Mindstone, the learning platform that simplifies and accelerates informal learning, has launched Mindstone for Business to help fast-growing companies create and curate onboarding, reskilling and upskilling ‘playlists’ drawn from a combination of proprietary resources and the abundance of freely available content on the internet. This will enable fast-growing businesses to improve and scale formalise training,  both facilitating more effective onboarding for new hires and supporting upskilling and re-skilling of existing employees. 

Founded in 2020, Mindstone is the next venture from CEO Joshua Wohle following the acquisition of his previous startup SuperAwesome, the biggest online child safety company in the world. Mindstone allows users to organise, share and take notes on web pages, PDFs, videos and podcasts and put these resources into playlists others can in turn learn from. By rigorously employing the science of learning, Mindstone enables people to learn faster & remember more at the same time. The company recently closed the largest ever edtech crowdfunding campaign on the Seedrs platform by raising nearly $2 million, receiving backing by serial unicorn-picker Mattias Ljungman, US-based Scoutfund and impact fund Mustard Seed Maze, among others.

Onboarding can cost as much as $1,300 per employee on average, but an efficient process makes employees 18 times more likely to feel committed to an organisation, according to one study. However, existing learning and development solutions are costly, cumbersome, and often compliance-oriented - rather than addressing companies’ and employees’ actual learning and training needs - and content can be difficult to update. 

“This is a particular challenge for fast-growing businesses, where processes, culture, vision, and needs are constantly and rapidly evolving as the company scales. I know first hand from my time building SuperAwesome that fast-growing companies can also face difficulties capturing organisational knowledge as it is generated, which can be problematic if an employee holding that knowledge leaves without properly passing it on or integrating it into official training processes and materials. Even if they try to tackle this, current solutions are often as limited as a spreadsheet or a big presentation with links to resources. Mindstone for Business addresses both of these critical issues by enabling organisations to build easily accessible and updated training playlists that also save time and effort by blending their own material covering proprietary organisational knowledge and the wealth of content freely available online,” said Wohle.

Mindstone for Business uses Mindstone’s inbuilt peer-to-peer discussion and annotation system to enable employees building and engaging in onboarding, reskilling or upskilling playlists to ask questions and share answers, contributing to the continuous improvement of the playlists over time, and ensure that new organisational knowledge is recorded and retained. In addition, Mindstone’s scientifically-proven learning tools, including spaced-repetition, interleaving, and contextualization, ensure that employees complete training faster and retain more of what they learn.

Companies using Mindstone for Business currently include SeedLegals, Yoti, Techstars, and Tech Nation. Mindstone for Business is private to the company and protected by industry-standard security measures to ensure the integrity of sensitive content. 

Chris Field, Chief Marketing Officer at Yoti, said: ”Mindstone has made it so much easier for us to explain really complex subject matter both internally and externally. Typically, when someone joins the Yoti team we like to make sure they know everything about our products, so we provide them with numerous resources to work through. Mindstone lets us package up the most important information in an engaging way that takes up less of their time AND ultimately gives them confidence to excel in their role.” 

Wohle added: “Developing and delivering effective training - and ensuring it remains up-to-date and relevant as you grow - is a critical, but challenging and time-consuming task facing every fast-growing company. Getting it wrong can slow down the integration of new hires and reduce internal mobility, reducing overall operational efficiency. We are excited to rollout Mindstone for Business to help more companies make the headache of training and onboarding a thing of the past.”