Munich Startup: What does your startup do? What problem does Lotaro solve?
Julia Kupke, Lotaro: Every company strives for high-performing employees. Over 90 percent of everyday work involves soft skills like communication, sales, leadership, motivation, and time management. That’s why it’s crucial for companies to strengthen these skills. Current solutions like in-house or external training are time-consuming and expensive. And e-learning providers don’t offer a satisfactory solution because the format doesn’t deliver the desired results. How can you improve people skills if you don’t practice them hands-on with other people, but instead watch videos at double speed while answering emails on the side?
For this reason, we developed a solution that on one hand offers a format enabling enormous learning outcomes in the shortest time, and on the other hand can be easily integrated into everyday work.
In short: Lotaro is a live training platform for people skills deployed across organizations. Every employee has access to interactive live trainings held daily in small mixed groups of around ten people with a trainer, lasting a maximum of 2 hours. Typical courses cover topics like “Structuring 1:1 performance reviews”, “Coaching skills for leaders”, “Learning negotiation tactics”, and “Storytelling in sales”, plus many others.
Lotaro: team comes first
Munich Startup: But that already exists!
Julia Kupke: There’s already plenty of content on the market, especially in e-learning, countless videos with impressive effects. Here much more value is placed on quantity over quality: more videos, larger groups, well-known moderators from renowned companies. But the learning outcome for the individual gets lost in the process.
Munich Startup: What’s your founding story?
Julia Kupke: It was important to me that the team comes first. Ideas change, the market changes, but working together as a team in the early years and meaningfully complementing each other’s skills are crucial for success. That’s why we first came together as a team and then went through ups and downs together until we could launch our training platform.
Challenge: getting back up
Munich Startup: What were your biggest challenges so far?
Julia Kupke: Getting back up. Before developing our training platform, we had several ideas in mind and even generated promising revenue. But with all these ideas, we lacked the feeling (and the metrics) that we were solving a problem better than others or that a significant problem even existed. We could have made money from it, but we have high standards for ourselves and the potential impact we want to achieve.
Munich Startup: Where do you want to be in one year, where in five years?
Julia Kupke: Our idea emerged six months ago. Today we have a technically flawless product, a really great selection of trainers and courses with customer satisfaction (NPS score) over 60, and customers who can already fully finance us. Things are going very well in this current phase. Still, it’s naturally a challenge to sell additional costs in the current economic situation where companies have to lay off talent.
In five years, I want to have achieved a situation where candidates proactively ask in job interviews whether the company offers Lotaro memberships to develop themselves optimally—it should be a given for employers to offer this opportunity.
Impressive helpfulness of the scene
Munich Startup: How have you experienced Munich as a startup hub so far?
Julia Kupke: I’ve been living in Munich for over ten years. Of course, I have my network here, which consists almost exclusively of founders. It’s always impressive how helpful everyone is. Whether it’s winning pilot customers, making connections to potential clients, exchanging ideas, or simply being a listening ear when things aren’t going well. I’m very grateful for this support.
Unfortunately, Munich doesn’t really offer meaningful financial support in terms of office space. Even though nowadays it’s rare to be in the office five days a week, it’s still important, especially in the early stages, to get together as often as possible. The so-called “startup offices” are usually labeled with logos of large companies and mostly stand empty or are used as “innovation spaces”.
Munich Startup: Quick exit or long haul?
Julia Kupke: For us, it’s primarily about creating something that really helps employees develop both in their current role and personally. We communicate, sell, motivate, and lead throughout our lives. Therefore, our impact is enormous. We want to offer this opportunity to every talent. That comes first. Whether an exit can help us realize this vision remains to be seen.
