Yeah. I grew up in northern Ontario, North Bay. My origin story
is so connected to the company because I really struggled in school. In grade
four, I was in the dumb class. The teachers called it the dumb
class. It was the three four split, the only girl in the class,
and it was because I struggled with reading. I had a speech impediment,
and I think as a kid, I just really wanted to be seen,
and that became a bit of a theme in my life. I stopped
being interested in school at that point and I started focusing on sports, and
so I started training really hard as a swimmer, and my coaches saw some
potential in me, which gave me this huge motivation to keep pushing hard.
So I swam until I was about sixteen and was in a pretty horrible skiing
accident which took me out of swimming. And discovered the sport of knuw kayak
later on in life, and I became an Olympian in two thousand at the
Sydney Olympics. After retiring from sports, I wanted to do something else at
the on the world stage, something else globally successful, and started my business
career from scratch and over the years built technology companies, which led me to
the one that I'm in now. So I got inspired to get involved in
education technology specifically because I saw my son go through the same challenges at school
that I had had when he was in grade four us the same time,
same challenges, and I really wanted to use my experience to help other kids
like my son master reading and do well in school and just be seen.
And so that's what led us to where we are today. Well, thank
you for sharing all that, and we are here to talk about CHULACE,
and I'm very excited to talk to you. I've got a daughter who's twenty
one, but I think any parent that's listening to our conversation right now that
has children is going to be very excited about what you and your team do.
So before we get into the weeds on CHULACE, why don't we talk
about what the mission statement is. We have a big mission. Ultimately,
we want to help future generations of learners broaden their thinking so they can tackle
some of the world's big challenges. And the way we believe we're going to
do that is to improve literacy, comprehension, and critical thinking. And so
what we do in our games. It's a game based learning platform. But
what we do is we help kids master their reading skills, their comprehension skills,
and then build the muscles for critical thinking. All right, let's do
this. Let's get a little bit more into the weeds. If somebody has
been introduced to Shoelace for the first time, who do you work with and
what exactly do you do. We focus on teachers because teachers have access to
kids in grades three to eight, So we're focused on delivering for kids in
grades three to eight. And teachers sign up to the program, they use
it in their classroom. And what happens is kids play mobile games, mobile
games like the ones they would play at home on your phone, on your
iPad, and as they're playing mobile games, content pops up that they have
to read and then they have to answer questions about that content to go back
to the game. It's almost like if you're playing a mobile game and an
AD pops up. Instead of an AD, it's learning content, and it's
learning a content that your teacher wants to see if you can master. So
it's basically delivering assignments through mobile games. Parents use it as well at home.
A lot of kids want to play at home, which is great because
it encourages them to read while they're playing games. You know, we're using
that screen time for good, but that's the experience. The kids play the
game, they do the learning, and then teachers get diagnostic reports and skills
reports to show how the kids are doing over time. So I like that
there's a lot of connection in that with parents and children, and you're connecting
a lot of dots there to all the work that's been done and just not
giving somebody screen time. I did want to circle back on something. We
have a lot of CEOs and a lot of future CEOs and entrepreneurs that listen
to this series, and I'd love to know the origin idea because you touched
on it a little bit early on, but maybe we could go more into
it because you obviously saw a hole in the industry. You used your own
experiences, but as an entrepreneur starting a business, as we know it is
not easy. Now you've grown this into a worldwide company that we'll talk about
this a second, because it's just amazing about how far shoelaced a stretch,
But can you talk about that epiphany, that idea about what you did,
and you started with it. I thought, you saw a hole in the
industry. I'm going to act on this leap of faith, start a business.
Here we go, tell us that story. Sure, I think that
the really important piece of that part of the story is that so my son
had a problem. It was a problem that I saw. It was a
problem I thought I could tackle with my background and technology. But what I
did, and what led to our early success, was I put myself in
the classroom. I really wanted to understand what is the teacher experience, what
is the learner experience? And it was very different than what I thought.
I wanted to build a technology that would help kids be strong readers. It
was as simple as that. But when I was in the classroom, what
I was seeing was it teachers were just managing behavior. Most of the time.
They were really struggling to teach, and it was because kids were checking
out of their education. They weren't interested in their learning. They weren't interested
in you know PDFs that had been printed out that they had to answer questions
on. And no wonder, these kids are being delivered the most exceptional you
know content outside of the classroom, and their bar is high for they're what
they're experiencing. So immediately I got interested in how we could use games to
motivate kids to want to drive their own learning. But I don't think I
would have got there, definitely not as quickly had I not seen the real
problem that teachers were facing in the classroom. And and I really advise anyone
who's looking at tackling a problem to really get into that problem. You know
firsthand, understand it, and that's it's just critical to being able to come
up with the right solution. So you started the company it looks like maybe
about nine years ago now, and I'm wondering if you knew you'd be where
you are today, because you need to share this with people starting this business
in Canada. Now, I know you're probably in North America, but you
work in a lot of country. Reason that makes sense because you're online,
so everybody has access to it. But tell us a little about the growth
about it. Everybody wants to have a sustainable business, but you also and
under a decade, have grown this business too. Yeah, we have over
six million users in over one hundred and sixty countries. Now, I started
wanting to help one kid, but I always had this vision and passion to
scale. I wanted to be able to scale this at the global level,
and that impacted how we how we designed our business models. So since scale
was important to me, we decided accessibility was critical, and so we built
this to be a freemium product so anyone could use it and then they could
upgrade to a paid subscription when they saw the value. And that allowed us
to really witness this huge amount of growth really really quickly. And I think
something we've always looked for as a team is this idea of market pull.
You know, not trying to push your product to the market, but where
are you seeing people are picking it up and wanting to use it without you
even telling them about it, without you even kind of you having to train
them on it, and really leaning into those parts of the product to really
guide your roadmap. Yeah, the market poll is critical and something we're always
looking for as we grow the company. If I could ask, because once
again you're very entrepreneurial, the growth is extraordinary. A lot of people are
going to say, how on earth did Julia get in that many countries and
that short amount of time? So what did you do to market the company?
And hook onto this great idea that you have in Cheelace, it was
referrals. It's about the market poll it's about building something that's working for your
users and working exceptionally well, so well that they want to share it.
We happen to be in education, and teachers loved, you know, teaching,
They love sharing things that are working. So we are in a market
that has exceptional opportunity in terms of referral. But that's absolutely how we got
there. In the first several years we spend a time on advertising or marketing,
it was all referral. As we get more sophisticated, we get more
sophisticated about our channels to market. But at the beginning, it was really
just one person telling another Julia, I know you have a great team with
you, but I'm also curious about doing research, working with teachers and whether
it's psychologists, literacy people, you know, book writers, whatever it is,
because there has to be all these different tentacles that connect back to you
about the latest thing, what to do, getting the feedback, making sure
the execution is there. Can you tell us about all the different kind of
education that you and your team do and who you work with to get to
where you are now with HULAS. Yeah, that's always been so important and
from day one was something that we really focused on. You know, as
an athlete, the only way you get to be as good as you are
is by building a team around you of people who were world class, and
we did the same thing with this company. From day one. We found
people who were building games for education that we're best of class researchers and literacy
best of class, teachers, best of class, and now we're looking at
people who are understanding how to build data models best of class, you know,
understanding the importance of diversity and inclusion and cultural responsivity, best of class.
And it's always about pulling those individuals in and getting them to contribute to
how we're building. So our company is mainly engineers, engineers and product people.
We have a growth team and then we're always bringing in experts and consultants
to help inform us on projects that are important to us at the time.
And I find that way of growing is always successful. You're a small company,
we're only twenty, but we always bring in people who help us be
bigger and better by bringing their expertise. Julie, I also like to ask
our leaders and CEOs about the cool things that are happening with a company.
Maybe sharing a good story, because I'm sure you have handsfuls of that,
especially maybe some of the countries where access isn't as great as we have the
luxury here in North America. Let's put a pin in a great story just
for a second. I'll let you think about that. But I want to
ask you about challenges because I know, as an entrepreneur and as a co
founder and CEO of a company that is doing very well right now, there
are still challenges out there. What are they currently? I'd say the biggest
challenge as an innovation company is the ability to continue to invest in innovation,
I think especially when markets are challenging, right So we're in the in a
phase of challenging markets kind of across the board of education. Technology is no
different, and continuing to invest in in innovation is so critical to a company
like ours. But it feels scary, right It feels scary at times because
you're also thinking about operational efficiency to make sure you can you get as far
as you can. So I'd say that's the biggest challenge right now is how
do we look at our different sources of income, whether it be revenue or
grants, or ways that we can keep investing in innovation, you know,
pushing the needle in terms of trying to be a best in class technology for
education, because there's so much room to push and I don't want to get
stale. I don't want to get static. I want to make sure we're
always pushing. So i'd say that that would be one of the bigger challenges.
And I want everybody that's listening that's a future entrepreneur. There's a good
lesson in there is that don't stay pat on anything because it's easy to get
you know, lazy about things and take for granted that everything's okay. You
always want to grow, and I think that's what Julie is talking about.
So Julie, that's a great life lesson for everybody that's running a company out
there, to don't stand pat and keep on growing, get out of your
comfort zone and grow the company more and more and more. With that said,
I wanted to ask you, and I know it's not fair to ask
about maybe one great story, but I would like you to share maybe something
that there's either heartwarming or you said to the team you know, we knocked
it out of the park that day for either that family, that school,
that city of something that was really special. Can you share maybe a story
or two with us, Sure, I've got two that comes to mind.
The first one was a teacher who called me a couple of years ago and
she was in tears, and she told me that she had had a student
who was autistic, non responsive, non verbal, and our products built for
all kids, So it's built for kids who are high performers, but it's
also built for kids who are really struggling, and she hadn't been able to
get this student to respond to her at all. And she was crying because
that day she had opened up the game and put it in front of the
student, and the student was able to not only respond to the game and
answer questions, but they were answering them correctly, so she knew that the
learning had actually gotten through. It makes me almost emotional thing for it because
it was such a special moment. The other one that I I'd love to
highlight is it was kind of it was a transformational piece and it was a
challenge. We got an email from a from a parent whose child was playing
the game and the question basically said somebody. It implied that somebody who used
a double negative I ain't no is somebody who's ill educated. And she had
a real problem with that because because frankly, it's not true. And so
she went on social media and it became almost a viral tweet, tweet,
you know, don't use this program, and it made us really reflect why
did that even get in there? Why had Because we build every piece of
our content, we review every piece of our content, we didn't understand how
that got there, and we learned by digging into it, it's actually a
piece of content that's used in the US curriculum right now. And that made
us really kind of really question, is this what's right just to align just
to very specifically aligned to curriculum, or do we want to be better?
And we decided we want to be better, So we pulled down all of
our content at that point and we started rebuilding the content historical studies, social
studies, and we did it with a lens of what we call JEDI,
you know, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion to make sure that
we're being culturally responsive. And it's been a really interesting exercise. It's been
years now of building content that we believe as bests of class that brings in
lots of different perspectives. And that is so critical because if we're trying to
teach critical thinking, you need to teach kids that their perspective matters, right,
that's the mirror they can see themselves, but also others have perspectives that
matter too. Those are the windows in other ways of thinking, and that's
something our kids are really missing these days, especially as we get technologies that
are reinforcing kind of the same message over and over again. We need to
help them broaden their thinking. And that's what we're committed to, is really
making sure that kids are learning in a way that they're challenged to think of
other perspectives and to recognize their own matters. So that was the other story
that I think, you know, truly transformational and has guided us and our
vision you know for the future. Well, thank you for sharing both of
those. NFIMA say, that was a very bold move, and I think
there is another life less and for all leaders out there and entrepreneurs and people
to run companies, is that integrity was online for the company and you saw
it fit to go down and change up and get better, right, right.
It was an opportunity. You know, we kind of got kicked in
the stomach a little bit, but we should have been and we could address
it and be better, and we did, and I tell you it motivates
every single one of our team members to know that we're building, right,
I bet it. Thanks for sharing all of that very cool stories. I
did want to ask you about the future, and it's very clear that you're
growing. You continue to not only be sustainable, but the growth is there.
What's the plan going down the road for Shoelace? What other things do
you have in mind that you want to bring to the table. Well,
very simply, we'd like to attract ten million new users in the next couple
of years. We're also building out our assignment library what I was just talking
about in terms of content that shows in many perspectives, and to do that,
we're working with communities to publish their stories. So we're getting communities to
tell their stories and our curriculum team is writing questions around those stories and that's
how we're helping broaden the context for learners. So those are some big pieces
that we're focused on right now, but really the reach is very important.
To me, I want to make sure that we are growing and continuing to
grow and getting in the hands of as many kids as we can support.
So you know, ten million new yearsers. So if anyone's listening and they
have kids in grades three to eight, it's a platform that can help them
and that they'll love so well you're talking when you're talking to iHeart, so
people will be listening, Julie, And I'm very excited, and I think
you're going to get to that goal because it really is amazing what you have
and I just love what you and your team are doing for everybody worldwide.
And as we put a bow in our conversation, I know it's probably hard
to just talk about one thing, but if there's maybe one or two takeaways
that you would like our listeners to go away when it comes to Shoelace,
what would it be That there is a great opportunity for kids to be engaging
on mobile devices in games and learning and strengthening their literacy, strengthening their ability
to comprehend and becoming strong critical thinkers. And it's not a nice to do,
it's a must do. It's something that we need to do for our
future generations. And so yeah, I encourage everyone to check it out.
And I know that most of our listeners have already googled and saw exactly where
you are. But for the ones that happen, maybe social media channels you
might be on, and of course the website what is that, Yeah,
Shoelace learning dot com outstanding. Well, listen, this has been a tree,
Julia. I love to talk to people like you that come up with
a great idea but then execute it and it really takes a lot of intestinal
fortitude, hard work, taking a leap of faith and chance out there,
and you've grown into something just extraordinary. So it is our pleasure to talk
to you. Continue success, and thank you so much for joining us on
CEO. As you should know, we really appreciate your time. Thank you
so much.