Lessonbee is an online learning platform enabling members to access online health courses
Reva McPollom is a mom, digital learning consultant, and the founder and chief executive officer of Lessonbee, a transformative online health education platform. Reva created Lessonbee to support health education and give children the ability to manage their own health. Students learn to make responsible choices through an interactive and self-paced learning experience rooted in brain science and culturally responsive practices.
Reva founded Lessonbee based on her own experience after seeing how challenging health class can be for students. She witnessed antiquated lessons that did not reflect her identity as an LGBTQ, black teen and realized that she needed to create a new solution to help students worldwide.
Shortly after launching Lessonbee in 2018, Reva prevailed through multiple stumbling blocks, both as a first-time founder, and as soon-to-be mother experiencing a challenging first-time pregnancy. Without the help of a technical lead, Reva dove directly into Lessonbee’s curriculum research, learning design, and technical requirements to develop a working prototype. However, Reva struggled to schedule face-to-face meetings with educators, a common barrier of early-stage EdTech startups. When, she did finally connect with her end user- health teachers, it became clear that the product was not ready to go-to-market.
Reva decided to participate in two startup accelerators to improve her product and strategy. During this time, Reva began to measure her user base and soon discovered that her existing business model would not scale. In the spring of 2020, Reva joined a third accelerator where she learned about the role of data and analytics in creating an investment-worthy product. This led to a breakthrough for Lessonbee, enabling Reva to raise additional funding, and soon thereafter, hire a director of engineering, Ankur Kumar. After starting, Ankur immediately began leveraging AWS tools, quickly improving Lessonbee’s privacy, security, scalability, and engineering processes. For additional information on how the SchoolBzz team is utilizing AWS technology, you can read their case study.
“AWS scaled according to our customers. We’re using a full suite of AWS offerings for our cloud services, which provides holistic tools at competitive prices, including developer tools for continuous delivery of our releases and tools for scaling our servers as per need. We wanted a one-stop solution, and AWS is perfect for that,” said Reva.
In addition to being all-in on AWS, Lessonbee is an AWS EdStart Member, which helped their team make new connections with fellow founders in the community. “AWS EdStart has become an extension of our team,” she said. “Marketing, education, fundraising, infrastructure, and innovation—they have supported us on all fronts. We’re excited about the future with AWS.”
In the fall of 2020, Lessonbee curriculum was approved for district use by the Chicago Public Schools Office of Student Health and Wellness and the New York City Office of School Wellness Programs. In addition to joining AWS EdStart, Lessonbee also recently joined forces with PowerSchool, a leading K12 EdTech provider, as a Schoology Learning Applications Partner. As Lessonbee matures, the Lessonbee team plans to implement a complete suite of AWS continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools along with AWS artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions. Learn more about Lessonbee.
AWS EdStart, the AWS educational technology (EdTech) startup accelerator, is designed to help entrepreneurs build the next generation of online learning, analytics, and campus management solutions in the AWS Cloud. Learn more about AWS EdStart and keep an eye out in the months to come for more compelling stories about founders in AWS EdStart.
