A journey to empower children learning with Alexa lessons: Lorenzo Carver and Russell Brand’s Startup Story

Lorenzo Carver first became an entrepreneur to pay his college tuition bills when studying music. He quickly realized he had a natural talent for building and selling products, and he started a series of successful projects before founding Brainsprays (https://brainsprays.com/), his current startup. Lorenzo wanted his daughter to get an education that would place her lightyears above her peers, and he wanted her to enjoy and be engaged with the process. So he created Brainsprays, which uses the Alexa home assistant device to offer engaging and interactive reading and mathematics lessons to young children. Brainsprays’ lessons have helped hundreds of kids excel above their grade level and develop a passion for learning.

During our Clubhouse interview with Lorenzo and his business partner Russell Brand, we learned more about their startup journey, biggest obstacles, and most successful strategies. Let’s dive right into their startup advice:

You don’t need a large team to be successful

Brainsprays is a great example of how startups can become successful with just a small team and a few resources. Lorenzo codes and publishes all the Alexa lessons himself using JavaScript. Lorenzo, Russell, and his daughter are the main masterminds behind Brainsprays. However, as Brainsprays has grown, the team has turned to external professionals to help them achieve tasks outside of their expertise. For example, they hired a few dozen musicians to record original music to accompany their lessons.

Always assume your traction channels won’t work forever

Lorenzo found that the Alexa device itself was a great traction channel to spread the word about Brainsprays. However, Lorenzo warned against getting too comfortable in any one channel, even if the channel is very successful.

“If you do an okay job, you can get some customers...but eventually someone with big capital is gonna come in and you’re not gonna get substantial traffic.”

Not only do startups fiercely compete against each other, but they also compete with established brands who have significantly more resources and power. Bigger companies can easily steal a startup’s traffic or users, essentially wiping them off the map. Lorenzo’s solution to this issue is to always be looking for, and experimenting with, new channels: “A lot of our effort has been on trying to get prepared for the next stage for other ways of reaching people.”

Lorenzo has also been using Growth Channel AI to help him find and implement new growth marketing strategies for Brainsprays.

Build personas off those who are willing to engage with you

For many startups, it can be difficult to know exactly who your target audience is. You may think you know who’s going to buy your product, but your actual customers may be completely different than what you anticipated. When it comes to marketing and targeting customers, incorrect assumptions can greatly hurt your chances of success. The best thing you can do is build a persona off of the data you already have, as Lorenzo did.

“We built a customer persona based on the people that were willing to talk to us.”

He directly reached out to users for feedback, and built an ideal customer profile from those who were eager to help. Users who are excited to offer feedback are the most invested and engaged with your product, so it makes sense to target similar profiles.

“Feedback keeps us honest” - Russell Brand
User feedback is incredibly important for any company, but especially for startups.

“The most common mode of failure for tech companies is they build wonderful products that no one cares about. They build things that no one wants, that no one can use.”

Both Lorenzo and Russell emphasized how important feedback has been in ensuring people actually want what Brainsprays has to offer. They’ve collected feedback and recommendations from various users and used it to improve Brainsprays’ lessons.

Our favorite quotes from Russell Brand:

“It’s very easy to believe that something is wonderful but not see what stops it from being useful.”

“There’s nothing as valuable as having early users so you can see what’s working and what’s not.”

Want to hear more awesome startup stories? Growth Channel is teaming up with Sloop.ai to interview a new founder on Clubhouse every month with the club Go, Go, Startups! (https://www.clubhouse.com/club/go-go-startups).