Suada: The Journey so Far

Six years ago, this photo was taken in The Hill Village Pub in Wollaston. Two guys with no product, no roadmap, just a couple of pints and a belief that we could make sales training actually stick.

That's how Suada started. In a pub with David Thomson, a man I'd met years earlier when he walked into a telesales office and delivered the most captivating sales training session I'd ever seen. I was fresh out of university, learning to sell over the phone, and I remember thinking: I need to learn from this guy.

We didn't speak for a couple of years after that. But we stayed connected. And in 2019, through a mutual friend, we reconnected. David had spent over 30 years working in sales, building up this incredible depth of knowledge and methodology. He's one of only six people in the world certified to teach Robert Cialdini's principles of influence. He understands NLP, framing, pre-suasion, negotiation and so many more. He'd worked across different industries, different markets, different types of sales - from complex B2B enterprise deals to fast-moving consumer sales. He'd seen what worked, what didn't, and more importantly, he understood why. We saw an opportunity: take everything he knew and create a digital offering that could reach more people than traditional face-to-face training ever could.

So we started building sales training courses. We developed a comprehensive sales transformation course and an influence course, pulling together all of David's experience and structuring it in a way that we thought would be our route to market. These weren't just generic sales tips - this was proper methodology, grounded in decades of real-world experience. We were excited. We thought this was going to be our play: take these courses to market, help sales teams get better at selling, and build a business around genuinely valuable content.

The Problem with Existing Platforms

But as we got deeper into the development process, we hit a significant problem. We looked at every learning platform out on the market - the learning management systems, the e-learning platforms, all the technology that was supposed to make corporate training better in the digital age. And none of them could actually deliver what we needed. They were all great for consuming content, for watching videos or reading materials, clicking through slides and maybe doing a multiple-choice quiz at the end. But they couldn't deliver the practical skills needed to truly embed the training.

This was the crucial realisation. If we were going to do this digitally and actually change behaviour - not just tick a compliance box or give people something to watch during their commute - we needed people to apply what they were learning, not just passively absorb it. Knowledge without application is just information. We needed something that would bridge that gap between knowing something and being able to actually apply it.

That's when we made the decision to build our own platform. We started working with an Indian development team to create something fundamentally different - an application where people could teach back what they'd learned. The idea was elegantly simple: if you can teach it, you truly understand it. We've all experienced this in our own lives. You think you understand something, and then someone asks you to explain it, and suddenly you realise the gaps in your knowledge. Or conversely, you explain something to someone else and in doing so, you cement that knowledge in your own mind far more effectively than if you'd just read about it ten times.

Starting Over

We wanted to create technology that would capture that process and make it scalable. Imagine if every learner had to record themselves teaching back the key concepts they'd learned, in their own words, demonstrating their understanding. That would be transformative. So we briefed the Indian team, worked with them on the specifications, and waited for them to build this vision.

Except it didn't work out. The Indian team messed us around. What they built wasn't good enough, didn't meet the brief, didn't function the way we needed it to. Communication was difficult, timelines slipped, and the quality just wasn't there. What they delivered was essentially a prototype platform that would never be accepted into either the iOS or Android app store. We'd invested 18 months and £100k+, and we realised we were going to have to start again from scratch. It was beyond frustrating - one of those moments in building a business where you wonder if you're ever going to get this off the ground. But sometimes you need to cut your losses and find the right partners, even if it means going back to square one.

That's when we met Beka Tomashvili and the Georgian team. Right from the first conversations, it felt different. They understood what we were trying to achieve. They got the vision. More importantly, they had the technical capability to actually build it. So we essentially rebuilt everything from the ground up with them, creating the first proper MVP version of Suada.

The Breakthrough

This time, we got it right. The Georgian team delivered. The platform did exactly what we'd envisioned - it allowed learners to record themselves teaching back the concepts they'd learned, in their own words, processing and synthesising the information rather than just consuming it. Learners would go through the training content, and then they'd have to create short video recordings of themselves explaining the key concepts. No hiding behind multiple-choice questions. No passively watching and hoping something sticks. They had to demonstrate genuine understanding.

And it worked. The feedback from our early users was incredible. People were actually retaining the information. They were applying it in their roles. Sales people who'd been through the training were using the techniques in real conversations with clients. But more than that, we started noticing something unexpected in how people were responding to the methodology itself.

The way they were learning - this teach-back approach - was creating results that went beyond just the sales content we'd originally built it for. People talked about how the process of recording themselves made them more confident. They'd record a video, watch it back, realise they could improve their explanation, and record it again. Each iteration built their confidence. They were literally re-engineering their self-image through the process. They went from "I'm someone learning about this" to "I'm someone who knows this well enough to teach it to others." That psychological shift is profound.

The Lightbulb Moment

We started getting feedback that the platform was as important as the content. People loved David's sales methodology, but they also loved the way they were learning it. And that's when the lightbulb moment hit us: this pedagogy, this methodology of teaching back what you've learned in your own words, it's actually content agnostic.

Yes, we'd built it for sales training because that was our starting point, that was what we knew, that was the content we had. But there was nothing about the teach-back methodology that was specific to sales. The power of having to articulate your understanding, to synthesise information in your own words, to build confidence through repeated practice - that could work for anything. Leadership development? Absolutely. Compliance training? Yes, and probably far more effectively than the usual tick-box approach. Technical skills? Of course. Manufacturing processes? Why not. Health and safety procedures? Perfect use case.

Any content could be taught this way and achieve the same outcome of people actually retaining what they'd learned and being able to apply it in their work. We'd accidentally built something with far broader application than we'd initially realised. The platform we'd created out of necessity - because nothing else on the market could do what we needed - had become the innovation itself.

The Science Behind It

But we didn't want to just claim this worked based on anecdotal feedback, however positive. At this stage, we wanted to make sure we weren't just stumbling around in the dark, that what we were seeing wasn't just placebo effect or confirmation bias. We needed to understand the science behind why this methodology was so effective.

That's when we started working with Professor Dean Mobbs at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Professor Mobbs is a neuroscientist who specialises in understanding how the brain processes threat, reward, and social information - essentially, how our brains work when we're learning and adapting our behaviour. We wanted to ensure that what we were building mapped to actual neuroscience and behavioural research, that there was solid scientific foundation for what we were seeing in practice.

Working with Professor Mobbs opened our eyes to the mechanics of learning at a neurological level. We learned about how neural pathways are formed through repeated practice and retrieval. We understood how memory is encoded more strongly when you have to actively recall and articulate information rather than just recognising it. We discovered how the act of teaching - of having to organise information coherently enough to explain it to someone else - creates deeper cognitive processing than passive learning ever could.

Professor Mobbs helped us understand that teach-back methodology genuinely does create stronger retention and behavioural change because of how it forces the brain to work. When you teach something, you're not just retrieving information from memory - you're synthesising it, connecting it to other knowledge, finding ways to articulate it clearly, anticipating questions, thinking about examples. Your brain is doing far more cognitive work than when you're simply watching or reading. And that extra work creates stronger, more durable learning.

The video element added another layer too. Recording yourself creates a mild form of social pressure - you're going to watch this back, someone else might see it. That activates different parts of the brain than just thinking about a concept privately. And the ability to re-record, to improve, to see your own progress - that creates a feedback loop that reinforces both the learning and the confidence.

Where We Are Now

So what started as "let's digitise David's sales training" became something far more significant. We'd built a learning platform with a pedagogy that fundamentally changes how people learn and retain skills. The teach-back methodology, now backed by neuroscience and behavioural research, became the innovation - not just the content we were delivering through it.

That's why Suada has potential across such diverse sectors. We're having conversations with deskless workforces in manufacturing who need to learn complex processes and safety procedures remotely. We're speaking with financial services professionals who need to stay current with regulatory requirements. We're exploring applications with healthcare workers who need to embed clinical protocols, and with educators who need to develop their teaching practice. The content across these sectors is completely different, but the methodology works equally well for all of them because it taps into fundamental principles of how humans learn.

And it's why our retention rates stand out. We're not just talking about customer retention - though that's strong too - but knowledge retention. Suada's unique methodology combats the forgetting curve - that well-documented phenomenon where people forget up to 70% of what they've learned within 24 hours if they don't actively engage with it. By requiring learners to teach back what they've learned, we're forcing that active engagement at the point of learning, which dramatically shifts the retention curve in our favour. People remember what they've learned through Suada. They can apply it weeks and months later. It's not because we have the best content in any particular field, though we work with brilliant partners on content creation. It's because the way people learn through Suada changes how they see themselves and their capabilities. They don't just know things; they become people who can teach those things. That's a fundamental shift in identity, not just knowledge.

Looking Back

Looking back at the journey, all those obstacles turned out to be necessary. If we'd just found an existing platform that worked reasonably well for our sales courses, we'd have built something good. We'd have had a nice business selling David's training content through someone else's technology. But because existing platforms weren't fit for purpose, because the Indian team let us down and we had to start over, because we ended up working with Beka and the Georgian team who could really bring the vision to life - all of that led us to discover something genuinely different.

Something that doesn't just transfer knowledge, but actually transforms how people learn, retain, and apply new skills. Something that's grounded in neuroscience but proven in practice across dozens of different applications and industries. Something that changes not just what people know, but how they see themselves.

That journey from "let's digitise sales training" to "we've built a learning methodology that's content agnostic and grounded in neuroscience" - that's the Suada story so far. And honestly, we're still only scratching the surface of what this approach can do. Every time we work with a new client in a new sector, we discover new applications for the methodology. Every time we see a learner's confidence transform through the teach-back process, we're reminded why this matters.

We set out to solve a relatively narrow problem - how to deliver David's sales training digitally in a way that would actually work. We ended up discovering a new approach to corporate learning that has the potential to change how organisations develop their people. That's the beautiful thing about building a business: sometimes the obstacles and failures lead you somewhere far more interesting than your original destination.