Startup Spotlight #69: Arist

Arist is the first text message learning platform.

Jan 07, 2021

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I got the chance to speak with Michael Ioffe, co-founder and CEO of Arist, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Arist is the first text message learning platform. They help Fortune 500 companies and nonprofits rapidly teach and train their workforces via text message-based courses, which are remarkably accessible and frictionless. With use cases ranging from diversity and inclusion to compliance and safety training, Arist is the most effective way to train remote audiences at scale. To try out a text message course, just go here.

Prior to founding Arist, Michael was the founder of TILE.org. With over 450 locations in 50 countries, TILE.org is one of the world's largest entrepreneurship education nonprofits. At 17, Michael was also the youngest high school teacher in Oregon state history. Michael is currently on leave from Babson College.

Startup Spotlight: Arist

Arist cofounder and CEO Michael Ioffe (center).

Problem: Current training solutions are often ineffective, unengaging, and expensive, and in the US alone over 33 million employees are unable to learn due to internet and accessibility limitations. Most critically, digital courses are rarely built around the busy day-to-day lives of learners, who often don’t have more than a few minutes to spare.

Market: Arist primarily works with learning and HR departments at large companies and nonprofits. Globally, companies spend over $250 billion per year on employee training.

Solution: With Arist, organizations can create hyper-engaging courses in minutes and enroll learners in seconds via SMS and WhatsApp — no laptop, LMS, or internet needed. For learners, Arist courses take just a few minutes a day and seamlessly embed into their day-to-day lives; as a result, we can save our clients thousands of hours and training dollars while delivering accessible learning and training that people genuinely love, with satisfaction rates of over 90%.

Team: Arist was founded by Michael Ioffe, Ryan Laverty, Maxine Anderson, Joe Passanante, and Riley Wilson. Active team members include Michael, Ryan and Maxine, along with Bianca Nieves (our VP of Growth), Sam Johnson (our CTO), and Rob Klock (our Software Engineer).

Recent Success:

Ioffe: Probably the biggest contributor to our success has been our ability to reduce enterprise sales cycles to 2-3 months, instead of the standard 6-18 months for enterprise learning and training products. There are two main reasons for this. First, we worked hard to reduce the friction in trying Arist as much as possible, going as far as creating courses for clients from scratch before they signed on to a pilot. Second, we would ask every person we talked to if they could introduce us to innovative learning or HR leader that they knew, which quickly got Arist in front of the right people.

Recent Struggle:

Ioffe: Early in our work with Arist, we often struggled to convince people that text message courses were a valid learning medium. The amount of skepticism we experienced was immense, even though we had research and testimonials showing that our course model worked and was way better than anything else on the market. We ended up realizing that getting people to try a really great Arist course as soon as possible was the best way to combat skepticism, and ended up focusing on making our sample courses super-high quality and very easy to sign up for. We also invested heavily into bringing onboard learning experts that could lend our platform credibility.

Founder Advice:

Ioffe: Cold emails and trying crazy things are your best friend. I met one of our top clients after I cold emailed 50+ conference organizers and got an exhibition booth (for free) at one of them. Once I got to the conference, I made it a point to introduce myself to every single person that was there. For other conferences, we would often print out hundreds of bright-orange Arist postcards and leave them at every table to drive awareness.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Ioffe: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Farza Majeed, Founder of ZipSchool: ZipSchool builds live, online classes for kids K-5.
Ish Baid, Founder of Virtually: Virtually provides live online training from industry experts.
Hayoung Park, Founder of HYP: HYP is the social bidding platform for exclusive releases.

Who should I profile next? Leave your suggestion in the comments:

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