When Panos Siozos talks about creators, he does not start with followers, algorithms, or viral reach. He starts with learning and with the belief that education businesses built by individuals will increasingly sit at the center of the creator economy.

Panos is the CEO and co-founder of LearnWorlds, a European AI-powered learning platform that enables creators to build and own full online education businesses, spanning branded websites, interactive courses, communities, payments, and analytics. Founded in 2014, LearnWorlds has created 800,000 courses and reached over 32 million learners across 155 countries, according to the company.

LearnWorlds provides creators with the infrastructure to move off third-party platforms and build owned learning ecosystems. For Panos, that distinction is not cosmetic; it is foundational to how creators build sustainable businesses.

“If these big marketplaces are something like the Amazon of online courses, we wanted to become the Shopify of online courses; giving creators the tools to create their own online school where they are the total boss of everything,” he says.

From Academic Research to Creator Infrastructure

Panos did not enter the creator economy from media or entertainment. He comes from educational research, holding a PhD in educational technology. Panos specializes in computer-assisted assessment and has worked for more than two decades in e-learning, serving as both a researcher and a practitioner. 

Before founding LearnWorlds, he worked as a policy adviser in the European Parliament, with a focus on research and innovation.

LearnWorlds itself began as an academic experiment long before “creator economy” entered industry vocabulary. Panos and his co-founders built their first learning management system in 1999 as a university project. The formal company emerged in 2014, when platforms such as Coursera, Udemy, and Lynda.com were reshaping online education.

“What people started realizing,” Panos explains, “was that if you wanted to learn a skill, you were not limited to the traditional schooling system anymore.”

While massive course marketplaces expanded access, they also introduced structural problems for individual educators. New creators were buried among thousands of courses, platforms dictated pricing, and, critically, creators did not own their audiences or data.

“You do not control your pricing, you do not control your content,” Panos says. “You don’t even know who your users are.”

LearnWorlds was designed as a response to that imbalance.

Photo: LearnWorlds founders Panos Siozos (CEO), George Palaigeorgiou (CPO), and Fanis Despotakis (CTO)

Solving the Ownership Problem in Creator Education

At its core, LearnWorlds solves a problem that many creators encounter after building an audience: platform dependency. Creators can reach people on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, but they rarely control the relationship.

“We are becoming the all-in-one platform where creators can create, disseminate, and monetize their content,” Panos says. “They own the data. They own the content. They bring in their own audience and monetize things.”

This ownership focus has become more urgent as creators contend with shifting algorithms, changes in monetization policies, and geopolitical uncertainty around platforms. Panos points to repeated moments when creators realized their businesses were “built on sand.”

“When you don’t own spaces, it’s fragile,” he says. “The creator is always at the mercy of the big platforms.”

Rather than replacing social media, LearnWorlds positions itself as an owned destination that complements it. Platforms like YouTube function as discovery channels; LearnWorlds becomes the place where deeper engagement and monetization happen.

“YouTube becomes the acquisition channel,” Panos explains. “Then you bring them into the platform for further monetization and for a closer connection.”

Image: LearnWorlds’ Product Course Hub

What Makes Learning Stick

With data from tens of millions of learners, LearnWorlds has visibility into what drives engagement and retention, and what fails.

One of the most consistent mistakes Panos sees is creators replicating offline teaching formats online. Long, uninterrupted videos are a holdover from classrooms, not a product of digital learning behavior.

“A 45-minute video of a person talking – you will fall asleep after five minutes,” he says.

Instead, LearnWorlds data shows that short, interactive videos perform best, typically under 10 minutes. Interactivity matters as much as length. “You watch the video, it stops, a quiz pops up, you have to answer, and then it progresses,” Panos explains. “Learning is not the same as consuming content.”

Community is the second major retention lever. Courses without social interaction often fail to sustain momentum.

“Learning is a social sport,” he says. “It doesn’t happen in isolation.”

Creators who build communities around their courses (spaces where learners discuss, disagree, and progress together) see higher retention and repeat purchases. Hybrid models that combine self-paced content with live sessions or office hours further strengthen engagement.

“The era of creating a course and selling it for one, two, three years has died,” Panos adds. “You need to keep updating.”

Photo: LearnWorlds’ team

Who LearnWorlds Is Built For

LearnWorlds serves a broad range of creator-entrepreneurs, but a common pattern runs through its most successful users: niche expertise paired with a committed audience.

The platform supports educators, coaches, consultants, and professionals who monetize their knowledge, including fitness trainers, nutritionists, makeup artists, barbers, wedding photographers, and healthcare instructors.

“We’ve seen niches that we didn’t believe existed,” Panos says. “Hair stylists for weddings. Barbers with huge communities.”

In many cases, creators do not start with massive followings. Instead, they have smaller, high-trust audiences willing to pay for depth. “They are not hundreds of thousands,” Panos explains. “They are a couple of thousand. But it’s a small niche community. These people love me. They consume everything that I do.”

LearnWorlds also supports creators who arrive from scale. One of the platform’s largest schools originated on YouTube, where its founders built an audience of more than 6.5 million subscribers, teaching web development. Today, nearly one million students have enrolled in their LearnWorlds-powered school.

“They brought almost one-sixth of their YouTube audience into the platform,” Panos says, “for monetization, certifications, and academic rigor.”

Image: LearnWorlds’ Product Website Engine

AI, Education, and the Risk of ‘Sloppy Content’

AI has lowered the barrier to content creation across the creator economy. For Panos, that shift introduces both opportunity and risk, particularly in education.

“There is all this easy content that anybody can create now,” he says. “On the surface, it looks perfect, but it’s not meaningful on the inside.”

Panos worries that AI-generated content can create a false sense of learning, i.e., exposure without transformation. “If learning happened just by consuming content,” he says, “Wikipedia and YouTube would have been enough.”

LearnWorlds’ approach to AI is augmentation, not replacement. The platform integrates AI tools to help creators work faster and design better learning experiences, while preserving human guidance. “You will not be replaced by AI,” Panos tells creators. “But you might be replaced by someone like you who is using AI.”

Fragmentation and the Case for an All-in-One Platform

Another challenge LearnWorlds addresses is tool sprawl. Creators often juggle separate platforms for websites, payments, video hosting, community, email, and analytics – an approach Panos believes is unsustainable for small teams.

“Fragmentation doesn’t allow them to focus on what they are good at,” he says. “Creating the best possible content and connecting with their communities.”

LearnWorlds consolidates these functions into a single platform. Creators can launch branded websites, host protected video content, manage payments through Stripe or PayPal, issue certificates, and analyze learner behavior, without surrendering ownership of revenue or data.

“We are not the ones who take the money for them,” Panos emphasizes. “The money goes directly to the creator.”

Where Creator-Led Education Is Headed

Panos believes content itself will continue to commoditize, while brand, trust, and validation grow more valuable. “What will become relevant is brand, community, connection, and validation of knowledge,” he says.

As AI accelerates change across industries, Panos expects demand for learning to increase, not decline, both professionally and personally. “People will need to learn more, rather than less,” he says. “Knowledge is becoming obsolete even faster.”

He also sees education emerging as a powerful branding tool for companies, creating new opportunities for collaboration between creators and brands through structured learning experiences rather than one-off sponsored posts.

Advice for Creators Sitting on the Fence

For creators considering their first course or online school, Panos offers direct advice: start now. “There has never been a better time,” he says. “The tools are better than ever.”

Perfectionism, he argues, is the biggest obstacle. “People wait to have the perfect course before launching it,” Panos says. “They should do it now and then iterate fast.”

He points to a cultural shift since the pandemic, where authenticity has replaced polish as the dominant value. “It’s the value that’s important,” he says. “Not perfection.”

As creator-led education continues to mature, LearnWorlds is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer beneath it, not by chasing trends, but by betting on ownership, depth, and learning that actually sticks.

“We want to help people package their knowledge in a beautiful, engaging, interactive format,” Panos says, “and allow them to monetize it to the best possible extent.”

Photo and image credits: LearnWorlds

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