More Money Podcast - The Future of Teaching in the Classroom - Founder of Gibbly, Mallory Maynard

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

This is a special mini-series of the More Money Podcast sponsored by Visa Canada to highlight the latest winners of the Visa She’s Next Grant Program.For this episode of the series, I’m speaking with Mallory Maynard, founder of Gibbly, a Canadian company dedicated to helping teachers fight burnout and reclaim their time so they can be more effective educators. Though not a teacher herself, Mallory’s first company, which built mobile games to inspire girls in STEM, gave her firsthand insight into the challenges teachers face every day. Due to the advent of generative AI, she saw a huge opportunity to streamline tasks by creating an AI-powered teaching assistant to help teachers create curriculum-aligned lesson plans, presentations, and quizzes in a fraction of the time. Although Gibbly has since grown to over 50,000 users, Mallory also shares the sometimes difficult realities of being an entrepreneur and shares advice to others looking to start their own company.For full episode show notes visit jessicamoorhouse.com/437Learn moreLearn more about GibblyLearn more about Visa's grant programFollow meInstagram @jessicaimoorhouseThreads @jessicaimoorhouseTikTok @jessicaimoorhouseFacebook @jessicaimoorhouseYouTube @jessicamoorhouseLinkedIn - Jessica MoorhouseFinancial resourcesMy websiteMy bestselling book Everything but MoneyFree resource libraryBudget spreadsheetWealth Building Blueprint for Canadians course Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lou Lou, Jessica Morehouse here, and welcome to a special mini-series of the More Money podcast, sponsored by Visa Canada. In this series, we're shining a light on some of the latest recipients of the Visa Shoes Next Grant Program by speaking with incredible Canadian women to learn about their inspiring entrepreneurial journeys. Each year, the Visa Shoes Next Grant Program selects 20 recipients to receive $10,000 in funding, along with access to an accelerated coaching and mentorship program through Wisepace at Your. York University. Since the program's inception, Visa has provided more than $900,000 in funding to help empower women-owned businesses from coast to coast with the tools and resources they need to grow. Now, as a woman entrepreneur myself, I wanted to do something a bit different with my podcast and use my platform to share the stories of these women so we can all get to know and support the incredible Canadian businesses they're building. If you'd like to learn more about

the Visa Shoes Next Grant Program, head over to visa.ca.ca. grant program. Please note the views and opinions expressed on this podcast are solely my own and those of the guests and do not reflect the views of Visa or its affiliates. For this episode, I'll be interviewing Mallory Maynard, who is based in Toronto, Ontario. She's the founder of Ghibli, a company that helps teachers fight burnout and reclaim their time with an AI-powered teaching assistant that's built for Canva. Ghibli saves teachers over 30% on their lesson prep time. They can generate gamified quizzes and engaging curriculum aligned lesson presentations in seconds. Now, let's get to that interview. Thanks so much for joining me on the More Money podcast. Mallory, excited to have you here.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited. You're so welcome. So I am already a huge fan of Ghibli. Both of my grandmothers were teachers. My mom has worked for various high schools, gosh, for like the past, since I was a kid, so decades. I know how hard, and I think a lot of people do know this, how hard teachers work every single day. And using AI to help them, I think is such a great use of this tool. So tell me first, before we really kind of get into things, tell me a little bit about yourself and what inspired you to eventually start Ghibli. Yeah. So to your point, teachers are spending a lot of time on lesson prep. And I've learned that my first company, I was spending a lot of time with teachers, and I saw firsthand how much time they were spending.

Like, I'll give a story. I was volunteering with a teacher on a Sunday. She was giving her time graciously. And then Sunday evening, she had to go home and do lesson planning for the Monday. So it's tough to be a teacher. And so when, you know, generative AI kind of exploded onto the scene, we realized there was a huge opportunity to help them do more in a lot less time. So that's kind of why Ghibli came to be.

Interesting. Do you want to kind of share a little bit more just so people can understand your background? So you're not a teacher, but you were still within like the educational space. So how did you kind of, yeah, really start connecting with teachers and better understanding some of their needs and a gap that was there that needed to have some more solutions? Yeah. So my first company, I was building mobile games to inspire girls into STEM. So long story short, I was never a teacher. But when I was working at my first job out of university, I was teaching my colleagues excel. So that was my first kind of foray into teaching others. And then adjacent to that, I was also on an engineering design team, even though I was a business student. And it was kind of like that meshing of worlds that I was like, okay, I want to help more girls get into STEM, which is why the first company started. And through that, I had to understand how to get this in front of kids. And teachers is one of the best ways to do that because they're the one spending the most time with our kids, our future workforce. So that's really how I spent so much time with teachers,

understanding how tough it is to be a teacher. I was doing workshops in the classroom, and I was zonked afterwards. I have no idea how they do this every day. Yeah, that's incredible. So with your kind of background, did you find it fairly easy to kind of start this new company, Ghibli? And really what was maybe,

was there a certain catalyst that you're like, oh, I need to do this and I need to do this right now. So when we first started the company, we were all about building collaborative, game-based learning. And basically within a day, before we even wrote probably a single line of code, all of the, you know, AI chatbots came onto the scene and it dramatically changed how we were going to do things. We realized there was now this new opportunity to help teachers do a lot more with a lot less. And that's really the direction now that we've gone since that day.

It's been really windy, honestly, understanding. how AI is going to fold into the education system because there's so much concern among teachers with like it's cheating kids. Even some students think it's cheating if their teachers use it. So it's been quite the learning experience of like figuring out how to get this into the classroom safely and effectively. Yeah, it's been a journey to say the least. Yeah, I mean, no, that's I think a thing that's on everyone's mind is, you know, AI is just like the thing that everyone is talking about right now. I think a lot of people are definitely looking at what, you know, some of the negatives, but you really want to focus on the positives. You want to kind of

share a little bit more about what specifically Ghibli can do. Like you talked about how it can really help teachers reclaim their time. How can they do that with Ghibli? I think that kind of the low-hanging fruit is that teachers have to, in each province, they have specific curriculum that they have to align to. And then they also have to adapt the instructions. And then they also have to adapt the instruction based on the students in their classroom. And that's like thousands of micro decisions the teachers have to make each day. So for us, it's really about helping them streamline that decision making, like take away the mental load of doing all those decisions. And then so specifically, we help them right now create gamified quizzes that's aligned to

their local curriculum, which is really hard to do until AI became a thing. And then building curriculum-aligned lessons. So right now we have a new app that helps them build full lesson presentations with like engaging pictures and it's aligned to the curriculum. So a teacher can just click and be done. And that's especially helpful for new teachers who don't know where to start and are, you know, feeling daunted by the task in front of them. That's so interesting. Was anything inspired? Because I know, you know, during the series I'm talking to a number of entrepreneurs and the pandemic had a big impact on the direction they took their business. Was that any consideration, especially because there's more of a hybrid with online and in-person

kind of teaching that you want to kind of make things a lot more accessible and just online is a big part of teaching kids these days. So we were founded in 2022. So we were over like the first company was through the pandemic. So I learned a lot. But because we're now coming out of the pandemic and students are back in the classroom, we do have more of a focus on trying to be low tech as much as we can so that the students are not stuck on their devices. So that is a push of ours. But thankfully, we didn't go through like the rockiness of

the pandemic. So it sounds like you've had a number of different companies. I'm always so curious with entrepreneurs, if this was kind of where you saw yourself, the direction you were going to go, or it just kind of happened, you know, like it was supposed to happen. Did you think, that one day you were going to start your own company or this was never the case. It just kind of happened how it was. So I met a very serious advantage here because my parents had a business growing up. So this was always something that was just like second nature to me. I never questioned that it was a possibility. In fact, when I was in grade eight, I think grade eight, my school, they made us write a letter to ourselves of like what we wanted to be in the future. And they sent

it to me like, be a decade later. Like I can't believe they held on to these things. But anyways, in this note, I said, at this time, you're going to be either a scientist or a businesswoman. And I was like, okay, pretty much both those things are true. So like, pat on the back, not a true scientist, but like, I'm a tech person. That's close enough. That's incredible. And I feel like especially, even though some of us may have an idea of what entrepreneurship looks like, the journey is very different for anyone. And there can be some struggles, some obstacles, some things that you did not expect, I think, especially as a woman and a woman in tech, I'd love to know. what your personal experience has been like, what have some of those obstacles or experiences been

just for anyone who's like, oh, I'd love to do that too. You're like, well, just so you know, this may happen. So just be prepared. Yeah, like particularly in tech, tech is hard. I'm a self-taught tech person and there is endless amounts of things to learn. Scope creep is very real. You always want to build more than you're capable of building. Stuff takes way longer than you expect it's going to. It costs way more than you expect it's going to. But at the same time, I absolutely love working in tech. I would not change it for anything. It's so much fun building stuff. And then seeing the end user enjoy it. There's like no better feeling. So it's been a journey for me. I mean, I started kind of self-teaching while I was in the workforce. And then I finally made the plunge and went full time in

my first company. And I've just been learning ever since. Like, you never stop learning when you're working in tech or when you're an entrepreneur. There's always so much to learn. There's always something. Yeah. I'm curious, too. I know it's still, so Ghibli's been around for a few years now, but it's still kind of in its early stages. Do you have a plan of where you see it going in the next five, ten, even 20 years? Or is that kind of difficult to say because we have no idea where technology and AI is going to take us? I don't know exactly, but I have some kind of plans for where I want us to see us go, at least in the next couple of years. I think right now AI is really good at helping teachers build the content and get the stuff in front of them to save them time. I think

the next stage for maybe all education companies and especially Ghibli is I want us to help bring actionable data back to the teachers so that they can meaningfully drive change in their classroom. And I think AI has just this incredible opportunity to help teachers understand their classroom down to the student and then build, you know, very catered instruction for that student in way less time because for a teacher to do that now, it takes hours and hours or it's just like not done because it's so much work. And I think that's really the future of this. We're going to really transform education by giving them really actionable data to work with. You know, speaking a little bit about, because you mentioned, it can be expensive to be a business

owner, an entrepreneur, and it's always more expensive than you expect. So that's why, you know, you hear a lot of, you know, things about funding and things like that, what was the kind of journey with that? Because, again, it's one thing to have an idea, another to actually have the money to kind of implement that. And then with that, I know you are one of the recipients of the visas she's next grant program. I'd love to also know what your experience was with that. But first, you know, how did you get things off the ground right at the start? So we are a 100% bootstrapped company. So we have, it's been tough because we are, we're lean because of that. It's just the two of us. We are

incredibly frugal. I like to say ruthlessly frugal. I love to hear that as a money expert. I love to hear reality. We are so frugal. So programs like this program just are dramatic to our business. One of the ways we're going to use the funding is there's so many great teacher conferences and it's tough for us as a small business to get into those because they're, you know, they're cost prohibitive. But now we can go to those and getting out in the field is the most valuable thing we can do, you know, talking to teachers, talking to principals. So it's been a journey. Like, we're ruthlessly frugal. I saved a ton of money to make this possible before we made the plunge. And we do, we pick up, you know, contract work wherever we can to kind of even out the extra revenue that

we need to survive. It's incredible that you said that you're just a team of two. And it's like, I honestly just automatically assumed it was a much bigger team for the kind of scale and the impact that Ghibli is already making. That's incredible. Yeah, we actually, I remember the day that we celebrated crossing 500 users. And we were so excited. Two weeks ago, we just crossed 50,000. Wow. I'm curious, too, how did the teachers find out about Ghibli? Because again, if you're just a team of two, marketing has got to be also very difficult. Is it much a word of mouth kind of thing? Or how is the word spreading? We leveraged some content creators kind of the early days and now it's just word of mouth we haven't really spent a lot on marking recently we

probably should i mean yeah if it can be word about that's the best kind of marketing right if you can do that so out of curiosity to because you say you know you've had it's been a learning curve trying to figure out how to kind of market and sell this how does it actually work if someone you know especially a teacher is listening right now or you know everyone has a friend who's a teacher i feel like how does one you know take advantage of ghibli or sign up how does that kind of work exactly yeah so we We wanted to make it accessible for teachers who school boards don't want to purchase it or schools don't want to purchase it. So teachers can purchase it themselves. We tried to make it affordable so that they can take advantage of the tools at a reasonable price. But really, we don't really want teachers paying for it themselves. So we have a school licensing plan where schools or school boards can purchase individual seats so that their teachers get the full access to the tool. And that it's better for them as well as us because then they can share it with their friends. And they're all. all on the same tool and they're all taking advantage of the cool AI features at their disposal. So we have both to kind of accommodate both situations. Going back to the the Visa Shoes-Dex grant

program, I know part of it is you received some funding. The other part is there's some mentorship part of it. What does that kind of look like or how are you going to kind of utilize that to, you know, continue to expand your company? Yeah, I mean, just like I mentioned, I'm always learning about the tech side of things. The same is true of business. I'm constantly learning from other entrepreneurs just validating or maybe invalidating my bad assumptions. So that's really the main benefits of the mentorship through this programming. Just having different perspectives is so incredibly valuable. Every meeting, I learned something new because I just thought incorrectly about something. So I'm wrong a lot of the time. So that's the benefit of mentorship is to kind

help me steer the ship in the right direction. Well, speaking of mentorship, again, there's a probably so many women entrepreneurs listening to this series right now from all of your experience in the field some of your mistakes some of the things that you learned that really worked your successes if someone were to come to you saying hey i have a i have an idea and i want to launch it but i have no background in say tech or the field that i want to kind of launch this company in what advice do you have for me what would be one of your one or two really great pieces of advice for someone who wants to get started, but they are ground zero just getting started. I think number one, and they're kind of the same thing, it's going to cost more than you think

it is and it's going to take longer than you think it is. But that's okay. That's to be expected, probably twice, three times as long as you expect. And then maybe the most important thing is like a business is about solving problems, not building cool stuff or doing cool stuff. It's about solving either a real or perceived pain. So if you remember that going in and you talk to the people that you plan on serving regularly, that's what you need to do to succeed. You cannot build something that they will come. That just doesn't happen. You have to talk to people and understand who it is that you're trying to help. And that's really the best advice I can give. It's something I, it's really easy to forget that. I work from home. So it's really easy to forget that. You have to

get out and talk to people. It's the only way that this is going to work. Yeah. So it sounds like, I think this is kind of opposite to what lots of people think is one of the best things you can do is listen instead of do what you think or make assumptions because the answers are out there and people are telling you what they need and what they want and how you can serve them. So you really need to be a good listener. For sure. I mean, everything, our first prototype sucks because we had the wrong idea on what people wanted. So we're constantly iterating based on what people are saying. So that's really the most valuable thing you can do if you want to run your own business. Yeah. And I guess when we kind of touched on this before is you're never really finished. And I think that's something that I to learn the hard way is there's never going to be a point we're like, oh, great. Now I can relax. I'm all done. Works done. No, you're always going to be evolving and changing based off of all the things we talked about, you know, user feedback or just, oh, this new technology exists. We should probably be using that. You know, I'm curious, what are some of the big shifts in your business that you've had to make along the way that you're like, oh, wow, I thought we were done at that point. But now. No, we were nowhere close to being done. It changes all the time. I don't even know if I can pinpoint, like, certainly every day, probably. Because I write down every piece of feedback we receive.

I love that. I kind of like aggregate, okay, what's like the most common themes here? But if I had to say the big ones, like certainly generative AI, just like flip-flopped our business. And then every time we understand part of like the lesson planning process of teachers, we're like, okay, that takes a long time. So we're going to incorporate that. And that's like little things. Like we didn't originally have the ability to help them build presentations, but we added that really quickly.

Even like how we approach gamified learning has changed quite a bit. So there's no like really big things. It's like thousands of little things that continuously change how we're approaching the product. Was there anything, you know, speaking of mentorship, anything specifically that you're kind of looking forward to or excited about really kind of digging into? Yeah. So I, what I still struggle with is sales and marketing. which I'm right I mean those are hard things and they're a super hard thing so those are the two things that I'm really looking for advice on it's funny because my parents had a family business so you'd think

I would be a star at sales but selling to schools is like a whole different ballgame than selling we used to sell boats and people like boats so they just bought very different products so you know talking to mentors understanding sales cycles of like schools like I'm still learning how to approach sales how to approach cold email outreach, all these things that I just like still don't know how to do is really what I'm looking forward to dive in, like how to use different tools, what kind of messaging to use. These are all things that are incredibly important for me to understand that I don't meaningfully understand yet. So that's really what I'm looking forward to most in the mentorship. So does Ghibli mainly just help teachers in Canada or is it accessible to other

countries? What's it kind of look like? So the last time I checked, I think we're in like 180 countries. Like we have pretty global reach. But our top three countries are U.S., followed by, I think, Australia and then Canada. But my goal really over the next six months is to, or maybe 12 months, is to get every Canadian school or, you know, most of them using it. I actually was in Newfoundland last week to talk to some of the superintendents out east. So that was fun. You know, in the future, we actually have a huge population of Spanish speakers. So Mexico, I think, it's like our fourth country maybe. So really our plans are to go global, like in a big way in the next five years. How we do that, I'm still unclear. But yeah, there's a lot of countries

and a lot of different languages. I guess if you want to expand globally, that is making it not only accessible and understanding the different ways, different countries teach and their curriculum and all that stuff, but also the different languages involved as well. That's, that's a big challenge, but sounds exciting. Yeah. I mean, the benefit of AI is that it, you know, works in almost every language. So out of the box, I think we can build stuff in like eight or 10 different languages. So that's why we've seen a lot of Spanish speakers pick it up because we already have it in Spanish without us having to do much extra work. Well, Mallory, I so appreciate you taking the time to share more about your entrepreneurial story. It's so inspiring. But, you know,

is there anything else you'd like to share with listeners? Any other tips or pieces of advice or things you've learned along the way you want listeners to know? I actually want to tell a quick story. I had a nice conversation with someone a couple weeks ago, and they were kind of asking me about exactly these questions, like, what is it like to be an entrepreneur? What should I know? What should I think about it? And the reason they were asking me is because they had a really good job, but they kind of felt like unfulfilled. And they kind of felt like a cog in the machine, which I can resonate with completely. I guess my advice for anyone who's kind of on the fence is, you know, just try it. If you carve out some time for yourself to do like a little side gig, I would do not recommend quitting your

comfortable job, please don't do that. But if you have time to carve out some time to, you know, talk to the people that you think you can solve the problem for and then build something and then see what they think, then I think it's a worthwhile use of your time. At the very least, it'll be a creative outlet that will hopefully get your juices flowing so that you maybe do take the jump into entrepreneurship. I have no regrets being an entrepreneur. So, you know, it's not for everybody, but it's a great way of life to be self-employed. So that's my advice. That's great advice. And I completely agree. And sometimes I think we've kind of, you know, touched on this too. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. You can take this slow kind of path to

entrepreneurship because there's no one path that works. So do what makes sense for you. Well, Mallory, it was so nice having you on this show. Thank you so much for taking the time. And, you know, I know you're going to inspire so many people. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. And that was my interview with Mallory Maynard, founder of Ghibli. You can learn more about her company at gibley.co and follow her company on Instagram, Facebook, threads, and YouTube at gibley.com or gibley co. And if you've been inspired by Mallory's story and are a woman entrepreneur interested in learning more about this grant program, you can find more information at vizza.ca.ca slash grant program. A big thank you to visa for funding this amazing

grant program, supporting Canadian women entrepreneurs, and sponsoring this special series on the More Money Podcast. and watching on YouTube. Until next time. The More Money Podcast would not be possible without the amazing talents of video editor, Justice Carrar, and podcast producer Matt Rightout, who you can find at MRAVCanada.com.