Investment Notes: Coassemble — Why we love it.
Read the full article: OneVentures Blog
After 8 years of primary school, 4 years of secondary school, 3 years in undergrad (and maybe even a Masters or PhD), most of us show up at our first real job with no idea what to actually do. The reality is, white collar or blue collar, almost all real training occurs on the job. Usually explained to you by the person who had to do it until you arrived.
This normally looks like a whiteboarding session or chat with the rules and steps of the key actions laid out. There is also usually a dated PowerPoint to quickly tap through and a mandated waiver to sign.
Our latest investment Coassemble makes this old school and ad hoc process infinitely better. It is a SaaS drag-and-drop microcourse creator with a Slack-like UX.
Imagine the manager of a NY pizza chain creating training materials for operating the ovens. He used to show each new teenager himself and hope they understood (and maybe be liable if they didn’t). With Coassemble he takes a video of himself using the machine and Airdrops it in, then adds in some Typeform questions to check they understood, followed by some slides on grilling times and a Docusign enabled document that covers off the OH&S requirement. Meanwhile he tracks all their progress on his dashboard and has it update his HR system once the training is completed. All in under an hour.
Every company has their own unique processes, so we’d think every company could use this tool (making a huge TAM) instead of standardised training materials, but after looking we can hardly find any SaaS companies going after (or creating) the market.
The company also has a great distribution strategy:
Aside from going direct, like Squarespace (a key inspiration) Coassemble’s users can create templates and sell them on to corporations, to be managed by the creator. One of these training managers used Coassemble’s authoring platform to create a course for a global pharma company that has 400 active users.
We were also super impressed with the drive of cofounders Ryan and Jude.
who saw the opportunity to spin the authoring tool part out of a traditional course delivery company. They also understand the domain intimately, having the right combination of education and tech backgrounds.
We were introduced to Coassemble by our friends Justin Lipman and Mark Velic at EVP.
They had been a driving force in getting the company to focus less on big TAFEs and more on SMEs which has driven growth of over 100% in this segment. EVP wanted Coassemble to stay focused on executing this growth and not run a wide-process before raising a big round later in 2021. We were all too happy to help providing a venture credit facility to help get them there.
Feel free to email me if you’d like to learn more — jmcgrath @one-ventures.com