About Starttech Ventures
Starttech Ventures is an early-stage startup accelerator for software-focused technology startups in the EMEA region. Through investments in capital, talent, marketing and entrepreneurial drive, the Starttech Ventures team guides businesses from the pre-product/pre-revenue stage, to successfully closing a Series-A investment round and achieving sustainable profitability.
The training challenge
As part of the European entrepreneur community, Starttech takes part in many formal and informal projects to inspire and teach others how to create their own tech startup.
One of those was the European-wide project called “Lean In” to introduce the basic principles of entrepreneurship as well as how to pitch ideas, collaborate with Angel Investors, and other tricks of the trade to aspiring female entrepreneurs. This learning experience would be in the form of webinars and instructor-led training sessions.
A few days before their training was to go live, the team at Starttech found that the platform they’d planned to use was not able to adjust to a few last-minute changes they needed to make. With all the training content already finished and approved, and only days away from launch, they were on the hunt for a replacement platform.
They needed the platform to do three things:
- Host a “hundred-user” live session with an instructor, allowing for introductions, questions, and answers.
- A separate section that would let users watch a high-quality video version of the webinar, as many times as they needed.
- An assignment for each webinar, enabling users to prove they are ready for the next level.
Why Starttech chose TalentLMS
Quite simply, they chose TalentLMS because TalentLMS could do exactly what they needed it to do. And could do it fast.
For starters, it was crucial that the LMS they chose could support one hundred users in a live session – without any glitches. TalentLMS checked that box.
TalentLMS has a native, ready-to-use integration with BigBlueButton, but Starrtech chose to use Zoom, since they already had an account and trusted this service. Zoom integrates smoothly into TalentLMS.
The results
Time was of the essence. But Content Designer Panagiotis Sarantopoulos was able to quickly set up their content from scratch, organize start dates and times, as well as time-zones, due dates for assignments, and notifications for continuity.
He integrated Zoom to their TalentLMS account. Then, in a few clicks, he’d added an Instructor-led training unit and set up a time slot to start the webinar. Next, he added a second unit to host the recorded video of the webinar.
Panagiotis explains, “This was exceptionally easy. We just used an unlisted URL from YouTube to play the video. The support team explained that we could have easily uploaded the video file to be hosted by TalentLMS, but the former option was a real time saver. Finally, we added the third unit to present the participants with an assignment. After adding all new registrants to a group, we were done!”
While TalentLMS is a piece of cake to use, Starttech needed some help because of the customized nature of their learning experience. That’s when our support team stepped up.
“We think TalentLMS’ best feature is the after-sales support. As we were trying to integrate Zoom as our default video conference solution from within TalentLMS, we received an email with a support article from the knowledge base, complete with screenshots and clear instructions. This kind of proactive after-sales customer service was something unprecedented. Almost magical!”
According to Panagiotis,
“We were able to complete our project without any delays even though we changed the platform so late in the game. It worked like clockwork. TalentLMS […] saved us valuable time, minimized our waste due to last minute changes and spared us the headache of delivering the task overdue.””
