LEAN Social

LEAN Social is an online productivity ecosystem where youth can livestream their work sessions with others and earn rewards for their study time

As Asian students, we’ve long tolerated the traditional education experience. Rote learning, Disorientation, Societal Pressure, we have been through it all. The long-term consequence is that students become dependent on extrinsic factors (social or parental pressure) and lose sight of what they truly enjoy studying.

Every single economics/education professor we have talked to (about 10) have given full support for the project in the potential of behavioral economics to incentivize long-term motivation. 

When looking for a business model, we found an opportunity in the online study room model, which has managed to grow exponentially to about 10 million users since the COVID-19 pandemic. We noticed that most of the traffic was coming from Asia - yet all solution providers were from the West. Our team is confident that we will build a superior product than our Western counterparts exactly because we are a regional team that deeply understands regional needs. 

Because we are fairly young, we can easily relate to the mindset of our target users, the young adult, and come up with solutions that match their needs the most. 

Website: www.lean.social

Deck: https://bit.ly/LEAN_publicdeck

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj2fbucVwJQ

Introducing: LEAN Social - an online study ecosystem where students can livestream their learning sessions solo or with others and earn tokens for their study time. These tokens can be used to redeem rewards from entertainment brands (fun) or youth education organisations (growth). LEAN incentivizes students’ learning with rewards by brands that can post for free to attract customers. We address the missing link between what students like and the learning journey. Furthermore, we connect with educational institutions to provide growth rewards that foster self-directed learning.

The platform has 2 main features: 

• Learn (time) to Earn Detection: a camera records the students’ learning behaviours and rewards them with tokens for their study time. Students also benefit from peer accountability when having others observe their study session

• Community Learning Feature: students can post whatever academic questions they struggle with. Students who provide correct answers and are upvoted by other students will also earn tokens for their contribution. 

Our learn-to-earn platform impacts the whole learning journey, making it not just fun but an entirely more productive experience. We aim to revolutionise the way students view studying, cultivating intrinsic motivation along the way. Educational payoffs are not inevitable, but we are here to make it so.

As can be seen in the case of Vietnam, domestic workers are put in a fierce struggle with foreigners as they are challenged to fulfill an international standard of vocational or technical skills within the context of being economically disadvantaged which leads to their disparities in reaching quality education. Imagine the issue of disparities as a ‘knot’, the number of economic disadvantages can be depicted as the quality of how many times the knot is tied, which makes it more difficult to be unknotted. Having the chance to visit rural regions in Vietnam, economic shortages is the reason driving the kids and teenagers to stop schooling and spend their life as unskilled labor. In the meantime, in the more developed areas such as Ho Chi Minh City or Ha Noi, the majority of learners do not share equal opportunity and access to quality education as the amount to attend those classes is targeted at the elite. It thus shapes the overview of the Vietnamese workforce, and also of other developing countries, as those with cheap and low-skilled. There are two main roots of the problem tree that we can look into, first the learner’s motivation and second the demand of business. 

In that case, our team would suggest deploying the platform bridging those with tenacious endeavors and directly related stakeholders who are probably giving the industry's demands, such as recruiters and educators. The platform is open for all to access for free. The unpaid version provides users with unlimited video conferencing with studying peers. While sharing video, the user's quality time of studying can be recorded by AI and the results can be exchanged for training sessions or internship opportunities. That scene of hard work pays off not only for the industrious but helps encourage the communities to approach the needs of the marketing and put their effort on the right track. We strongly believe that our startup idea can make a significant contribution to SDG 4 and will be a radically different approach to the edtech market, where most solutions are either boring, not student-centered, or not community driven.

We are also trying to build a community where students can help uplift each other by means such as creating a study session or forming mentor-mentee relationships. The concept of community learning can be explored hugely and there are numerous aspects that we expand on. For example, a mentor-student model where students can request another student for a session to learn from one another and the student who provides it to other students will gain achievements/awards/rewards. Another example could be a homework help platform similar to stackoverflow for non-coding community discussions. These are features that are planned to be included in the further roadmap. The concept of incentivizing community learning could be very helpful for students as well as companies who are looking for hardworking/outstanding individuals. 

LEAN Platform is a team for students, by students. We are students from many universities in Vietnam, Hong Kong, and the US. Our team members come from many different backgrounds with knowledge and experience in many areas, giving us a more well-rounded perspective on the learning experience of young people today. Because we are fairly young, we can easily relate to the mindset of our target users, the young adult, and come up with solutions that match their needs the most. 

Our founders’ combined experience also covers areas in education and technology. Our CTO Zi Hao Lam is a full-ride scholarship recipient at The University of Hong Kong and has 3 years of experience in full-stack development. Lam has built a full-fledged LMS before and is currently a solution architect at Amazon. Our CEO Ky Nam has over 3 years of experience working in civil society, academia, and corporate environments focusing on impact projects such as education and green energy. He has received recognition from his government via an honorary consultation branding position, and the international community as a Europe-ASEAN leader from Vietnam.

We have tested our prototypes with 200 users and interviewed 60 to inform the development roadmap of our project. We have also hosted online study groups with more than 200 daily active members and 2000 monthly active members to learn about their remote learn needs. The following are the conclusion we have gathered from the data:

Background: 

• Age: 15 - 24 (GenZ learners & young professionals)

• Gender: Male - Female

• Career: Student & White-collar workers

• Location: Southeast Asia + Urban area

• Income: Middle class

Psychographic: 

• Needs: space for studying/working and  network connecting with productive tools

• Wants: incentives and motivation to study/work/be productive

• Gains:

  • Real-life incentives (Education rewards, discount vouchers, opportunities)

  • Personal space with personal customizations

  • Pains:
    

  • Inconvenience of separating tools

  • Little motivation to be productive in work/study 

  • Feeling lonely when working/studying alone

Motivation:

• Successful in studying and career development 

• More opportunities in studying/working and developing themselves 

Personalities:

Daily activities:

• Spend hours for deep working/study and focusing 

• Always tend to find a space for work and not be bothered by surroundings

Buying tendencies: 

• Apps for personal development and management

• Leisure spending - food and beverages

• Online/Offline engagements: events, streamers, influencers etc

• Lifestyle spending - fashion, accessories

Pain points: 

• Lack of motivation to learn

• Feeling lonely when engaging in remote work/study

• Frequently used productivity tools (notes, to-do list, music, timer, etc) are on separate platforms or too complicated to use

• Have a need for peer-accountability in productivity

• Statistics for working/studying sessions (concentration statistics)

Among myriads of other streaming platforms or study tracking sites, LEAN is the only one that offers a practical incentive system. The LEAN app will serve as a study-to-earn platform where we focus on incentivizing students using a rewards system. Students are awarded rewards for studying. Rewards are broken down into fun rewards (discount vouchers) and growth (scholarships/interviews) rewards and can be redeemed with the rewarded tokens. 

Much empirical research has pointed to the potential role of extrinsic incentives in learning, but none has successfully used extrinsic incentives to foster intrinsic motivation to learn or self-directed learning. Our incentive system is the first of its kind to offer “growth incentives” - potentially helping students build up their intrinsic motivation for a particular area while supporting their learning journey with personalized tracking and support tools.

Besides the main feature of studying to earn, LEAN plans to stick to the concept of community learning. Hence, there will be a feature for group studying. This feature will allow students to start a study session together and earn rewards together. To amplify the concept of community learning, there will be features where students can set study goals and earn rewards by achieving these goals. There is an abundance of scientific literature pointing to the role of community and goal-based learning on intrinsic motivation.

We are serious about our educational mission and are very rigorous in our product design. To make sure that everything we build is based on not just market research but also actual science to benefit students, we have R&D members who work with professors to design an experiment in an unprecedented direction with intrinsic motivation.

With the prototype ready, we will set up a discord community to start building a user base for our platform. This will give us real data on what students need from a study platform and incentive system. We will also start reaching out to SMEs and educational organizations partners to negotiate with them to offer rewards for learners on our platform. Early partners will benefit from long-term partnerships and discounted fees in the future when advertising on our platform.

In the following 3 months, we will add more features that enable students to interact directly on the platform and benefit from more features that personalized their learning journey, such as tutor homework help. We will also refine our revenue model to create an income for the project, such as through advertisement or premium subscriptions for learners who want more personalized help.

To launch first in Vietnam’s market, we will adopt the following strategies:

• We will focus on creating buzz through online social media, most notably Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok - platforms most popular to Vietnamese youths. We will start creating Facebook discussion posts in the form of study room recommendation posts or F&B posts with tips on getting vouchers in productivity and hobby posts. We will also invite small, independent productivity content creators on TikTok and Instagram to review our product and share our revenue based on the number of traffic that they drive. These tactics will create buzz and drive traffic from both motivated students (more active in productivity communities) and to-be motivated ones (more active in hobby communities).  

• Alongside viral marketing, LEAN will build a strong user community through support groups on Discord and Facebook. This will give us real data on what students need from a study platform and incentive system. To incentivize WOM recommendations, LEAN will give out referral codes that give users more tokens the more friends sign up using their code. Utilizing our existing network of education enthusiasts and professionals, we will also build online events targeting different segments of our users and promote it on various social media, thus expanding our community of learners. 

LEAN is targeting its first launch in Vietnam followed by Hong Kong then expansion throughout South-East Asia. We foresee 70k users in Vietnam alone by next y

Applying machine learning and data analytics to tracking learning concentration in consumers, we are among the pioneers at most existing solutions on focus on-screen content or is limited to the B2B market. Our planned technology work as follow:

To provide a feedback mechanism for students to improve quality of study sessions and ensure a fair distribution of rewards, several mechanisms will be implemented. 

The implementation of quality study detection will not be 100% accurate with automated monitoring of students. However, there are several mechanisms that might help determine the quality of study sessions.

Mechanism 1 (Detection of study materials and stationaries used during study session):

The presence of interaction with study materials and stationaries could indicate the authenticity of study activities in class. Implemented using object detection with machine learning. Using EfficientDet objective detection model architecture, popularised by Google. EfficientDet works on low-resolution images (which suits the project because webcams are mostly low res, and it’s very computationally cheap, which makes it possible to run in mid-low end devices, to cater to all students). 

Mechanism 2 (Detection of student behavior)

Student behavior is another important metric to determine, whether the student is concentrated, bored, confused, engaged, frustrated, or happy. Common affective states include boredom, confusion, engagement/flow, frustration, and happiness/delight. Emotion recognition proved accurate using machine learning. Utilize open source libraries such as OpenCV which provide good accuracies. 

Mechanism 3 (Classification of content type on student screen)

Classification of non-academic screen content (eg. Games, entertainment videos). Manual classification is possible, but not scalable. Automated classification using machine learning is under research. 

We are serving 200 active members in our online study group.

In 2023, we will conduct a pilot test with our public beta with 5000 users until April to collect meaningful data about how we can improve the platform to make it yield more values for youth studying. 

After our product has proven market fit, we will focus on scaling in the latter half of 2023 into >10 thousands users.

Our biggest challenge is technical and financial. Our team is full of students committing part time to this project. However, to make the project more sustanable and provide real values to our beneficiaries, we will eventually have to move full time in the next year and call for investment, lest other team members will lose motivation. As of now, we struggle to get sponsorship and grants to invest in this project so that it can grow enough to call for angle investment who believe in us and the cause.

Our techinical challenge is building up the AI model and the video streaming infrastrure. Streaming infrastrucure as an Saas is expensive to use for a student project, so we are trying to build our video server on an open source framework (livekit). Training the AI model for mass purpose focus detection in outside the classroom environment is also challenging, and we are working with HKU professors and some students in AI to find a better model than what we currently have.

We are in discussions with 4 educational companies in Vietnam to provide rewards for users of our platform when they study productively. 

- MindX: programming and tech courses

- Youth+: Career orientation and mentorshop

- Otus consulting: scholarship and university application

- SpinUp: Marketing and professional courses

These companies will provide discounts or vouchers of their programs as rewards for our users to redeem. After a collaboration of 6 months, we will analyze the data to evaluate the quality of students who redeem the rewards and the values they bring to our partners and users.

The LEAN app will serve as a study to earn platform where it focuses on incentivising students using a rewards system. Students are awarded rewards for studying. Rewards are broken down to fun rewards (discount vouchers) and growth (scholarships/interviews) rewards and can be redeemed with the rewarded tokens. 

For our users: Tokens that students earn in exchange for their study time on our platform can be used to redeem rewards from entertainment brands (fun) or youth education organizations (growth). By offering them these coupons, they will have a more practical motivation to study and earn these rewards. 

For our partner companies: Offering coupons to users on our platform can be a great marketing strategy. Customers are more likely to come to visit their stores and make purchases if they have discounts for products in the stores. 

TAM

• There are 40 million GenZ students living in urban areas in Asia Pacific

• Over 1 million GenZ users currently use our competitor services in this region

• Assuming that only 10% of users are paid

• With pricing at 4$/month or 48$/year, the TAM’s potential is 200 million $

• The market is currently 4.8 million $ 

SOM

• There are 9 million GenZ students & young professionals living in urban areas in Vietnam

• Our competitors receive about 400k traffic from Vietnam monthly

• Similar to the above, the SOM’s potential is 43 million $ and is currently at 2 million $

SAM

• We realistically aim to achieve 60k users in the first year in Vietnam

• With this the SAM’s is 300k USD

Our revenue mainly comes from 2 areas:

• Affiliates on reward marketplace at $1.58/ click that offers brands and companies:

  • Ranking display offers in reward marketplace

  • Rewarded video ads

  • Streaming events/campaigns

• Study booster subscription package at $59.99 and allows students to:

  • Earn more tokens per study time/question answered

  • More access to exclusive incentives

  • Access professional study help from tutors

  • Addons that help students elevate their desktop study space (notes, musics, backgrounds, etc)