VR education has crossed the chasm - Christophe Mallet (Bodyswaps)
Christophe Mallet, CEO & co-founder of Bodyswaps
Christophe has a long experience in the immersive technologies and digital marketing fields and is based in London, UK. Bodywaps is a VR platform that brings realistic simulations and AI-enabled feedback to soft skills training for educational institutions and corporate clients.
The full transcript of the podcast can be found below for those who prefer reading rather than listening. The podcast is hosted by Frank Albert Coates.
FC: Why did you end up in EdTech and create Bodyswaps?
CM: So we started working in VR with my co Founder Julian in 2016. And originally we were a storytelling agency. So using VR to do work with brands like, you know, Adidas and Canal Plus for the French listeners. And at the same time we were teaching in University in Schools, geeking out a lot on research around virtual embodiment and behavioral change.
So in other words, imagine I put you in virtual reality. And I give you an avatar that you're going to embody. That avatar is a different gender, race, appearance, height, age than you. How does that influence your behavior in the simulation but also outside of the simulation? Right. And there's a ton of research around that, which was fascinating.
And then, and we really used this to discuss how VR as a storytelling medium was unique and therefore powerful for marketing. And then one day we were approached, that was in 2019 by a publisher in education, a big publisher, scratching their head saying, right, how can VR, be used to transform learning and specifically learning communication?
And so the question they had is, how do we train nurses in psychiatry to have conversations with patients, especially patients who are going through a tough time. So that's when we kind of had this, this eureka moment of saying, well, we can use our storytelling skills from VR, but we can also use some of the results of that research around virtual embodiment and put the learners, the students, in VR in which they're going to interact with a virtual character of a patient.
Right, so that was the original idea - to build like a flight simulator, but for soft skills. So that's what we did. And in parallel to that, we did the similar simulation for management. So rather than talking to a suicidal patient, you were talking to a sexist team member. But, essentially the same idea right?
You are expressing feedback in your own words and then you swap bodies to watch yourself back, right? So learning through self-awareness. So that was the original idea. We did a test with UCL in London. Had very good results. And long story short, we get a grant from the government and then starting to get funding and after about a year of doing Burst, the storytelling agency and what was going to become the Bodyswaps and this EdTech product, we dropped the agency entirely to focus on Bodyswaps.
FC: Nice. So mostly an opportunity that came along that made you sort of look into the education sector?
CM: Yeah it's an opportunity. And if I'm completely honest as well, it's, I don't remember what the expression is, something like, you know, need or catastrophe is the mother of invention and opportunity.
But, when we went into Bodyswaps in that product, it was a tough world for being an agency, right? It was just at the beginning of Covid, and when you did storytelling VR, it was mostly for having, you know, activation on location right? At festivals or shops or things like this. So that wasn't going to happen in 2020.
And also being an agency, it's a completely different mindset where, you know, pitching, pitching, pitching. Then you get a client and you work hard on a project, you deliver it, and then you start from scratch again. And I think there was a desire to move past the frustration of the agency mindset and into a world where every time we are in version, like 4.2 now of Bodyswaps, right?
Every time it's slightly better. Right? And that is super satisfying to always have something that is slightly better than the first time around.
FC: Yeah. So as you said, moving from the agency world where essentially you deliver a project and then it's done to something that you can follow through. So related to the company, how did you find the team and I guess, is this your right team and what makes it tick?
CM: Well, I think the first thing is that, so my two co-founders at Bodyswaps, even though Bodyswaps officially was created in 2020, I work with them since 2016. So Julien was my co-founder in the agency that I mentioned called Somewhere Else. And Tom, our CTO, was the CTO we would call in to help on projects.
So I think that the first reason is we enjoy working with one another. And I think the personalities are very different. The three of us are very different in terms of where our skills are and where our personalities are. But the values and aspirations are very similar.
And I think it's that kind of a complementary that worked really well. And I think the values is kind of like a mix of the passion on one side. Like the craft, you know? You want to put something into the world that has your name on it and therefore it has to be good. And the other side of that equation is reliability, right?
You have a lot of people who have a lot of passion, but also very unreliable. And you have a lot of people who are very reliable, but they're lacking the passion and the little piece of magic that makes it happen. And I think it's the combination between the three of us around those values that works.
FC: And can you dive a bit more into what stage you're at with Bodyswaps? You were saying that you're in v4.2 right now. And what does it mean? Maybe also in terms of funding and how you see that.
CM: We are 18 people at the moment, full-time, based in London, but we were six less than a year ago. So, we're going through a big growth stage at the moment. We have about 150, B2B clients. So we work mostly with universities and colleges. I would say that's about 70%, and then some corporates and some public sector. And from a funding perspective, we are closing our seed round now this month.
FC: And to put a bit in perspective the different segments you're working with. What would you say are the main differences in working with the public side, the education institutions and the corporate side. What are the advantages and disadvantages?
CM: We learned it the hard way. So we, we started in the corporate world. I did a business school. I worked in strategy consultancy, so I was more familiar with that world. And you know, you have those big shiny logos and on paper there's more money, right? So the first scenarios, the first simulations we created were for managers and we worked with Orange and Dell and S N C F and big, big companies like this.
But what we found is opening the door was easy. You are VR, you're shiny, there's always an education budget somewhere with someone that has, you know, five, 10,000 pounds to spend. And so there's this illusion of; oh my God, I'm working with this Fortune 500 company and they have 150,000 employees and it's amazing.
And so you get to that stage very easy. Then how do you get from a pilot that has, you know a few learners and essentially one champion who's gonna handle the hardware and is very happy to do that. How do you go from this to like scale? And what we found is in the corporate world the pyramid of buy-in is a very pointy, slippery one. And you need a lot of layers of validation.
And once you do get through those layers, the issue for a wannabe SaaS business like us is that the higher the buy-in, the less likely they are to buy off the shelf. So in other words, you're doing, anti-racism training and you're gonna work with, not that it's a true example. But, you're gonna work with Barclays and HSBC. The learning objectives are the exact same. Anti-racism training, we know what it's about, but they're gonna need their own version. So you find yourself with super long sales cycle and then you have to do something that's semi bespoke. You're still using your own code, your own, you know, learning framework and maybe characters, environments and whatnot.
But you still have many stakeholders to talk to and the politics of it. And so weirdly enough, even though the clients are big and they have money, there's not that much scalability there. Then on the other end, you take the education market. So we started receiving a lot of inbound from education and what we found is, well the first thing, structurally speaking, a college doesn't have money to do, or university doesn't have money to do a bespoke piece of work.
It's the opposite. They want to buy off the shelf. And if you have something off the shelf that's been successfully deployed at a college or university down the road, that's even better. So there's a level of kind of recommendation and advocacy that's very high in education.
And the second thing we found in education, it's alignment of purpose. And I'm gonna put it very, very bluntly, but deploying virtual reality is a pain in the ass. Especially if it's the first time. You need the hardware, you need to train the facilitators, you need to manage the fleet. I mean, it's a lot of work. And it's a lot of effort. And for a middle manager at Barclays to learn active listening in VR versus on PowerPoint, it's for many people, for most L&D people, it's a nice to have.
So they might do it once to get a little bit of PR, but to really deploy at scale, it's something else. Whereas for a college to help their students be better at job interviews is their mission, right? That's what a college does. A bank, they do banking, they don't do learning. That's not their job.
And so there is a culture of innovation in learning in education that is much stronger. And so if they find, and there's also a care for learning outcomes that is stronger. So if they find that what you offer as a solution is better than the status quo, that the students get value from it, then they will make things move a lot faster.
And so we did a pivot like 18 months ago to two months ago into education, and it's worked very, very well. And so that's the difference between the learning with the two sectors. We still work with corporates, and it's starting to catch up in terms of scale, but really it's education that, that's leading the charge here.
FC: Very often you hear the debate between what audience will you attack first and how, and then, generally, the education institutions have very long sales cycles, et cetera, et cetera. And then corporate might be a bit easier. So it's not necessarily black and white at all.
CM: It's not and one thing I would say to be very pragmatic. Where does the money come from? Right now it's not like the economy is doing that well. So in the corporate world, everything that is perceived as a nice to have is scraped off.
Very simple. Whereas education tends to be contrast cyclical a lot more. The investment in education doesn't go that much up when it's a good time economically speaking, but it doesn't go that much down when it's a bad time. And right now, there's a lot of government money in grants. How are we gonna use immersive learning to improve remote education and access to education for people on the other side of Digital Divide? How are we going to use artificial intelligence to solve the shortage of teachers? So you have big questions and the government is putting money there, and so our biggest client as Bodyswaps is not a big corporate, is not a Fortune 500 company. It's a group of colleges near London, in the countryside that's received a 5 million grant from the government to develop virtual reality and AI for improving the outcomes of the students. It's not something you can put in your business plan, that's what's gonna happen two years from now.
But the reality of it is the money sometimes comes from places you don't expect.
FC: And just to dig a bit into the sector of immersive and AR/VR, how has the hype that was a few years ago around the topic, how has that helped or not helped the development of Bodyswaps?
CM: So we're gonna see if you're a visual thinker or not. You're gonna have to overlay two curves. The first one is the hype cycle. Alright, so you know the Gartner hype cycle. So you started in 2015. And so 2015, 2016, beginning 2017, you opened Wired Magazine. VR every day. Like half of the articles were virtual reality, which is very good at the beginning.
Cause that's means you opened the door at Orange and Fortune 500. Because they read it in Wired and there's FOMO. So you're playing on that FOMO that is created by the media. And then 2017 you start to go down that slope of disillusionment. And then 2018 is the age of like of VR is not working. VR is dead. It's like 3D TV, you know, all of that. So you have that curve. And then behind that, you have the reality, which is the adoption of new technology. You start with the visionaries, the early adopters. Then you have this chasm, this gap, and then you go into the early majority. And the chasm is when you move from your champion, your people who like VR and have a vision for the future and are willing to put the effort to people who don't care about the technology and they only care about the results.
And technology is a means to an end, and you have to make it easy. And what I feel is right now, 2023, we have crossed the chasm in education. So when we have a conversation with institutions, we are not talking about why VR. It's never why VR anymore. It's always how. And it's not, how do I use a headset, it is how do I train my staff? How does XR fit with the work of the library or with the work of the career center? How do I get buy-in from the teachers to integrate modules in the curriculum? So it's those kinds of questions. And I think the market is mature enough now so that we are entering a phase of mutualization of use cases.
And someone that comes in and when they say, oh, I want to use your software Bodyswaps, but where can I buy a headset? I always know that it's gonna take ages. Whereas, if they come in and say, oh, we have headsets and we are using them for 22 different types of simulations, and we heard about you, you know it's gonna be faster.
Because in the former case, it's like you invented Photoshop and you have to come to people and say, hey, this is a laptop and this is a mouse, and this is a keyboard. So it's a hard sell. Whereas when people come to you and say, oh, well I have Photoshop, but I want a video editing tool, you know it's gonna be a shorter sale cycle.
And I really feel in 2023 talking with other companies in the sector that's where we are. Solutions that tackle problems for which a cost benefit analysis has been done, that deliver results that have been academically demonstrated, that have nailed the kind of product market fit and where to deploy.
And now we are entering the phase of mutualization of use cases and scaling.
FC: On the success, what's your secret sauce? Like what will make you succeed eventually?
CM: I think it's the team. It's the most basic answer, but it's when you hire, you know, when you are like two, three people and you're just the founders and you do everything yourself, and you hire someone in sales and then one morning you wake up and you see in the Slack channel that you have a new client and you haven't even heard of them, and your sales team has done it entirely. And then you wake up to find an award that you've won that your marketing has generated. And then you wake up to see a great feedback from a client through a customer service team. And that's just to talk about one side. And then obviously on the other side, your CTO is able to output more content and more, more features because he has developers.
And I think for us, the team has been everything. That same like mix of passion and reliability. That's the only secret source there is. For me, I mean, I could talk about the tech and the pedagogy, but I don't think it's really that, I think it's about putting the impact first. And it might sound bullshit, but the day the company changed for us is the day we realized that if we are VR geeks trying to do education, that's not gonna work.
So we hired a head of learning design, Ruth, she has a PhD in human computer interaction, 20 years experience in learning design. And her exercise during her interview was to essentially destroy our product. And say, what is wrong with our product from a learning design perspective. And yeah, she absolutely, she destroyed it. She pointed out so many things that when was not working, not from a VR sense, but from a this is not how human beings learn.
And I think when we flipped it on its head and said, no, no; we are an education company that happens to use whatever technology is available to achieve a result, which is improving the soft skills of people so that they can get the carriers and the lives that they deserve.
And so how much AI are we gonna use? How much VR? What else are we gonna bring in? That's only dependent on the results, as opposed to building a shiny hammer that's looking for a nail, right?
FC: And on that, on the market, who do you consider your competitors and why?
CM: So there's two levels of competition. I think you have the direct competitors, other VR companies doing soft skills training. And even though they are competitors, there's no overlap, absolute overlap of the content.
I think I'm generally in a stage where anyone in our industry that raises money is great news. Because of the mutualization of use cases. And so if a college has bought a management training from a competitor and they're using it and they're happy, maybe they tried the job interview simulation from the competitor. And they tried ours, and they prefer ours. And the very fact that they tried the competitors and are already using other products from the competitor makes them more likely to also buy our own. So I think that's the first level. And I don't really see those companies as competitors because the real competition is the status quo.
I mentioned we do job interview training. There's an American company that has a platform for job interview training. They have like 300,000 questions, but the way they teach job interview training on that platform is terrible. And we know that because we know that the engagement rate for colleges and universities that buy that platform is under 1%.
So that's the real competition. And you know, those guys are in place. They work with half of the universities in the world. So that's who we are going after.
FC: And that resonates with what we just heard from another founder from Society Lab, Thomas, who was on the show as well, talking about status quo in corporations, and that's what they are fighting as well. Moving over a bit to the learnings; what's been the biggest learning since you started the company and how did you solve it?
CM: I would say it's about falling in love with the challenge, not the product. At first, at least for us we created the product out of excitement for something that was doable, right? This idea of you can use VR to record someone's voice and body movements and replay them to do out of body experience slash self-awareness. That has to be a new way of learning soft skills. But, then you put it in the hands of people and you get a lot of smiles and a lot of wows, and then it doesn't stick, it doesn't scale. And then you're like, well, what's wrong?
We have a good product. Everyone loves it. And then I think you learn to ask the tough questions to your clients, right? Say, oh, you said you loved it, but you didn't really adopt it. What's wrong there? And then you discover a lot of stuff. I don't think we've solved every challenge. But, a solution certainly is talking to clients.
To give you an example; this afternoon. Looping the loop. The publisher that I mentioned earlier that commissioned the first experience in 2019. We're still working with them and we are going to build a new solution for business school students. And so our head of learning design Ruth wrote three learning proposals.
I can't tell you what they are for obvious reasons, but what we did is we asked 25 business schools that we work with. Which one matters the most to you. And the answer we got was quite surprising in terms of what they chose. And so we had 25 clients telling us what they would want to buy from us in less than 48 hours. That kind of information is just amazing. Cause then you build something that you know is going to sell. And you talk with them as well about how are you going to deploy it? And actually, do you think it's for first year students or last year students?
FC: And, on the learnings as well, any resources or support within the ecosystem that has really helped you along the way?
CM: So for us, we had a grant from the UK government that changed everything. It was like a 300,000 pound grant at the very beginning. So that's kind of, that was like, okay, well we have a year ahead of us to build a product and then we will be able to go to investors with a product that works. I think advisors have been very, very important as well. And I mean, people are generally quite happy to talk about their job and to help out if you ask them in a nice way. And we were very surprised by the level of people that we were able to talk to by just saying, Hey, look, you know, we're young entrepreneurs. We want your advice on this, and that. And people will jump on a call and help. So we have LinkedIn, it's easy to find people talking with us. And then as I mentioned, clients. Talking to clients, organizing focus groups and all of that. You save a lot of time, not like second guessing what your learner is going to be just chatting with them.
FC: And on the subject of grants, I have to dig into the Meta grant or the partnership that you have with Meta. Could you tell a bit more about that and how you ended up getting this partnership?
CM: Yeah, so, Meta, they have a program for software vendors. So they have a community and we had a check with them. And we talked about education and they said, well, listen we have a team dedicated to education that has a lot of headsets to give away, what can you guys propose?
And that's when we had this idea of building a grant. And when I say the grant is not a grant for us Bodyswaps, it's a grant for education institutions. So what we said is, we went out to the world and we said those are three questions, very easy to apply. And the top 100 institutions will receive two headsets given by Meta, will receive a license for Bodyswaps for three months and will receive support and onboarding and participation in the community. Without spending any money on marketing whatsoever.
We received application from 250 institutions. That's about 500 pages of applications. And the questions were, you know, why do you wanna use VR for soft skills? Who are your learners? What are you hoping to achieve? How are you going to deploy? So we get like 500 pages of market research. And then obviously, now we're still learning from them and we're putting institutions in clusters.
So we facilitate dialogues between institutions, maybe from, from different places, but in the same sector. So far it's been very, very insightful and obviously we are hoping to convert those partners into long-term clients. But I think enabling the dialogue and allowing them to pilot and test it with the learners, just being there to support as opposed to selling hard, seems to work well in education. Because, and that's maybe the difference with corporate is when you work with Dell and in the US and Orange in France, the L&D team at Dell has no idea what the L&D team is doing at Orange. Right? It's just not the same industry, not the same places.
Whereas in education, people are very aware of what everyone else is doing. And we found that the best driver for us, for new business is the advocacy of our own clients. So we have some colleges that have brought five, six new clients on their own without us doing anything.
And it's interesting to say we should spend more money hiring people in customer success, than going on Google advertising. Because giving great customer success makes people talk about you in the network, whether they are real or virtual. And that is what drives new business.
FC: And looking forwards in the next 6 to 12 months, what's keeping you up at night?
CM: I think that's what's keeping everyone up at night. It's generative ai. Right. What's happening has so many ramifications in terms of impact that it's very hard to get your head around it. And I'm becoming slightly obsessive about it.
But if you think about what we are proposing at Bodyswaps, it's a conversation simulator plus an AI coach, right? The idea of Bodyswaps is; if you wanna help people get soft skills today, you cannot do it at scale. Things like coaching. Coaching is fantastic, but you cannot, like 99% of the population cannot have a coach.
And on the other side you have e-learning. It's fantastic for knowledge, right? It's super scalable. It's super accessible. But when it comes to talking to a suicidal patient, you don't learn that on PowerPoints, right? You have to practice. And so that's where the idea is. Let's simulate the conversations using VR, and let's use AI to give you hyper personalized feedback so you become independent. It's repeatable practice. And now with generative AI, that technology brings us like a huge step closer to that vision. But there's a lot of problems. Hallucinations as they call them in terms of the accuracy. The control as well. If you let the AI impersonate suicidal patients, what's the AI going to say?
There's the ethical reasons as well. You know, can you give responsibility for an AI to become your coach. Is it really gonna give you the best advice? So that's what's keeping us up at night. It's definitely going to be integrated and we are working on it now, but how do we make it ethical and safe and actually beneficial for the learner?
FC: And how much is that interest driven by formal or real opportunity instead of hype?
CM: The vision for the product aligned. So I think it's not a diversion from what we did originally and say, look, there's new, shiny stuff on the side. I think, it's always what we wanted. We probably just didn't expect it to come that fast and that strong. We've been given a tool, almost a weapon that is scarily powerful.
There is a notion as well of people right now somewhere are using generative AI to build better soft skills training. We are slightly ahead at the moment because, you know, we have tens of thousands of learners and we are working with dozens of universities and so on, but that's a little headstart. Let's use it to build something great. But if we don't in 12 months, 18 months, someone's gonna drop a product on the market and could like, literally kill us overnight. And I think that's the scary slash great thing for generative AI is it's going to disrupt industries very, very brutally.
Um, so that's why Yeah, it's, it's both an existential threat and the biggest opportunity we've ever had.
FC: Can't wait for what's coming out there. Based on all your experience, is there any advice that you would give other EdTech startups?
CM: I would say talk to people. I think you mentioned that, you know, what are the resources?
Just talk, talk to clients, talk to advisors, talk to investors. And then I would say, maybe to repeat myself a bit, build on advocacy and FOMO. It's something you read everywhere, but cherish the first few relationships you build because specifically in education your sales team, your marketing team is your client.
You just enabling, you know? Just give them a microphone, organize the webinar, invite them for blogs, invite 'em at conferences. But you're just building a stage. You are not on stage. Your clients are on stage.
FC: So we are almost at the end of the podcast. Is there anything else that you want to share with the audience?
CM: Yes. I think. Maybe something around the availability bias and the insight bias. So what I mean by that is, I remember when we started reading in the news, you know, you only read about the startups that raise a lot of money. And so, you think, oh, you know, I've been at it for two years and I'm still struggling and I'm not raising money and what am I doing wrong?
And there's nothing that you're doing wrong. It's just the news obviously is going to cover the ones that have the overnight success. But I think that creates a certain form of anxiety and pressure to achieve that big, that fast. And that's the availability bias, right? You focus too much on the information that is available.
So I would, maybe one of my advice is to stay away a little bit from that and be realistic. And the other thing is the hindsight bias is that's when people like me are going to say, well, this is how you should do things, because that's how I did it and it worked. And I think that's building a story out of something that is sometimes just pure luck or being at the right place at the right time.
And so it's good to talk with people and you need to talk with people, but also be aware of the gurus. We've had some fake gurus in the past, and so it's always like critical thinking, right? Talk to as many people as you can, but then put a critical thinking judgment between what people tell you you should do and what you really think you should do.
Because at the end of the day, only you really know your clients and your product and what you want to do with your life. So yeah, essentially don't listen to people like me too much. This is my advice.
