ease. By creating courses on Steppit today, you’re joining us at the beginning our journey as we start sowing the seeds of the open platform we aim to become. 🌱
Any details to clarify about the deal?
Our goal is for Steppit to become a destination for online learning, with an open marketplace for creators to connect with learners. This means that Steppit isn't a whitelabel platform, and instead of charging high monthly fees, Steppit lets you sell unlimited courses through the platform on a revenue-share basis.
We operate on this model as we think it's important that we're incentivized to see your courses succeed, and we also take all of the burden around payment processing and sales taxes off your plate (which comes at a direct % cost to us per course sale). But we're also aware that our Sumo-lings are making an early investment in our success, and so we've decided to give all AppSumo tiers a preferential lifetime rev-share in comparison to our standard rates.
In addition to selling unlimited courses via Steppit, each tier comes with a number of monthly enrollments that are redeemable by directly inviting learners to classes inside the platform, or by using our Zapier integration to connect to any existing external platform. Alternatively, you can always create a public link to your course content which you can share freely. This means that you can distribute your courses whichever way works for you.
You'll also see AI credits offered with each tier. These can be used to generate content with your tailored AI assistant. To give you an idea of what these numbers mean, a Pro course plan costs 100 AI credits to generate, a session plan costs 50 credits, and most other tools cost 10 credits per use. As an additional bonus exclusive to Sumo-lings, we'll also be giving every purchaser a bonus 5,000 lifetime credits on top of their monthly limits. 🙌
