Client
Voovo is a study app that turns educators' content - YouTube videos, PowerPoints, documents - into structured online courses, with flashcards, quizzes, active recall and spaced repetition built in. Students learn from creators they already follow; an AI tutor answers from the course's own notes and an AI study plan schedules the material against a syllabus and exam date.
The platform runs on a creator model: educators bring their existing material, Voovo packages it into a paid course flow, and students buy and study from it. Today it carries 150k+ students, 25+ creators and 25+ universities, with partners spanning medicine, biology, economics, history and psychology across Europe - including channels like Rhesus Medicine (469K subscribers, 36M views) and Jocó Bácsi (100K+ followers, 1,200+ course purchases).
They came to Vanderbuild before that creator motion existed - convinced the buyer was universities.
Challenge: a confident thesis, aimed at the hardest segment
Voovo arrived with a self-formed go-to-market thesis: sell to universities and the high-value academic champions who hold the knowledge but keep it locked in clunky formats. They wanted to reach the market fast.
Two problems sat underneath that plan. The thesis rested on conviction rather than evidence. And universities were the highest-friction segment on the table: long sales cycles, committee buy-in, procurement. Before committing resources to the slowest-moving buyer they could have picked, Voovo needed proof of which segment would actually convert.
The core question
Is the university motion real or is there a lower-friction buyer who wants exactly this?
Solution
We ran product-market-fit validation with a go-to-market workshop on the front end. The workshop produced the pivot; the campaigns proved it.
Business Value
Voovo walked away with both a validated direction and the assets to execute it.
- A repositioned go-to-market strategy and a validated ICP: YouTube educators.
- The revenue-share value proposition, tested in live messaging.
- An enriched, semantically categorized database of educational YouTube channels, with contacts.
- Campaign assets across two iterations.
- A scalable sales thesis backed by two independent data sets.
Results: the pivot held across two independent campaigns
The creator segment converted where the original university thesis would have stalled and the result didn't rest on a single lucky send. It held across two separate campaigns.
Iteration 1 - test the thesis: 1,496 prospects, 257 replies (16.8%), 85 sales opportunities.
Iteration 2 - scale it: 1,400 leads, 198 replies (15.6%), 77 interested (37.6% of replies).
The strategic outcome: a lower-friction, evidence-backed motion replaced an unproven, high-friction one. Voovo stopped spending against a hunch and started selling to a buyer the data had already confirmed would answer.
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