#176 - Elena Agaragimova, Founder at Bessern - A story about a startup that's transforming individual learning

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to take our personal growth to new levels in a way that's not only fun and easy to accomplish, but also highly accessible and affordable. My guest is Elena Agaragimova, Founder and Chief Growth Officer at Bessern

Elena is both an entrepreneur as well as an engaging, skilled trainer and talent development specialist. She is known for her ability to drive change within individuals and organizations that are looking to reach their potential and maintain their competitive edge in the business world. She has started her career in higher education but then shifted towards corporate learning and talent acquisition in the last few years of her career, providing talent onboarding and development to multinationals across the MENA region.

Elena has a strong passion for L&D, promoting creative and engaging workplaces, and all about optimizing performance through the development of others with a keen interest in neuroscience.

In 2019, she co-founded Bessern - and is on a mission to fast-track behavior change and disrupt the way people learn. They believe the future of learning is individualized and that learning is about action and consistency. Change is not easy for most of us; unless we create consistent routines (micro-actions) so that change does not depend on our motivation

This inspired me, and hence I invited Elena to my podcast. We explore what's broken when it comes to the traditional approach to Learning & Development. We dig into how people learn, and how technology can help people learn more, faster, and with more joy by taking a radically different approach. We discussed their journey from idea to go-to-market and how this could be done in a way that was financially attractive. Beyond that, we explore how they overcame one of their biggest challenges to creating app-stickiness - a critical ingredient to their growth strategy.

Here are some of her quotes:

Being self-funded, b2c is a very expensive market, a very saturated market. To spend the kind of marketing that you need to get noticed in a b2c market is very high. We purposely tried to avoid investments for as long as possible.

So we said; "How can we make/create a product and how can we test it in a way that makes sense for us financially?"

What we know and what we practice is that at the end of the day, it's about creating processes. Just like when you're building a startup - you're going through that agile methodology, where you're just continuously experimenting, like the lean methodology for startups.

And we apply the same for the personal growth, whether it's leadership development, etcetera. So it became more interesting for organizations, and we already had the network. So it was a much easier market entry for us to be honest with you.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How you can deliver transformative change to any industry even if it has not changed in decades
2. How, by offering a solution that's delivered through a blend of both technology and people can give you a highly defensible advantage.
3. That stickiness grows once individual users start to realize they get nuggets of value that they'd miss if they were gone
4. That creating new products to take to market can accelerate if you're architecting for reusability

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Elena Agaragimova
• Website Bessern