We’re thrilled to introduce Camilo Rivera and Shane Maley, the dynamic leadership duo behind Apprendo, one of the innovative startups selected for this year’s L-SPARK Accelerator cohort. Apprendo stands out as a platform designed to change how professionals turn their expertise into valuable assets. In this post, we’ll dive into the minds behind the business who are not only reshaping education and professional growth but also expanding the ways knowledge can be shared and monetized.
About Apprendo:
Apprendo is an eCommerce platform for experts and professionals to monetize their knowledge.
Apprendo began serving education institutions and large companies generate new revenue from internal knowledge and digital assets. Apprendo enables not only universities but professionals to monetize their assets through subscription and eCommerce models.
The platform enhances engagement by simplifying content creation and expanding an experts reach to build their profile, all while providing secure data management, compliance, and easy integration with existing systems.
Camilo Rivera founded Apprendo Whitehorse, Yukon after years of seeing how sharing knowledge can increase sales. Having built internal solutions for companies like Pepsi and Walgreens and his years of running marketing teams and products, he recognized that a huge number of professionals could grow their business with this learning-led marketing.
For more details, visit Apprendo.io.
1. What’s the main problem your startup is solving, and how are you tackling it in a way that stands out?
At Apprendo, we believe that many people, especially experienced professionals, hold skills, know-how, and expertise that others desperately need and want. This is a distribution problem.
Apprendo is designed to take the expertise from your brain to your bottom line, transform it into profit, and spread its reach to those that need it.
Our eCommerce platform is designed for experts and professionals to effectively create, share and monetize this knowledge.
2. How did your product come to life, and what makes it different from what’s already out there?
Working with colleges and universities, we’ve been in a lucky position to work with so many people who have a ton of knowledge but struggle with getting their expertise out into the world. Apprendo has made a massive difference for faculty and departments who have started selling what we like to call their ‘idle assets’ – lecture recordings, interesting articles, that kind of thing. We’ve had professionals coming to us and asking for Apprendo to both showcase their knowledge and add new revenue streams. This is where our product’s ability to not only sell their content but create it makes all the difference. On Apprendo, every professional can essentially have their own podcast, video clips, content publishing that our technology leverages AI to make possible.
For professionals, taking the time to build a course is a huge burden, and it’s not the way that modern learners are looking to engage with material. Think instead about how difficult it is for so many people to write a blog post about their work, but how they light up talking about the same thing with a friend of colleague. That’s the lightning we seek to bottle with Apprendo.
3. Can you share a key lesson or challenge you’ve faced on your entrepreneurial journey and how did you work through it?
Consistency is the key. How can you break things down or change what you’re doing so that you can keep going every day and keep moving forward. There’s so much to juggle serving existing customers while building the future that will allow our business to scale much more quickly.
4.What are you most excited to learn or experience during the L-SPARK Accelerator?
Learning from previous founders and operators on how to execute in company building and sales – especially learning directly from those who have seen success before and know what it takes to reach it.
5. What’s been your biggest milestone so far, and how has it shaped where you’re headed?
Our first major milestone has been to validate the need professionals have for our product outside of our initial education market. The L-Spark team has helped us blow up our biggest blocker – content creation. Before, we’d hear from someone that they would love to add new revenue with Apprendo but they didn’t think they had content that they could share. In the past two weeks we’ve adjusted our process and tweaked our platform so that professionals can now record a conversational interview with Apprendo and we publish the content directly for them. We’re still tweaking this, but already it’s showing to be a much better way to enable experts to be entrepreneurs outside of their service business.
Camilo and Shane’s story offers a glimpse into how passion for solving real-world challenges can evolve into an innovative platform that helps professionals unlock new opportunities. As they embark on this next stage of growth with the L-SPARK Accelerator, we’re excited to see what new heights the company will reach.
The Founders:
Camilo Rivera, CEO
Camilo brings a unique combination of technical expertise and business acumen that has driven Apprendo’s success. His background in software engineering, complemented by years of experience managing tech, education, and media companies, provides him with a comprehensive understanding of both the technological and business aspects of our industry. This perspective has been crucial in developing Apprendo from concept to a thriving product that empowers experts to diversify their revenue streams, gain deeper customer insights, and leverage their active and idle resources.
His 19 years of experience in education transformation have been instrumental in securing partnerships with prestigious institutions like USC and closing deals with major corporations such as Walgreens and PepsiCo supporting their learning and growth strategy.
Camilo’s global market understanding, evidenced by successful deployments in Mexico and Colombia, has been key to our international growth. He’s personally led the development of long-term client relationships, resulting in high customer support NPS levels and low churn rates. This client-centric approach, combined with my experience in managing cross-functional teams and implementing tailored agile methodologies, has enabled us to pivot strategically based on market needs.
His track record of aligning product development directly with client needs, coupled with data-driven decision-making in both product-led growth strategies and enterprise sales, uniquely positions him to lead Apprendo towards continued innovation.
Shane Maley, COO
Shane has more than 15 years as a founder and in leadership and product roles.
Always focused on the opportunity to improve access, before Apprendo Shane built, led, and launched Canada’s first jurisdiction-wide digital health platform. In response to COVID-19 Shane scaled that program and was appointed to the Prime Minister’s Virtual Care working group, advising on the allocation of $240M in funding. Shane joined Camilo as a co-founder of Apprendo to open access to non-degree education and provide education entrepreneurs with the tools they didn’t have to create, manage, market, and sell expertise.
Shane co-created with Harley Finkelstein the Shopify entrepreneur in residence program while working as a physiotherapist and has benefited from working within Shopify to understand how to create new entrepreneurial communities.
