Lemoney Learning: The Fun and Effective Way to Teach Financial Literacy

Intro: [00:00:12] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Sandy Springs, Georgia. It’s time for Sandy Springs Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:29] This episode of Sandy Springs Business Radio is brought to you by Mirability, providing unique IT solutions, leveraging cloud, AI and more to solve business problems. Here’s your host, Erik Boemanns.

Erik Boemanns: [00:00:43] Hi,thank you. Yep. Erik Boemanns’s here with Mirability. And today we have a special guest. His name is Christian Doetsch and he’s with Lemoney Learning. And we’re going to be talking a little bit about what his business does and, and his background and what brought him to, to that business. So maybe give you give us introduction Christian.

Christian Doetsch: [00:00:57] Sure. Thank you Eric. It’s excited to be here. Uh, Lemoney Learning is a financial literacy first, but now we’re moving into more social studies K-12 education platform. So it’s myself. And there’s two other gentlemen in Texas. And right now we’re focused in Texas. And we realized there’s a huge problem with financial literacy in this country. We’re seeing a lot of kids graduating from high school, graduating from college. They have no idea how to balance a checkbook. They don’t understand exactly what credit card interest is. They don’t really understand is a student loan for $80,000 at 7%? Like, is that a lot? Is that a little? Can I afford that working at a, you know, at a Starbucks or you know what how much that is. And we realized there’s this issue. We realize it’s not really being taught in K-12 schools yet, but but they’re working on it. And so we’re limiting learning comes in is we’re working on building resources to help the students directly, but more importantly, help the teachers to make sure that they understand comprehensively what they’re doing, what things to teach, what are the critical points. And so that’s that’s kind of what our vision was, was to to help with this problem.

Erik Boemanns: [00:02:07] Gotcha. Yeah. And that’s I think an awesome. Mission and definitely want to dive in to some of the details. But let’s even take a step back and talk maybe a little bit about your own background and and what led you to I think you said your co-founder of Liberty Learning. So what led you to that path?

Christian Doetsch: [00:02:23] Yeah, I’m the co-founder and CTO, so I’m on the technical side. I went to Georgia Tech and got a computer science bachelor’s degree. I spent the first was about ten years of my life, of my working career, rather working as a software developer. So I was hands on writing code. I was an intern first. They liked me and kept me on after I graduated. So. Uh, spent 6 or 7 years writing, writing code, and then a few more years as a team lead and then a couple more years as a manager. So I’m very much on the technical side of the software development process. And, um. Basically, I realized, you know, I’ve kind of hit a plateau here. There’s not a ton of room for growth at the previous company I was at, and I’ve always been interested in entrepreneurship and starting businesses. I’ve read every business book you could imagine, and I’ve listened to, you know, tons of successful business people talk about their processes and their struggles. And, and I decided, you know, that’s that’s definitely the thing that I want to do. So I already was kind of open to this. And then these two gentlemen approached me and one of them I went to high school with and he said, hey, I don’t know if you remember me from what was that like 15, 14 years ago? I’m not sure if you remember me. And but we’re starting this thing. Here’s what we’re doing. And I’m like, all right, education software, that’s what. That’s what I’ve worked in my whole career. Um, financial literacy, which I’m passionate about and, and think that it’s a critical problem and it’s a startup and I can get on the ground floor, be a co-founder. It’s like, all right, sign me up. I’m in. So those conversations happened about October of 2022. And then in March of 23 was when we decided to to drop our full time jobs and go, go do this full time. And so I’ve been there just over a year now, really just hitting our anniversary mark.

Erik Boemanns: [00:04:08] Yeah. That’s interesting. I was going to ask how old it is. So one year, one year doing it. All right. Well, yeah. Congratulations on the anniversary.

Christian Doetsch: [00:04:15] Thank you.

Erik Boemanns: [00:04:16] Um, so I’m curious, since you’re let’s talk a little bit about the financial literacy portion. Um, I think that’s I personally think that’s a super critical topic, but maybe tell share with the listeners a little bit more about kind of what motivates you there. You said it was a passion of yours.

Christian Doetsch: [00:04:31] Um. It is. Yeah. I was very fortunate growing up. My mother is she’s been the CFO. She was an accountant, CPA. She’s done all all of the financial stuff on her side. And so I felt very fortunate that I grew up with a solid understanding of, of compound interest. And what happens if you invest a dollar when you’re 18? What does that turn into when you retire at 65 or 70? And the answer is about $88 if you start when you’re 18. Um, and of course, if you wait until you’re in your 50s or 60s to start thinking about retirement, you lose out on all that compound interest. And so I realized like, well, hang on, like this, this is huge. And it’s high schoolers and college kids that need to understand this so that they know start putting away 5% of your paycheck. 10% of your paycheck is all you need, and you can be a millionaire by the time you retire. So I just felt like, this is there’s such an easy and easy answer for a lot of these problems. And it’s education. It’s making sure that, you know, ahead of time so that you’re on a solid foundation. Um, and I realize a lot of my friends didn’t understand it. I work with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Atlanta, which is a great organization. I’ve been matched with my little brother for just over ten years now, and I think that’s a big problem with the youth that that we’re serving there is that they’re in families that don’t historically know these things. And so it it just seems like there needs to be some way to educate the kids better.

Erik Boemanns: [00:05:55] Gotcha. And I guess what I’m curious about is what’s Lemony’s particular approach to that. What’s different about that from other courses out there or programs?

Christian Doetsch: [00:06:03] Yeah, that’s a great question. So the the biggest thing is that we are aligned specifically to the state curriculums. So we have we have an education people on our staff that review to make sure that we are, um, like pedagogically correct, to make sure that we are aligned to the state standards. And so that when a teacher right now we’re mostly in Texas, a teacher in Texas opens up our materials. It doesn’t just say, hey, here’s a topic about credit cards. It says the Official Texas Standard Teaks 13 B states that a student must differentiate between a credit card and debit card. And it’s like that’s the exact standard and that’s exactly what we do. So that’s a that’s a huge one, is that we were directly mapped to state standards like that.

Erik Boemanns: [00:06:47] Gotcha. And so are you producing the actual curriculum and the materials. Are you the platform that delivers it like what is what is how that all work.

Christian Doetsch: [00:06:54] Yep. Yeah. We’re we do both. So the lemony learning platform right now is a free platform. And starting in about a month, we will have a premium option that has even more more content has AI technology. So you can ask, ask our proprietary AI questions and have it answer things. So if a student asks you a question in class, maybe you’re not sure exactly what the answer is. You can ask the AI and it’ll give guidance. Um, and so there’s a host of premium features that we’re working on and special content. But but yeah, to answer that question, we we produce the content in-house. We have it audited and we have it verified by education professionals. And then we host that on our platform. And then that’s where the teachers go in. They say, oh, this is the class I’m teaching. Here’s a list of classroom activities of projects, video resources. And and we’re working on a whole bunch of other exciting new things coming up too.

Erik Boemanns: [00:07:47] Very cool. And I know you’ve only been doing this, like you said, a year, but have you already started to see the impact that it’s making on your target market?

Christian Doetsch: [00:07:54] We are seeing a little bit, yeah, we the first year of an education platform that’s that’s in a. K 12 sectors is difficult because there’s some pretty big players in that field already. But fortunately, by having this sort of free model first we’ve we’ve gotten I think we’re almost to 400 teachers already in Texas just in our first year, because it took us from March of last year until August to build the platform. And so really, we’re towards the end of our first school year, we’ve already got over a thousand users total. We’ve got about 700 students and about 400 teachers on the platform so far. And they’re telling us they love the material. They can’t wait to, you know, we’re getting a lot of referrals of kind of authentic referrals from teachers up to the district level and up to the region level that are helping us move and make sales just because the teachers love the content so much. And so, yeah, I think from from their perspective, it’s making it a lot easier for them to teach the material which is which is impacting the students.

Erik Boemanns: [00:08:51] That’s awesome. Are there any kind of good stories to share already? Out of that, you said you’ve got some feedback already. That you can share. Maybe.

Christian Doetsch: [00:08:59] Yeah, yeah. I’m trying to think of some, some specifics. I think one of the, one of the cool features is that the. There’s a there’s kind of a dashboard where the teachers can view the students and the progress they’re making. They can see what the what sorts of grades the kids get on the, you know, we have pretests and course tests and we have, um, little checks on learning throughout the thing. And so, um, they just said that it’s useful to have that as a, as a practice because a lot of the teachers just prefer like a repetition of, like just take the same answer, the same questions over and over again or answer similar questions to really hammer in the material. So that’s that’s one thing that they’ve enjoyed, is having that platform and knowing that they don’t have to, because a lot of our competitors are huge and they cover the whole country, but they provide more material than it’s needed. And the teachers is kind of stuck deciding which of these align to the, to the curriculum. And so the fact that the fact that they can just plug and play, we have a pacing guide that basically, uh, the teacher looks at it and it says on day one of class, here’s what you do on day two of class. Here’s here’s an activity. Here’s the topic to cover. Here’s some questions to ask. And then we provide a PowerPoint presentation that’s just like, hey, this is the day two PowerPoint. And you just go through and it makes it super easy for the teachers. And so yeah, we’ve just heard we’ve just heard that they love that they’re they’re really loving that material. Awesome.

Erik Boemanns: [00:10:18] Yeah. And listening it sounds like there are. But I’m curious if you’ve stated them in kind of a clear principle thing, but some principles that are guiding you as you’re thinking about the product, as you’re designing it, as you’re building it?

Christian Doetsch: [00:10:31] Yeah, that’s that’s a great question. Um. We’re we’re pretty much focused. You know, we’ve and from where we started we were going to be and this is just over the course of a year, we’ve pivoted from being like a banking platform to help banks reach out to teachers. That was kind of our first thing. And so we started talking to the banks and started talking to some teachers to try to make partnerships, because banks have a handful of incentives to to give back to their communities. And we went from there and realized like, well, no, that’s not quite right. And then the teachers were just like, well, we don’t need the banks. We just need something to help us with. And so that, um, that kind of started down that path and we realized pretty quickly that, like, the biggest principal is like, we need to make sure the teachers are rock solid in what they’re doing, because if the teacher is unsure, like our expectation is that the students will know that they’ll they’ll kind of tell, like, are we sure this this person is as confident as they should be in that? And so I think delivering the confidence to the teacher to, to empower them to do the teaching is, is probably one of our core core. Values. Gotcha.

Erik Boemanns: [00:11:40] Very good. Um. You mentioned your background is technology. 15 years, I think, of technology experience that you’re bringing to this startup. Is there anything unique in in this startup or in your own experience about. And a learning management has huge companies like you mentioned and content. What are some unique technical challenges that you’re facing as you as you build this startup? Or surprises, perhaps?

Christian Doetsch: [00:12:08] Yeah. The one of the biggest, the biggest technical challenges of being in a startup is having such limited resources, because at the previous company where I was for for ten years, we had a comprehensive team, we had a rock solid revenue foundation. And so if we needed to buy new products or if we needed to buy new, if we needed contractors for a little bit, or if we needed to hire more people to do a project, all of that was no problem. We could justify it and we would and we would get what we needed. But now it’s just there’s so many limited resources and we have to make really tough decisions about, okay, there’s there’s five features that would be fantastic to have. And we don’t have time for five. We can do one and we can maybe start a second. Right. And so it kind of shifts if you think about something that has, you know, benefits in the long terme but costs in the short terme versus benefits now but costs later, it kind of shifts where that where that line is to like we need something to sell right now. And even if it’s not perfect and even if it’s going to require more technical debt, is what we would call it, some things we have to do later to, to address it. It’s like we have to do those now just to, to kind of stay alive. And so that being in survival mode I think is, is a challenge compared to being in we’re stable and we’re just trying to be as efficient as possible. Right.

Erik Boemanns: [00:13:26] It really is its own kind of financial literacy at that point. Right?

Christian Doetsch: [00:13:29] Yeah, exactly. It really.

Erik Boemanns: [00:13:30] Is. Yeah. Startups as opposed to to personal finances. Yeah. And I think Atlanta has a strong startup community. I don’t know if you’re, um, born out of any of the incubators here in Atlanta. You said you’re in Texas.

Christian Doetsch: [00:13:42] So, yeah, we’re mostly we’re mostly in Texas because that’s where we knew we had the most inroads into their education departments. And we have, um, we have more, I guess, content knowledge of their courses and their curriculum. And, and since that’s kind of our starting point, but we are looking at moving into Georgia in the next school year or two.

Erik Boemanns: [00:14:02] Gotcha. And as we think about Atlanta’s startup community, I think financial literacy could be an it’s an interesting topic, right, because that is such a key thing to, as you said, getting a startup off the ground to a success. But also, are there other words that you have advice looking back over the last year that you might have for people who are thinking about starting up their own business in 2024?

Christian Doetsch: [00:14:25] Yeah. I mean, from the from the technical side, one thing that I’ve had to kind of reel myself back in is that you you can’t afford to optimize a process if you’re not sure that process is going to, to to live on. Right. If you’re still trying to find the product market fit and you’re not exactly sure what what it is as a as a technology person, I’m always thinking of like, how can I make this automatic? How can I completely automate this? And how can I make it more efficient and how can I optimize it? And the sad truth is that like at this stage, we don’t have the resources to do that. I can’t spend two more weeks making this thing an instant process. I just have to deal with the doing it manually, you know, spending 15 or 20 minutes on it once or twice a week. So it’s there’s things like that that, that you can’t, you can’t afford to do that. Um, and but you have to so you have to do things manually first. And then once you figure out what things are working, that’s when you can start to improve the efficiency of them. Yeah. That’s a that’s a big thing. We’ve we’ve learned.

Erik Boemanns: [00:15:27] Right. And. I think. Throughout the conversation process has come up quite a bit, and the ways of either automating it or just building more process into what you’re doing. Mhm. Um, you had mentioned to me that you are starting to get your private pilot license as well, and I think that obviously that’s a very process oriented career. That’s. Um, and so I’m curious, do you see an overlap there. Is that drive. Those two things relate to you. And in that regard or is there a connection?

Christian Doetsch: [00:15:57] Yeah, there definitely is a lot of points of similarity and kind of metaphors between the two. And, um, process is certainly one of them. And I know one of the other topics that you talk about occasionally is like security. And I would say that that I think is the number one biggest overlap between the software business or really software development in general. And aviation is the fact that if if you take shortcuts in the wrong places and if you don’t follow the rules as they should be, there can be pretty devastating consequences. I mean, we’ve seen that happen with some of the Boeing issues that we’ve had. We’ve seen that happen in plenty of, uh, small engine planes where people, you know, make little mistakes. And the overall way in aviation that we kind of conceptualize the those those safety procedures, we call it the Swiss cheese model. Are you familiar with that?

Erik Boemanns: [00:16:53] Fairly. So maybe give me a little bit on that.

Christian Doetsch: [00:16:55] Yeah. So the idea is if you think about Swiss cheese, it’s it’s got holes in it. Right. It’s not it’s not perfect. It’s not a solid. It’s not a solid block of security that you would want it to be. But the idea is that the holes are placed in such a way that you still can’t get all the way through the block of cheese. And so even though it’s not a perfectly stable solid block, there are enough layers of it that you should be like. You should be safe, and it helps. And so an example is, um, the planes that fly around in Atlanta, if you’re within 30 miles of a big airport like Hartsfield Jackson, you have to have a transponder that says, hey, here’s where I am. And so that’s that’s thing one, right? We have that thing two is depending on the airspace you’re in, you have to announce where you are. You have to say like, hey, here’s where I am. So you’re you’re verbally announcing it over the radio. Um, thing three is we have ATC, the air traffic controllers that are monitoring things and can say like, hey, look out. We have automated systems that say, hey, there’s a plane over there. You know, you need to drop 1000ft right now. And so we have all these different systems so that even if one of them fails, even if I don’t notice a plane, there are other people. There are all these other layers that are watching out. Yeah. And I think that’s there’s a huge a huge metaphor there. And that’s, that’s similar to how software is as well. And architecture.

Erik Boemanns: [00:18:14] Right. I was going to say if we could land that metaphor right to, to tie it back into software development. Yeah. What does that look like? And I certainly can see the corollaries between air traffic control and perhaps a security operations center. Right. And and the planes and software delivery, all those the dev DevOps process. Exactly. Yeah. Are there any particular examples, even preliminary or with lemony that you’ve seen where that mindset, that that process orientation has helped prevent a bad thing from happening, or in software specifically or in the companies you’ve worked with?

Christian Doetsch: [00:18:47] Oh, yeah. Yeah, all the time. I mean, there at your if you think about kind of like an onion, right. You’ve got layers of security. Um, at the outermost layer, the entire internet is just spamming. You’re getting bombarded with, with internet requests that are all just spam. And so there’s like a firewall towards the outside of that that’s filtering most of that. So there’s there’s a layer and then inside you have to have certain I don’t want to get too technical, but there are certain tokens that you have to have just to, just to get in to make a request. And then once you make the request, there’s validation in the code that’s doing that and that’s on, you know, one part of the code base. And then another part is going to confirm that that’s the token you’re using is the valid one. And so it’s it’s really the same the same principle. It’s just we have all these different layers of, of security. So that even if something sneaks in here we’ve got another layer somewhere else that says, well hang on, that’s that’s not right. That guy snuck in, um, kick him out.

Erik Boemanns: [00:19:41] Yeah. And I think. Security is is critical to every application, every company in the world. Right? At this point, it is, um, it can’t be an afterthought for a startup, for a multinational. And related to security is privacy, obviously, as well, because we’re trying to protect people’s privacy. And I think people may maybe don’t realize, and you don’t have to go into great detail about it. But education has its own special privacy concerns as well. I assume you’re looking at that.

Christian Doetsch: [00:20:07] It does. Yeah, Coppa and FERPA and a handful of those acronyms. And yeah, we’ve made we made very uh, we made decisions that made it a little bit more difficult for us because of, of these security and privacy concerns. So for example, it would be much easier for us if we just asked the students for their email addresses and we let them log in that way. But email address is one of the things that you have to be super careful of for anybody that’s under 13 years old. And so now we’re like, all right, well, do we try to have two different login screens and we try to migrate kids? What about when they turn 13 and they’re already in the system? And it just it’s a huge mess. And so instead we said all right never mind no email addresses. That’s that’s too much identifying information. And we just have that. Now. The teachers basically just create the account on behalf of the student and let them let them log in that way with with no email address.

Erik Boemanns: [00:21:00] Gotcha. So it’s more of a privacy by design. Exactly. Yeah.

Christian Doetsch: [00:21:04] And so we start there. And then of course, as we talked about before, we have all those different layers before you can even get into the database. And so that’s that’s where all the private data lives. And so making sure that that’s secure having the the database passwords rotate automatically. So even if someone is trying to to get in they, they couldn’t even, even if they tried to get the right password. It’s not going to be the right password anymore. And it makes it just difficult, difficult for any of that to happen.

Erik Boemanns: [00:21:29] Very cool. So we talked a little bit about your background. We’ve talked about lemonade. I’m curious, is there anything in particular that makes you super excited about lemonade that gets you up every day that that brings you to shows like this to talk about it? What drives you?

Christian Doetsch: [00:21:44] Yeah. Um, well, in the last few months, we’ve been experimenting with with AI, and I mentioned that that’s a, that’s a feature we have coming soon, and that’s just been such a groundbreaking, revolutionary technology that over really just the last 18 to 24 months has, has really changed a lot, a lot of the business landscape. I think there’s going to be a lot of shake ups in the next five years. And so I’m excited that we have the bandwidth and the capacity to explore that, and to see how we can leverage AI to help teachers teach students better. So I spend right now I’m spending a lot of time on on AI trying to figure out whether we can use that and how we can use that to, uh, basically evaluate what, how the students are doing. And instead of having a complicated report that says, here are some topics that some students could use help with or, you know, doing it kind of the traditional way. If we just unlock an AI and have it, have it look at the types of questions the students are getting right and wrong. Um, there’s a there’s a world where a teacher logs in and the AI says, hey, like, three of your kids are completely missing these questions and a bunch of other ones are struggling with them. You should spend half of today talking about this. Or here’s a classroom activity you can do that we’ve detected will improve their students knowledge of, um, you know, credit scores, right?

Erik Boemanns: [00:23:03] That’s I think that’s fascinating because I, I believe that education had a more negative reaction toward AI when it first came out than positive, right? Because of cheating, because of even I would say even teachers may feel threatened by AI’s potential. What’s been kind of the perception that you’ve seen from the market with your product having AI capabilities?

Christian Doetsch: [00:23:22] Yeah, the things like cheating, detection, that’s just going to be tough. That’s going to be difficult to do because even if you don’t, even if they don’t just copy paste it in, they can still use that to answer questions. They can still use that to generate essays and then just go in and modify things so that it doesn’t feel as obviously AI written. And so yeah, we have seen some of that, but I think. I think as AI becomes more normalized, the those sorts of fears will kind of will will subside a bit. And I think there’s I can’t imagine a world where teachers don’t exist. I think that kids will always need to be taught by a person. There’s and for all sorts of, you know, developmental psychology. Like there’s there needs to be teachers, a human involved. And so I think teachers are probably one of the safest professions, I would say. And so I’m hoping that instead of AI replacing teachers, it’ll really just serve to augment them and and help them be, you know, five, ten times more effective in what they’re doing.

Erik Boemanns: [00:24:22] Right. That makes sense. And I like kind of what you were suggesting earlier, where it can even tailor the curriculum, the materials to the student, right, based on what they’re how they’re interacting with your system. Exactly.

Christian Doetsch: [00:24:33] Yeah. Um, we’re working on a way for an AI to be able to basically pre grade essays and point things out to the teacher. So that. Right, because my, my dad is a teacher and my stepmom was a was a middle school counselor. And the amount of work they do after the workday is absolutely insane. And especially in some of these social studies and English, these courses where it’s not like, hey, do a math question, did they get it right? But you’re reading a five page essay for 30 kids in your class and you’ve got four classes. That’s that’s a lot of pages to read. And so while we wouldn’t advocate for just letting the AI do the grading, it would be helpful if it pointed things out to help draw attention to to patterns that the student might be making to help the teacher. Again, notice these things and, you know, improve their ability, right?

Erik Boemanns: [00:25:22] It makes sense. I can see that AI enablement as opposed to replacement. Exactly.

Christian Doetsch: [00:25:29] Yeah.

Erik Boemanns: [00:25:30] Um. So as we’re thinking about liberty, we think about your background. I any kind of trends that you you want to I is a trend. I is a future thing. But you’re doing it today. Anything else that you want to just kind of talk about that. If you’re going to a vision quest where where things are headed.

Christian Doetsch: [00:25:48] Yeah, I mean, it it feels like I now is kind of where the internet was in the late 90s or the early 2000. It’s like, yeah, it’s it’s new and it’s this whole big thing and a bunch of VC and private equity money are going into it, and we’re not entirely sure how it’s all going to pan out, but it’s obviously already disrupted, disruptive. And yeah, I think there will be it’s difficult to predict exactly what, but I think that the disruptions will continue until we kind of reach a more stable equilibrium after we account for for what I can do.

Erik Boemanns: [00:26:22] Gotcha. And you feel like. Lemony is well poised to take advantage of that disruption.

Christian Doetsch: [00:26:27] I think so, yeah.

Erik Boemanns: [00:26:29] Awesome. Um, any kind of. Parting words of wisdom in terms of what lemony does or where.

Christian Doetsch: [00:26:36] No other than go to lemon learning.com. It’s spelled l e m o n e y. So, like lemon, honey and lemon learning.com. And you can if you want. Even if you’re not a teacher, you can create a free account. You can look at our materials, you can check out our pacing guide, see how we’re teaching it. Eventually we’re going to start targeting home school because we think that’s that’s another huge opportunity here. Um, so yeah, let me know Learning.com check it out.

Erik Boemanns: [00:27:01] Okay. Well, thank you for your time today. I appreciate you being on and talking about lemon and your background and enjoyed the conversation.

Christian Doetsch: [00:27:08] Absolutely. Thank you very much for having me.

Erik Boemanns: [00:27:10] Thank you.