Most marketing folks will tell you that a company blog post should be short, full of pictures, and have a big "Click Here!" button at the end. But today, we're going to do things a bit differently.

I want to share with you the story of how our company and our product grew up. By the end, you'll know what we care about and where we're heading.

If you're making your own software product, you might want to grab a pen. Our story might help you avoid some of the twists and turns we had to take.

So, grab a drink, get comfy, and let's dive in.

How It All Began

Back in 2021, when the world was dealing with a big health crisis, a bunch of us got together. We were young designers, smart programmers, and trainers who were tired of how things were done in big companies.

We had an idea: let's fix corporate training once and for all. We wanted to make a platform that had all the tools you'd need for training in one place.

Looking back, it might sound a bit silly - after all, lots of other companies wanted to do the same thing. But back then, we really thought we were going to change everything.

Our First Big Mistakes

We made some wrong guesses at the start that made things harder later on.

First, we thought everyone would soon be working on tablets instead of computers. A year later, we had to redo a lot of our work when that didn't happen.

What we learned: Be careful about betting on new tech. What's popular today might not be tomorrow.

The PowerPoint Problem

We also thought that people who make training courses were sick of things that looked like PowerPoint. So we made our tool look more like Figma (a design tool).

When we launched in 2022, people thought our tool looked cool and different. But there was a problem: even though people liked how it looked, they found it hard to use because it was so different from what they knew.

What we learned: It's good to make new things, but don't make them too different from what people are used to.

Some Things We Got Right

We did have some great ideas that made us special. Like our visual course builder - it let people make training that didn't have to go in a straight line, just by clicking and dragging things around. We called it the "Story map," thinking we were being clever (spoiler: we weren't).

Pro tip: Use words your customers already know, or you'll spend a lot of time explaining what you mean.

Growing With Our Customers

As time went on, we added more features to our product:

• Media lesson editor - A tool for quickly adding voice-overs or videos to slides.

• Peer-graded assessment  - A way for learners to grade each other's work, which helps people learn faster.

By talking to our customers a lot, we figured out what they really needed. We realized companies wanted to make short, fun courses quickly. They wanted to get these courses to the right people and see if they worked, fast.

So we focused on helping companies make "bite-sized" learning or microlearning - short, sweet courses that get the point across quickly.

New identity

These are the pillars that we've shaped during all these years and now are reinforcing our commitment to those:

• As a product, we help to create amazing learning as fast and as easy as possible

• As a team, we keep our hearts and minds open for our customers' needs, stay sincere and adhere to our moral code

And that's why we have decided to pick a new name. We became Konstantly - a name that better fits the purpose of our product, one that reveals all those warm feelings in its sound, a name that says we're always learning, always growing, and always getting better.

Cool New Stuff We Added

To show we mean business, we added some exciting new features:

Native experience with Text Editor

First, we’ve brought the native experience into editing courses with the revised Pages and Lessons editor:

As an instructional designer, you now feel at home while editing text fields in your learning modules.

Seamless editing for published courses.

Next, we’ve revised the way how to edit published courses where learners already made some progress. Now minor edits mode is transparent and allows editing some of the course structure:

Built-in Unsplash image search

And — a feature that I particularly adore myself — the integrated image search via Unsplash:

Now you don’t have to spend hours on picking the right visuals for your course — professional photographers already made thousands of their high-quality photos available for you for free.

Integration with 1000+ apps via Relay.app and Zapier.

Finally, another major thing. Of course, we’d like to add all imaginable functions to our system, but it’s not possible: it takes the infinite amount of resources, and hardly such a tool would be friendly and easy to use.

So instead we decided to enable integration with hundreds of awesome apps that compliment the learning platform.

Needless to say, that along with these major features we’ve released a dozen improvements here and there, including these:

• Speed up mass operations when it is thousands of users, courses and groups that we are talking about

• View-only mode for learners, that have already completed the course, but would like to review course materials

• New design for navigation, custom fields management, human-graded assessments, and more

We also made things faster, added a way to look at old courses without changing them by accident, and made everything look nicer.

What's Next?

We feel energized, focused and even more determined with our mission.

Our tech team is already working on new cool features (and fixing bugs too 😊) to extend your capabilities in fast and efficient training.

Our customer success team is always there to answer your questions, help with setting everything up and share best practices and methodology caveats we’ve learned during all these years.

We thank all our customers for their trust, their feedback and awesome educational projects. We’ll live it up to your high standards!

Thank you for reading this story. hope that it was useful for you in some way. Either to understand what to expect from the e-learning platform you signed up for, or to have a smile about our early days. Or maybe to learn a few things for your own stunning product.

Here's to always learning, always growing, and always achieving with Konstantly!