Namu Cursos: From Zero to Brazil's First Quality-of-Life Learning Platform

In 2014, online education in Brazil was dominated by professional certifications and corporate training. Nobody had applied the EAD format to yoga, Pilates, meditation, and healthy eating. Namu was the bet that they should.

My Role

I joined Namu Cursos as Project and Technology Manager in 2014 and stayed for four years — from early build through product maturity. My scope covered the full stack of the operation: the platform technology, the editorial content portal, and the audiovisual production pipeline. Three different workflows, one coherent product.

What I Built

1. The E-Commerce Platform from Scratch

Designed and built the platform that let users browse, purchase, and access online courses: course catalog management, payment gateway integration, subscription logic, student dashboards, and content delivery. Purpose-built LMS solutions for this use case didn't exist at meaningful quality in Brazil at the time — we built what we needed.

2. Portal Namu

Alongside the courses platform, I managed the technology for Portal Namu — the editorial side of the business covering health, wellness, and lifestyle content. This meant coordinating work across engineering, written content, and video production simultaneously, keeping three different production cadences in sync under one platform.

3. Four Years of Ownership

The most meaningful metric here isn't the launch — it's that I was still there four years later. The platform scaled from zero to a real subscriber base. The team grew. The product moved from "let's see if this works" to a recognized brand in Brazilian wellness. Long-term ownership of a product teaches things that a single project handoff never does.

Why It's Still Relevant

Namu was my first experience owning a digital product across its full lifecycle — architecture decisions, content strategy, team coordination, and business continuity. The instinct to think about systems holistically (not just the code, but the workflows and people that feed the code) is something I trace directly back to this period.

Key Tech

• Platform: WordPress + WooCommerce (custom extensions)
• Payments: Brazilian payment gateway integrations (Cielo, PagSeguro)
• Team: Cross-functional — engineering, editorial content, video production
• Duration: 4 years (2014–2018)