The NEN Interview: Paula Dozsa, Co-founder & lead developer, imagiLabs
Just over two weeks ago, Stockholm’s imagiLabs, an all-female founded EdTech, announced that they had raised €250,000 in pre-seed funding from a stellar group of angel investors. Their mission is as simple as it is important - to get as many young girls into coding as possible.
I was really pleased to speak to Co-founder and lead developer, Paula Dozsa, for this Nordic EdTech News (NEN) interview. We covered a lot of ground including their fundraising experience, how the investment enables them to grow and their plans to build a global imagiWorld!
As previously, the transcript of our conversation (edited to bring you all of the very best bits) follows below.
These interviews are published every fortnight with key players from across Nordic EdTech. Your feedback is always appreciated, so please email hello@10digits.org or comment below.
And if you enjoy this interview, please do subscribe (for free) to Nordic EdTech News. This ensures that you’ll get all future newsletters and interviews in your inbox every Monday morning.
Best regards, Jonathan
Jonathan Viner (JV): Hi Paula - thanks so much for talking to me today! Could you start by explaining what imagiLabs does?
Paula Dozsa (PD): imagiLabs is a Stockholm-based startup. Our goal is to equip and empower teenage girls to shape the future with tech. We believe that tech is the future, so if women are going to be equally involved in shaping the future, they need to be equally involved in tech.
The company started from a research project that our CEO, Dora Palfi, did during her masters. Her objective was to level the playing field for an underrepresented group and she initially decided to focus on women in STEM and women in tech. But after further research she realised that teenage girls were a really underserved group in the space. There were lots of products for kids and adults to learn coding, but apart from events, there wasn't a lot going on for teenage girls. Research also showed that after the age of 12, girls simply lost interest in tech. So we wanted to try and build their interest over the longer term.
JV: How did the company start?
There's actually a background story behind that! I met Dora and our third co-founder, Beatrice, during our university studies at NYU Abu Dhabi. Dora and Beatrice had founded a student group called weSTEM (Women Empowered in STEM) and I was the first to join them. I was also one of the first to join imagiLabs. So this is obviously something that we’re all passionate about and have been thinking about and working on for a while.
JV: How much has changed from Dora’s original research proposition to actually now running it as a business?
PD: When Dora started working on this project, she decided to focus on girls aged between 12 and 16. And that’s still our core target audience today.
However, her initial product idea was actually a programmable phone case called the imagiCase. After collaborating with Beatrice, who’s now our CTO, they decided that the phone case idea wasn’t very scalable as phone sizes differ so much and models change every year. They then switched to a stand-alone object- that’s been through a bunch of different shapes and forms before getting to the imagiCharm we have today.
JV: Are you targeting all 12 to 16 year old girls globally or have you narrowed down your target audience?
PD: Well, our product is currently only available in English, so we’re only targeting English speaking girls at the moment. Sweden thankfully is great for that and then we also have, of course, the US, the UK and Australia.
Girls’ interests do vary throughout the different countries, but I think they are all very much online and consuming very similar content. So they do have similar interests despite being from different parts of the world. Our network of imagiGirls act as our teenage ambassadors and help us figure out what kind of content they like and what kind of content makes sense for them. So we try to stay as close to our users as possible, but there's a lot that we have to learn from this age group.
JV: How do you balance communicating and engaging with both the end user (the young girls) and your customer, who is presumably their parent?
PD: Our approach is predominantly B2C and we try and target both audiences.
We target the girls because although they might not be buying an imagiCharm, they can definitely ask their parents to buy one! So we try to be where these girls are - that’s places like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. And in terms of their parents, we try to be as prominent as possible on parent socials such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
But I think the trickiest part has been figuring out what content works for our specific target audience. We're currently in the process of hiring a social media and community manager who will help us to get this right.
JV: Given how quickly trends move for that age group, how can you be a constant presence that teenage girls will always want to engage with?
PD: Well, we currently have the imagiCharm and that will continue as it is for the next year or so, at least. But our focus is shifting more towards our app - it’s more fluid and more adaptable to what’s happening. For example, we run monthly coding challenges which we organise around different trends that are of interest to our audience. So that's one way in which we try to stay current and up to date.
JV: Do I need to have an imagiCharm in order to use your app?
PD: That's something that we need to clarify because our app is completely usable without the imagiCharm. We’re now really pushing the app because there's so much you can do and learn with it. The app is also free as is all of the learning content on there as well.
JV: imagiLabs was founded in 2018. Looking back over that time, what have been the business’ greatest successes?
PD: I think that one of our biggest successes would be the Kickstarter campaign in 2019, where we successfully raised 550,000 SEK to fund the manufacture of our first imagiCharms and to figure out where our initial markets were. We’ve also had a couple of fundraising rounds that have also helped us a lot. imagiLabs were also part of the Sting incubator, which really enabled us to enter the Stockholm startup scene.
That all led to us launching our app in May of 2020 and we started shipping our first imagiCharms in June. Obviously that timing meant some of our manufacturing was delayed and we weren't able to do all the in-person events we had planned around our launch. But we were able to transition much of what we wanted to do to online events and workshops.
JV: And how about the biggest challenges that you’ve had to work through in that period.
PD: We're such a small team that we often end up having to do a lot of different things at the same time. Dora, for example, is the mastermind behind imagiLabs, but as well as being CEO and making sure that this company survives, she has also been our main designer and delivered the initial design of the app.
Making sure we're focusing on and prioritising the right things that will work out long term has also, of course, been tough.
JV: You talked about the business surviving and presumably the pre-seed round announced just over two weeks ago is a big step towards that. How was that process for you? How did it all go?
PD: Dora has been leading all of those efforts - I look up to her so much and really don't know how she does everything she does. She’s been talking to investors and identifying potential leads, but Covid has made it more difficult. We were planning to raise earlier but people became more risk averse until the end of last year when things really started happening.
We met our angel investors through our networks and have been so lucky to have found them. So we met Eros Resmini (founder of The Mini Fund and former CMO of Discord) at Slush in 2019, when face-to-face events could still happen! We also got introduced to David Baszucki, CEO of Roblox through a friend of a friend.
In some cases, the investment happened after a year-long series of conversations and in others, they invested after just a three email exchange. Things just kind of happened and grew from there. I think that's just how it works for most startups.
JV: Do you have any advice to pass on to other founders on raising money? It’s always one of the big challenges when I talk to startups.
PD: The first one is a cliché, but don't be afraid of rejection or of hearing “No” - that's fine and is expected. Ultimately, if you search hard enough, you will find the people who really care about your mission and what you do.
There are no clear instructions on how to fundraise and sometimes there’s no clear pathway to reaching your goal. I think that uncertainty is something that you have to learn to be comfortable with as a startup founder.
JV: So what are you going to use the money for?
PD: As I said, we are focusing our efforts on the app at the moment and are definitely looking to hire more people who can help us build that out. Linked to that, we’re also going to be creating more learning content. This lives on the app and we’re trying to gamify that learning journey a bit more, so that learning how to code is appealing to teenage girls.
JV: How will you generate more revenue through that approach?
PD: Our main source of revenue currently is the imagiCharm, but we do plan to monetise the app through a subscription model. But we definitely need a bigger user base so that we can test our assumptions to make that a success. So at the moment, we're doing things that will lead to significant revenue eventually.
JV: On the subject of your user base, how big is it currently and what are your targets moving forward?
PD: We currently have 2,600 users across both of our apps at the moment - that includes people who have imagiCharms and those who don't. Our goal is very ambitious - we want to get to 100,000 users by the end of this year. So that's why all of our marketing, sales and product efforts will be specifically directed towards the app to make that a reality.
JV: A recent article in Tech.eu referred to a 300% increase in your sales between Q3 and Q4 in 2020. What's driving that rapid acceleration and growth?
PD: Well, Santa Claus left behind a lot of imagiCharms at Christmas! We also put the product up on Amazon and a lot of those new B2C sales can be attributed to etail via Amazon and our website.
Our new partnerships manager, Nadia, has been making a difference too and we recently closed a deal with Black Girls Code in the US, which is a great sales opportunity for us as well. This is a B2B2C approach where we partner with organisations, who then buy imagiCharms for the girls that are part of their programme.
JV: To what extent do you see imagiLabs as an EdTech company?
PD: We see ourselves sitting at the intersection of three major areas. The first would be EdTech, the second would be gaming and the third is around diversity efforts in tech. Ultimately, we are teaching coding, but we want to do it in a fun and gamified way. We also have a significant community aspect to our work and view it as a social experience. Finally, we also see how we can help current diversity efforts like the CSR programmes being delivered by bigger companies.
JV: Can you tell me more about that community? How does it work and how do you support / encourage users’ engagement?
PD: Our community is predominantly on our app. Users can share their projects, comment on other people's work and can also use other people's code to turn it into their own thing. Users have been very positive, friendly and helpful.
We also have a Discord server, where we have bigger conversations with the girls and where we organise content around different channels and host regular coding challenges. Some of our imagiGirls act as admins here, engaging with users and being peer mentors.
Finally, there’s also an older group of imagiLabs enthusiasts. These are our imagiMentors, who volunteer to lead some of our workshops and who also engage with the girls across our communities.
JV: On community, how has the Stockholm startup network helped imagiLabs grow and flourish?
PD: Stockholm is such a great place to be a startup. There's just so much support here and it's a small enough city so it's easy to navigate the whole network. It's also relatively affordable to start a company here, unlike San Francisco, for example.
The Sting programme introduced us to a lot of the investors from our first fundraising round and has been super supportive with coaching and mentoring sessions. Things like the Stockholm Tech Meetup helped us to practise pitching and to meet potential investors.
The tech community in Stockholm is full of people who are eager to help us and who are eager to be a part of something that they see as a problem. People understand that this problem exists, that it's important to address and want to help us focus on actually solving it.
JV: How do you respond when boys want to join the community and get involved in coding?
PD: We already have boys and male parents using the imagiCharm and our app. We don’t explicitly say that no boys are allowed, but we do think that if you don't specifically say that a space is meant for girls, then girls can feel intimidated and think that it’s not a space for them.
A recent article about products which teach kids how to code described imagiLabs as “a community for girls and open minded boys.” We think that’s a great way of putting it!
JV: OK, so what are the plans for imagiLabs over the next 5 to 10 years? Where is business headed moving forwards?
PD: We have a really clear plan of an imagiLabs World that covers this!
We certainly intend to go beyond just teaching Python, which is our current focus, and to explore teaching other concepts such as game / web development and machine learning. We’ll do that by partnering with experts in the field and then imagifying the experience to bring our community and user base on this learning journey.
The team sees ourselves as being girls' primary coding companions until they take their first coding classes at university or until they start their first internships. Ultimately in ten years time, we’d love to be investing in those companies that were launched by girls who started coding with an imagiCharm!
JV: Thanks very much for your time Paula. It’s been really inspiring talking to you!
Thanks for reading and if you enjoyed this interview, please do subscribe to Nordic EdTech News, you’ll get future newsletters and interviews in your inbox every Monday morning.