Namu Cursos: Building Brazil's First Quality-of-Life E-Learning Platform
Launched and scaled the technology for Brazil's first EAD platform focused on yoga, Pilates, and healthy eating — from initial build through four years of product growth.
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.
4. Organic Search Growth
Acquisition at Namu ran almost entirely on Facebook Ads until I compared segments and saw organic visitors converting noticeably better than paid ones. That comparison moved the content strategy toward blog posts with calls to action instead of paid landing pages. This is SEMrush's estimate of organic search traffic to Namu Cursos over the following two years:
Screenshot from SEMrush, taken on November 14, 2018. SEMrush numbers are third-party estimates, not analytics data.
From close to zero in early 2017, estimated organic visits passed 30,000 a month by mid-2018, then settled at 20,300 in November 2018, with 5,500 ranking keywords. SEMrush valued that traffic at about $6,500 a month in equivalent ad spend.
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)