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Ad: The interview you’re about to watch was made possible by Haystack. Haystack is where you’re going to find the right web designer for you next project. So check out haystack.com. Here’s the interview.Andrew: Hey everyone its Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. So a buddy of mine started a website called eduFire, which you’ll find out about in a moment eduFire is a place where you can go and learn online from teachers using live video. Well I remember when he was starting he had scramble to get teachers to start populating his site. Well I was just talking to Koichi who is working at eduFire now and he told me that now eduFire has 5000 teachers and 50,000 students and it’s only been about a year and a half since launching. I invited Koichi here on Mixergy to talk about how they got so many teachers. I know how hard it is to get a teach to come on to get a dozen teachers to come on, to get 5000 people to come on to be willing to teach. It’s impressive. I wanted to invite you on here to find out how you recruited teachers and then how you empowered them to get students on eduFire. So Koichi, how did I do in describing what eduFire does?Interviewee: Yea. I think you did a great job I think the only thing that I would add is that eduFire is breaking all the rules in terms of teaching and empowering teachers because it’s an open marketplace it’s basically like, the easiest example I can give is it’s like the ebay of teaching. Let’s anyone join. Let’s anyone teach. There’s a rating system and actually the users decide who’s a good teacher and who’s bad teacher and of course the good teachers do really well and the bad teachers, they disappear after a while
Andrew: What kind of classes can people take on eduFire.com?
Interviewee: We started out with languages so language is probably the most popular. We have actually recently branched out into tech categories. Things like html, design, web programming we also offer classes in business and in test prep, as well.
Andrew: Business and test prep. How is this different from linda.com, whose founder I had here on Mixergy?
Interviewee: First of all, linda.com is absolutely amazing. But what we do is we do everything live so teachers, they actually schedule a lesson, people sign up, they pay for the class and then the lesson takes place at a specific time. And we have a virtual classroom where the teacher comes up and they do the class live so you can interact with your teacher, you can interact with the others students in the class and it’s a more I think, fulfilling experience that way
Andrew: I gotta say too, a buddy of mine started it, John Bischy. And I gotta say for as long as I have known him and I’m sure before I met him, has been passionate about creating rock star teachers, has been passionate about education in general. He’s the guy who used to walk around with audio books on his earphones, who used to recommend and then buy for us, his friends, self-improvement books. This is his dream business. He doesn’t want to just create a company to flip it. He wants to create to create rock star teachers to give the rest of us, to give the rest of the planet the kind of passion he has for education, right.
Interviewee: That’s right. He’s done a great job passing on that passion as well, to the people working here.
Andrew: How?
Interviewee: Well, I think part of it is I guess, the hiring process. He’s not going to hire someone who’s not really passionate about education and some of the things that we’re striving for. I’m really excited at the idea of the rock star teacher. I think another one is the teacher-preneur, is what John likes to say. Just imagine a time where any one in the world can access to the absolutely best teachers no matter where the live as long as they have internet connection. I grew up, I had, everyone has one or two really good teachers that they remember that really had a good impact on their life, but no one has 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 absolutely amazing teachers that they can look back and say, “Wow that changed my life for the better.” I think eduFire is something really empowers people who have access to those teachers and change the world for the better. And that’s what really excites me.
Andrew: Yeah, I gotta say most of my teachers have sucked. I wish the educational system was where I’m hoping you guys will take, are going to take it. I wish it was like that back when I was back in school. If any of this is resonating with you guys who are watching this live, if you love learning and think that the school system is broken and you’re rooting for eduFire or you’re rooting for anybody to come and change it. I’d love to hear from you.
Just tweet out
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Andrew: …tag it “Mixergy” so that I can hear from you, and of course if you’ve used eduFire and you’re watching us live I want to know about it, and if you know Jon Bischke I want to know about that, too. Ditto for anyone who’s listening to us recorded. Come back to Mixergy and in the comments tell us. So that’s Jon Bischke and that’s eduFire, who are you and what are you doing at eduFire?
Interviewee: So I’m the social media and marketing manager, so I get this dream job of spending all my time on Twitter, on Facebook, and using other social media outlets, and I get to make friends all day, and that’s technically my job. I have a bunch of other hats as well, but that’s the life of the start-up. I absolutely love my job and, you know, it’s hard to explain to people what I do, because they’re like, “That’s not a job; that’s just playing around all day.”
Andrew: So, is it more than playing around all day? I mean, you’re using Twitter, you’re using Facebook, you’re using these services that for most people can become a distraction from work; you’re saying you’re using it to help grow your company. How?
Interviewee: I think there’s — So, of course we do the standard stuff where we tweet from our own accounts and we tweet or we post stuff on Facebook, but I think really most of it comes from other people and it’s all about getting other people to tweet about you. Because I could create a Twitter account and I could just tweet about myself all day long and no one’s going to care, but if someone else tweets about me, or a hundred other people tweet about me, or a thousand other people tweet about me, that sends a much bigger message, and it reaches a lot more people.
Andrew: I’m getting a little distracted from our original outline because I’ve got to ask how you do that, but it’s not too distracted; it’s not too far off base here. How? How are you getting other people to tweet about your or about eduFire? I’d like people to tweet about me.
Interviewee: Totally. So, I guess if we go back to the very beginning, we didn’t actually employ any of these tactics and we just tried to tweet from our own space and we had it all coming from ourselves. And then, you know, we realized that we had this platform where we could teach people things, live, online, and, you know, reach anyone around the world. And so we started running Twitter classes, and so we were actually teaching people how to use Twitter. We ran like “Twitter for Business” classes. We ran– I recently ran a class that was “How to Get a Thousand High-Quality Twitter Followers in Four Weeks.” And doing those kinds of classes for free for people, not with the intention of getting them to tweet about us. but more with the intention of getting them really, really excited about Twitter. Because one of the things about Twitter is that people just don’t get it, you know? Or people try, and they’re like, “What is this? I don’t wanna talk about what I’m doing today,” or any of those things. It’s just teaching them the really exciting parts about Twitter, like how you can follow celebrities that you love, follow people that you’re really interested in. And then I think that by having that information coming from us, people get excited about eduFire as well, and after a while they’ll start tweeting about eduFire too.
Andrew: Ok, so you’re training them and because you’re teaching them they’re going to hopefully start tweeting about eduFire. But, also, within the class, you’ve got ways of getting people to tweet about eduFire, don’t you?
Interviewee: We don’t have any actual teachers that do that, but whenever I teach my own classes I always have people tweet. I have contests, I have times where I’m like OK– it’s kind of like what you’re doing right now during this interview– where I’m just like, ok, what did you think about this ? Please put it on Twitter; here, use the eduFire hashtag so that I can keep track. That class that I was telling you about — the Thousand High-Quality Twitter Followers in Four Weeks — we had one hundred people in that class, and over the course of that hour we had a thousand tweets with the eduFire hashtag . And of course now that it’s pretty late in Twitter’s history, you’re not going to get on the front page for that, but 1000 tweets in an hour, that’s pretty good I think.
Andrew: That’s great. And you actually were one of the trending topics, I remember, at least one time, and you do that often by having contests, right? Where to enter the contest you have to use “#eduFire,” right?
Interviewee: Yeah, so we were on the trending topics two times, and they were both from — it was actually from a couple different things: we had a couple Twitter classes running on that day, and we also had, it wasn’t really a contest, but it was more — it was a charity. So for every reach we gave away like a dollar to RoomToRead.org, which is a great organization. So it was an educational charity; all people had to do was retweet. One thing that might be interesting for your viewers is that we found that it was lot more effective when we actually increased the amount that we pay out per re-tweet. We did set a limit, so we were like, ok, we’re going to limit it at $1000, but if I say we’re going to give away $5 for every re-tweet, rather than $1, you get so many more people re-tweeting, but you still pay out the same amount for the charity.
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Interviewee: But you still, you know, you pay out the same amount for the charity. But that’s a..
Andrew: Let me make sure that people understand this. What you guys tweeted out was that anyone who tweeted and included the hash tag eduFire, for everyone of those tweets, you would give out $5, and because you gave out $5 instead of $1, you got many more people to tweet it out. But, because you have the cap at $1,000 bucks, you were capping how much money you guys were spending?
Interviewee: Yep.
Andrew: Okay. I don’t want to make this into how to get people to tweet about you type of interview. I’m just going to suggest beyond these techniques that we talked about, just follow eduFire or take one of their classes on this, and you really will get to see how they do it and you’ll get to learn directly from them. And speaking of, you’re right, I do throughout this interview, I keep addressing the people who are watching us live because then they tweet it out, and then when they tweet out to people that on live, they help me bring more people in to watch us. So, let me do that right now and thank Rainbow Hill and I’m also going to thank Benjamin X Yang. Benjamin X Yang, thanks for tweeting out that we’re live here on Mixergy.
Okay, alright, so the heart of this interview is how you recruit rock star teachers and how you’ve gotten to 5,000 teachers is amazing. And how you empower those teachers to use social media to promote their classes, how you make them into teacher-preneurs as you say. So, let’s start with how you recruit rock star teachers. I think the best way to introduce this topic is to mention some of the teachers, some of the rock stars who’ve taught on eduFire.com. Can you throw out some names that might impress my audience and let them understand why I invited you here?
Interviewee: Yes, so some of my favorites were Avinash Kaushik. I think I have his book right here: Web Analytics 2.0. We’ve had Bert Sperling from Sperling’s BestPlaces, like if you’ve ever heard like basically any study around the U.S. like Best Places to Live, you know, Best Places to Retire, that was all him. And like his two men team. We’ve had Neil Patel who’s SCO genius. Let’s see, Mark Dodds, I think. You had him on or you having …
Andrew: No, who’s Mark?
Interviewee: Oh, no, whom am I thinking of?
Andrew: You probably are thinking Mark Suster. [simultaneous talking]
Interviewee: Mark Suster. Okay, yes, yes. And, yeah, and so it’s just … I actually love these classes. They’ve been free and you learn a lot.
Andrew: So, basically, what you’re saying is you recruit a lot of the teachers that John Bishky [spelling] would have salivated over their books years ago. You get them to come in and teach their subjects and make it more interactive than a book? How much work are they putting into each one of these classes? I know when somebody comes and does an interview with me, they don’t have to do very much. So, they’re happy to spend an hour with me. But if I were to start asking them to put together slides and other material, I don’t know that I’ve got that kind of clout yet. I don’t know if I’ve got that kind of guts, the chutzpah, to say, “Hey, Mark Suster, you’re a top venture capitalist. Come spend an hour on Mixergy, and by the way, prepare a class.”
Interviewee: [laughs]
Andrew: You guys have that to do it on my behalf. So, what kind of work do they do?
Interviewee: You know, to be honest, it’s actually pretty similar to what you do, I think, in that we try to make it as easy as possible for them cause these are all very, very busy people. And we found that the easier we make it, the more often they’ll come on. And so, we’ll set everything up for them and we’ll actually prepare, not like a presentation, but we’ll prepare a kind of an interview that’s based more around teaching. And we’ll ask them questions, and we’ll compile questions from the audience as well. But one interesting thing we have found is that a lot of them have come with their own presentations. And they’ll do like a half an hour, you know, teaching session which is absolutely great. And I think people like teaching. It’s kind of a new thing that you can teach on the Internet, and anyone can teach on the Internet live. And I think part of that is what makes it fun.
Andrew: So, yeah, I guess I can see it. A lot of them already give lectures, give presentations. They have their slides prepared. So, they just take them from offline, put them online, and you guys make it easy for them to show their slides, the ones that they already use. Alright. When you say you make it easy for them by setting everything up, what do you mean? What kind of setup do you do for them?
Interviewee: So, we actually we set up their profile, their class. We like… we go in and we get their bio or we’d write their bio. So, we pretty much did absolutely everything up to the actual class, and all they have to do is join the class for the most part. And after the class I think, after people have experienced it and have a good experience, there’s some people who want to come back as well.
Andrew: So I’ll
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Interviewee: So that should be pretty neat. We’re really happy about that.
Andrew: Some of the students who are going to come back.
Interviewee: Some of the teachers who will come back. They want to come back and teach a follow up lesson or something like that.
Andrew: You know, it’s actually kind of, it’s surprising how successful rock stars are online right now, and it’s amazing how much credibility they give you. I was talking to Otis Chandler, who I think is a mutual friend of ours, about how he brings in authors to Goodreads. And I wonder if every network out there, if anyone who is trying to build a community or trying to build a directory as Will Schroeder did, if anyone can go out there, reach out to the rock stars in their industry and say, “I’m going to create an account for you on my site. Here’s the minimum amount of effort that I need from you. In return, what I’m going to get is your name, and what you’re going to get for doing all this is a presence on my site and access to my audience.” Does that sound right? Does this sound feasible from your experience?
Interviewee: I think, and I might be totally off on this, but I feel like if you have a niche site and… It sounds like there’s a little bit of feedback. If you have like a niche site. So say you’re a radish grower, and you wanted to have the rock star radish farmer come onto your site and do something for you. I think those people, they’re so passionate about that niche that they’re excited to help, you know, either get other people excited about it, or spread their knowledge around. It’s kind of like the idea of having volunteers on your site. So, if you start paying someone, then the magic is lost. But if they do it for free, then they enjoy it a lot more and they put a lot more effort and energy into it. And I think the same kind of holds true with the rock star teachers or the rock stars on the internet as well. As long as it’s something they’re interested in they’ll be happy to help.
Andrew: How do you reach out to them?
Interviewee: Well, usually what we end up doing is we never do like a cold email or a cold call or anything like that. We’ll either know someone already or we’ll actually seek out an introduction. So we’re never going to email any of these people, because they’re never going to want to respond. I get tons of emails like that everyday I think. But if you know someone that knows someone else that knows this person, then, you know, you’ve got to take that path, and the success rate is so much higher if you take that route.
Andrew: Could you give me an example of someone who you reached out through a friend of a friend and then ended up having as a teacher?
Interviewee: A lot of those are actually done by either John or Lily, who is the director of marketing here. Jon, who knows absolutely everybody and can network that way. I don’t know of any specific examples for that. I’m not sure who he reached out to directly or through a friend.
Andrew: OK. And I did an interview with Jon where I talked to him about how he networks. I hope people go and look up Jon Bischke on Mixergy and listen to that interview. All right, what else can you tell us about how you guys recruit rock star teachers?
Interviewee: I think a lot of it comes down to word of mouth, and what we actually encourage is people who are part of other communities to basically bring the rock stars from their community to get them to teach those people who are interested in those things.
Andrew: How do you mean?
Interviewee: So like, for example, if someone’s a part of a PHP forum, and there’s someone over there who’s like this amazing PHP teacher, we wouldn’t want to directly reach out to them. We’d want to encourage the actual student who wants to learn from them to reach out to that person. Because that student’s going to be like, “Hey, I want to pay you. This is how we can do it.” And then they’d introduce eduFire that way. I think it’s much more sincere coming from other people than from us.
Andrew: OK. Do you have an example of somebody who you did that with?
Interviewee: Let me think. I’m trying to think of a specific example. I know, like, people have brought people from YouTube over, and all of a sudden they appear and they’re doing pretty well just because they already have a following.
Andrew: You know what, while you’re thinking of that, I’ve got to say, I’ve been trying to do that here with Mixergy. It’s one thing for me to reach out to people who I’d like to interview.
Interviewee: I saw that.
Andrew: I think that lets them know that they’re wanted by the site. It lets them know who I am and that I want to have them here, and what I’d like them to teach here on Mixergy. But if I could have one of my readers email them and say, “Hey, I’ve been a follower of yours and a fan of yours for a long time. You’ve got to go and check out Mixergy and do an interview with Andrew.” It’s so much more powerful.
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Andrew: It’s so much more powerful to have them make that introduction and it makes that person feel twice ass wanted if not more.
Interviewee: Definitely. Definitely.
Andrew: Okay. What else can we tell people about how you’re recruiting to teachers? And really what it is is leaders in their space, who happen to be teachers in what they’re doing. You’re not bringing necessarily professional teachers. We’re talking about people who are just like rock stars in their space.
Interviewee: And something that’s pretty interesting is that I think, a lot of the most first of all successful teachers on eduFire and some of the best teachers they haven’t had any teacher experience at all. They haven’t gone through education school. They’ve never been a teacher. I think what it comes down to is eduFire is more like a business than an actually classroom. You can’t join it and all the sudden students will come flooding in because they have to because it’s a public school system it’s an actual business. You know a lot of the people who aren’t’ traditional teachers they get a little bit faster and they tend to do better in classes as well.
Andrew: All right before ,we move on the next step the next part of my interview I want to again acknowledge and thank the people who are watching this live. Sflilly, thank you promoting that we’re watching doing live
Interviewee: Yeah that’s our director of marketing Lilly thank you!
Andrew: Khpatel he’s a good friend of mine. and of course rainbow hill I wish that there was a way for me to take your tweets and put them in the interview, put them in the post when I in the recorded post when I put that up. Do you know rainbow hill?
Interviewee: Absolutely, he’s a Japanese teacher.
Andrew: Amazing
Interviewee: If you’re learning Japanese go check out his classes
Andrew: Right now by the way speaking of online names, I’m just going with one name for you. Can you tell people why that is? So they don’t think I’m snubbing you or I don’t know how to pronounce your name.
Interviewee: So aside from eduFire, I do a lot of blogging and YouTube stuff. And just basically to keep myself safe from the stalkers. Koichi is actually my middle name. Even more so. I don’t use my first name because it’s spelled very uniquely. So it’s very, very easy to find everything about me. And there’s a lot of people out there who know my name and a lot who know who I am but I don’t want them to know my name or know where I live so that’s why. And it’s for branding purposes too I like it its one single name.
Andrew: How did they find you at edufire
Interviewee: So I had graduate from college and I thought okay I’m going to be a blogger, a video blogger. I’m going to make my money that way and so that’s what I thought is was going to do. I was making about $500 to $800 a month so that’s like terrible but at the same time doesn’t quite pay for everything. I was actually scrambling for money and trying to figure out like how I was going to pay the rent at the end of the month, for like the third month or so of doing this. A friend told me about eduFire because he knows the co-founder eduFire [indecipherable]. So I went over the eduFire and started teaching Japanese because that was what I had blogged about and then I started making a ton of money on eduFire and that’s how I met John and things just kind of rolled from there
Andrew: What was it about you, beyond the fact that you could teach, that attracted them to you?
Interviewee: Maybe the amount of revenue I was raking in.
Andrew: So you were bringing in serious revenue?
Interviewee: It wasn’t bad. eduFire was really young back then. They weren’t advertising, they were still keeping it pretty small just because they were still working out the kinks and figuring things out. So I was bringing in a little over $2000 per month just teaching one-one online. It wasn’t even full-time or anything; it was maybe like 15, 20 hours per week. That was great money for a recent college graduated who didn’t have a job and I was doing something I loved
Andrew: So you were making more money through eduFire than you were through advertising on your blog?
Interviewee: Definitely. Yes
Andrew: What did you do differently? What did you do that the other teachers needed to learn?
Interviewee: I think one thing; well first of all, I had this big audience that I could pull over. People who had been asking for years for me to teach them. I would be like, I don’t want to teach, or I don’t have the time or means to do it. I think that’s the most important thing. All these people were able to come over
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Interviewee: …and I think in terms of the way I teach, I think there’s a lot of teachers out there, you know, if you go through public school, and you’ll know this, who just kind of goes through the motions. They’ll know their stuff but they don’t know how to teach it. And I feel like I’ve been through all that. And so I was able to really, really simplify everything down to something that was really easy to work with for people and connect with, and people liked it.
Andrew: Today, what do your top teachers make?
Interviewee: [squeaking sound of wheels] UPS man’s here.
Andrew: Wow. This never happens to Charlie Rose. I say, “Lily, can you get the UPS guy. We’re doing a very high powered, very important interview here.” I guess we can do it at the same time, middle of the interview.
UPS guy: Sorry.
Interviewee: Oh, no problem. Sorry about that.
Andrew: What do the top teachers make on eduFire?
Interviewee: It depends on who they are, of course. Recently I saw one teacher. He was making about, let’s see … how much was it? See, this is my public school math working right here. [laughs] Non-existent. He was making about $500 per class, and he taught four classes. And he’s just charging a lot of money per class, and he already had that audience who would be willing to pay for it. So, that’s the highest I’ve seen. In general, like the higher end teachers, they’ll be making between like $50 and $100 an hour, I’d say.
Andrew: Uh, huh.
Interviewee: And this is through Superpass which is our subscription service. So …
Andrew: Okay. And the rock stars aren’t getting anything. These are people who are just coming in to reach out to your community and to teach their own fans, right?
Interviewee: What are we talking about? Maybe I misunderstood.
Andrew: The rock star teachers. The top teachers. The ones who are big brands. They’re just coming in because they want to reach out to your community?
Interviewee: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, some of them are … the one that I mentioned where the person’s making $500 a class, that one I’d say that person’s a rock star teacher too but he was charging for it. So, eventually a lot of potential for rock star teachers to come in and charge a ton of money … be able to get most of …
Andrew: Oh, he’s charging $500 per student or is it $500 for the whole class?
Interviewee: No, no, no. He was making $500 per class.
Andrew: I see, because he was charging so much. Okay. How are you empowering these teachers to use social media to become teacher-preneurs?
Interviewee: I think a lot of it comes down to education. And so we run quite a few classes on just teaching people how to use social media cause a lot of people on eduFire, they come from the traditional teaching background or they haven’t grown up as a digital native. So, like we actually go out. We make it easy. We make people excited about social media. And I think that’s the main thing is, you know, there’s only so much you can teach. But if you can get someone really excited about it, then they’re going to go and learn everything on their own. They’re going to use it and then they’re going to be able to utilize it really well for what they’re doing.
Andrew: So, how do you do that?
Interviewee: Well, so we teach our classes on my twitter and other social media.
Andrew: You teach the teachers how to use it within one of your classes?
Interviewee: Yeah, and, you know, we encourage people to talk to each other. So, like I’ll introduce people on the eduFire twitter account or like people who have been in my class, I’ll make sure that I sent them a message or a reply so that right after their class, they’ll be like, “Oh, I got this message. That’s great. I’m able to communicate directly with this eduFire avatar,” and basically helping them see the benefits of twitter and how it can be used.
Andrew: I need more. I need more depth on this section. I want to make sure that we’re giving people as much value as possible. So, can you give me an example of somebody who you trained in social media who ended up getting results, getting meaningful sizeable results, ended up getting more students in his class or more classes that she was able to fill?
Interviewee: I think when one thing that we’ve been working on is teaching people how to basically not stand twitter with uninteresting things. And like, whenever we see that, we definitely like try to reach out to those people individually and then kind of coach them on how to use twitter more effectively cause, you know, you’re not going to follow someone who’s like “this class, this class, this class, this class, this class,” you know, “buy this, buy this, buy this.” And so, we actually do spend a lot of time doing one-on-one…
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Interviewee: …kinda I guess not really lessons but like coaching people one on one, giving people tips and as people change, they see the benefits from that as well. So, it’s all about… I think, a lot of it is about the one on one relationship. And actually one thing we recently did is I un-followed almost everyone on the eduFire twitter account. Basically to get rid of all the spammers and probably so that I can follow the feed and respond to people as much as possible.
Andrew: And I would have wanted to do that too. I keep getting hit up with people about their ringtones, about how their making money through their multi-level marketing. But I hate to un-follow anyone because I don’t want anyone to feel insulted. I don’t want to accidentally un-follow, I don’t know, rainbow_hill, if he’s following me. I don’t want him to think that suddenly I don’t like him after he’s been such a supporter of the show here.
So… is it twitter that’s mostly getting your teachers, their students. Is that where they’re getting the bulk of their students?
Interviewee: We definitely encourage people to go out and find the community hub for whatever niche they’re in. So if its Spanish, it’s like finding either that forum or that website or if twitter’s the answer then that’s good too. But twitter’s often a really good way to find those things as well.
We teach people how to follow hash tags and keywords and things like that so they can really focus in on who they want to reach out to. So, I think twitter’s probably one of our biggest focus just because we got a lot of really really high-quality traffics from there in terms of page views, bounce rates… time on site. And so, if that works really well, we’ll wanna definitely scale that up. But there’s definitely other things as well.
Andrew: It’s seems that the most successful teachers, the ones who can charge the most or get the biggest audiences or the most students for their classes are the ones who already had an audience. The ones who already had a following and maybe that following was on twitter already or maybe it was on their blogs or maybe it was because of the books that they had but if you walk into eduFire as a teacher with a following, you’re gonna do a lot better than if your somebody starting from scratch and looking for individual students.
Interviewee: I say for the most part, it’s definitely true. I definitely seen some people come in who had no followings at all. Just like, come out and be very successful. I can think of one teacher in particular, he’s actually, he found a good niche I think. He’s in the niche of teaching other teachers how to teach online. Just like bloggers teaching blogging or how to blog. And you know, that’s very lucrative. You’re gonna teach people how to make money basically. He came in without any following at all and he basically went and made eduFire his following. And so he went in. He started writing great foreign prose. He wrote articles, he started really working on those one-on-one relationships and now he’s teaching this class once a week that must have 25-30 people in it. And he’s doing pretty well with that and each week that number keeps on increasing as people want to get into his class.
So, I mean it doesn’t matter what community you try to woo with your talents but you gotta go somewhere.
Andrew: A similar thing I think happened back with eBay. In the early days of eBay I remember seeing that there are tons of people who are selling “How to sell on eBay” books. People are buying. They are very popular back then.
Interviewee: Totally.
Andrew: Can you give me a sense of what the culture’s like at eduFire? How many people do you have at the company?
Interviewee: So we have 5 full-time employees, 3 people in the office. The 2 developers are actually… they’re in the US but they work from home so they’re like… in the East Coast.
And then we have 3 community managers who do a lot of the community stuff to customer service stuff and they work part-time also from their homes. In terms of the office, there’s only 3 of us here and it’s pretty small but it’s a lot of fun I think.
Andrew: ‘coz you get to be around John… [laughs]… What’s the culture like? I know that John as I said in the beginning is really into self-improvement, he’s into the books, he’s into the ideas… How’s he incorporated that into eduFire?
Interviewee: Well… Actually, if you look over here, you can see… there’s a couple of shelves full of his books. And…
Andrew: Can you do that again? Let’s take a look at it again…
Interviewee: Can you see it over there?
Andrew: I see two shelves full of books…
Interviewee: Yeah and so…
Andrew: I’m sorry, two book cases full of books not just shelves, yes?
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Interviewee: …encourages us to take them home read, right now I’m reading Getting Things Done, I haven’t quite started yet but I just brought it home yesterday. So I think a big part of our culture is actually around education and learning. We also teach classes, all of us here we make sure we’re teaching classes so we can stay in touch with everything, make a little extra money maybe, no, and everything seems to be centered around education, all of us here really love education as well.
Andrew: Alright. Are you from San Fransisco?
Interviewee: I am from Seattle, Washington.
Andrew: Seattle, Washington. Did you move for this job?
Interviewee: I did.
Andrew: You did? Wow!
Interviewee: Definitely.
Andrew: Did John pay your moving costs?
Interviewee: No.
Andrew: No, I didn’t think so.
Interviewee: That’s OK. It’s cool I wanted to move so I was in Salem, Oregon before I came here so I would pay anything to get out.
Andrew: How is dating in San Fransisco versus back home?
Interviewee: Well, my girlfriend came with me so…
Andrew: You brought a girlfriend with you?
Interviewee: I did, yes.
Andrew: Wow. How’s she liking it?
Interviewee: She likes it OK, a lot more to do in San Fransisco I think.
Andrew: But does she feel like, because I have a situation that is similar here. Olivia and I both moved here to Argentina, I’m going to be working today probably until eight o’clock and then I’ll go out and see her, we’re in a brand new country, she’s working from home and she’s got to stay by herself until eight o’clock when I decide to leave here, it’s tough, or it’s going to be tough right? Now we’re still in the honeymoon stage but it’s going to be tough, how are you handling that?
Interviewee: It’s actually pretty much the same situation so, my girlfriend is looking for a job so maybe it’s a little bit worse. Yeah, I come home fairly late most times, or when I do come home I have to keep on working, I guess I don’t have to but I want to and need to, I’m addicted, but it’s pretty similar. That’s a good question.
Andrew: You know we’re both struggling with this question, not struggling we’re going to deal with it eventually I mean, right now like I said it’s a honeymoon situation for me, Olivia and I just got married, you’re girlfriend, well actually you’ve been in San Fransisco for a while, what happens ten, twenty years from now if anyone has been in this situation for ten years, if anyone has been in this situation for five years, help a brother out. We are men who love to work or we love to just get home and look at our iPhones and look up stuff on the Internet, what do we do? How do we keep these relationships going? I would like a class like that please.
Kirsten Winkler on Twitter is saying “True about every online teacher, not just limited to eduFire,” and I think what she means is if you have a following you’re going to have more students and I see that over and over in my interviews. The people who have followings before they start companies have a much easier time then those who have no followings, but maybe got a little bit of revenue, a little bit of investment money. John Bischke would not have been able to get teachers to come in to teach at eduFire if he didn’t have those relationships before he got started. He wouldn’t have been able to get the community going, if he didn’t have all of those friends to go and seed the community on his behalf. So, Kirsten thank you, you’re absolutely right.
Let’s see Fabio Philo, I hope I’m pronouncing your name right, he’s saying, I’m going to say this out loud because he’s re-tweeting, I’m going to say this out loud because it’s very complementary of my work here. It says “re-tweeting Ian Aspen who’s saying I’d say Mixergy is the best place to go for in depth insights into what makes businesses great or not,” and in depth even capitalized, so we know that he really means it.
Let’s see what else we’ve got here. If anyone has any questions please come in with them quickly because I think we’re about at the end of our interview. Let’s see, no that’s it, Keenan I’m sorry, I’m not able to focus on this tweet from you right, I don’t know why. Let’s read it together, I’m trying to read ahead here, he is saying “pound Mixergy I take a few older clients through social media and they find it mostly frivolous and go back to old advertising what can I do?” Good question. Alright, thank you, I’m glad I stuck with that. Do you ever try to teach someone social media knowing that it’s going to be helpful, knowing that it’s going to help them build their brand, build their audience, get more students into their classroom, more customers, and more revenue into their pockets, and then find that they get a little disappointed because it doesn’t give them an instant bump and then walk away?
Interviewee: Yeah, definitely, that sounds like…
Andrew: Did I just lose you? I did just lose him. We’re going to reconnect and, let’s see, let’s give it a second here. I’m going to hang up and reconnect with you if you’re listening to me. Stand…
Interviewee: Oh, there you are.
Andrew: Oh, there we go. Hang on. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, can you repeat the answer to that question?
Interviewee: Yeah, so I think, can you hear the sirens going off? I think that that’s kind of the story of my life in terms of trying to teach social media to people who either they don’t get it…
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Interviewee: …trying to teach social media to people who either they don’t get it, you know, they didn’t grow up with it. And then I’m trying to make them interested. Like so when I do my presentations or when I teach people about social media, I don’t mostly focus on like the how to like to how to run things. But I do mostly focus on like what I think will get them excited about social media. So, you know, if you’re talking with an older person, you know, finding out the types of people that they like, people that they’re interested in and seeing if they’re on twitter or if they’re on Facebook. You know, maybe, if someone’s a huge M.C. Hammer fan, and you know, that’s perfect right there. Then you can show them M.C. Hammer on twitter or show them a character on twitter that’s something that they’re interested in. Just getting them excited about is the most important thing about getting someone into social media. And that’s, once again, it’s all about the one on one relationships and coaching and figuring out what that person wants and what they’re looking for.
Andrew: Oh, that’s a great point. So, before you start teaching the tools that are actually going to help them grow their business, you’ve got to get them excited. If introducing them to M.C. Hammer’s twitter or Britney Spears’ twitter is what’s going to get them excited and get them to stick with this, then that’s what you start off with. We use to … I’m doing a lot of talking in this interview. But, whatever, we’ll keep going. It’s my interview. Actually, it should be your interview. I should be shutting up and letting you talk more. But, I’ve got to say this. I used to teach Dale Carnegie and I remember the first day of class, they would get people excited about the concepts that they were going to learn. They would get them excited about how to win friends and influence people and teach them one little thing that they could take home and feel that they own and feel that they could use immediately before they got into the beef of the program, the stuff that would really change their lives. And that’s a great point here. Give them something that they can use right away and if it means M.C. Hammer or Britney Spears, then that’s where it starts. Alright. Is there anything we missed here?
Interviewee: Hm. When can I get you on eduFire to interview you?
Andrew: Oh, so I would love to teach a class on eduFire but I don’t know how I would prepare it. I don’t know where I would find the time to prepare it. But you’re saying you could do it kind of like an interview?
Interviewee: Yeah. You are a teacher rock star for sure, so …
Andrew: I’ve got a following.
Interviewee: We can get things all set up for you.
Andrew: I can do like one person at a time. So, woo me the way you would woo a teacher, not that I deserve to be super wooed like a rock star, but I would like to get a sense of what you guys do?
Interviewee: Well, if it was me, and I’m pretty socially retarded. So, I’d use twitter to reach out to you or something like that?
Andrew: Is it you who would do the actual recruiting?
Interviewee: Probably for you, it would probably be John cause John knows you the best and lives next to you and …
Andrew: I would only be … I would only allow myself to be wooed by the CEO. I couldn’t be wooed by anyone lower down the chain than the CEO. No, but seriously, who would woo the rock stars? Would it be Lily if there was somebody who was new? Would it be you?
Interviewee: It depends on who we know. Like the people that Lily know who has introductions to, she’s going to do it. So, we all pitch in. It’s not one person.
Andrew: I see, okay. So, what if somebody says what I say which is, “I want to help out eduFire and I want to be a part of eduFire cause it’s going to help me out. You guys have a great community that’s going to make me look good if I’m a teacher there. But I’m a little worried about having to spend time creating a class and holding a class’s attention for an hour.” What do you do to reassure me? How do you get me in?
Interviewee: Probably for that, I mean what we do is we probably do it similarly to the business rock stars and we get everything ready for you. And it would be our job to keep you well engaged and to come up with the interesting questions kind of like you do with your interviews.
Andrew: So, you would do it as an interview so that I wouldn’t have to prepare anything. You would be prodding me to teach by asking me questions. What else would you do? What other stuff would you prepare for me? Would you prepare my slides, my PowerPoint?
Interviewee: Yeah, definitely. We don’t come up with anything too fancy but, you know, four or five pages on very broad subjects.
Andrew: Four or five slides on broad subjects?
Interviewee: Yeah, and things that we know about you from like going in and researching and reading about you and stalking you and things like that.
Andrew: So, if we were going to do this as a classroom, I might have … I said already in the beginning that we have four stages to this interview. I might put a different slide up for each one of these sections?
Interviewee: It sounds about right. A lot of it is…
Andrew: If I did a little more research, I might know your answers to how you’re recruiting your rock stars and how you’re empowering them to use social media. And, maybe, I’d create a slide that showed bullet points of all those tools that you use. And that’s what eduFire creates on behalf of its teachers?
Interviewee: Yes, at least the rock stars.
Andrew: Right. [laughs] At least the rock stars.
Interviewee: Not all 5,000.
Andrew: Hey, you should because the rock stars aren’t getting paid. They’re doing it because they want to connect with the community.
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Interviewee: One thing I would like to see at some point is a rock star coming on and doing a paid class but doing it all for charity. You know, we wouldn’t take our percentage or anything like that. But if you’re interested in something like that, helping out a good charity.
Andrew: I’m interested? If I personally am?
Interviewee: Yeah, that is something I would like to …
Andrew: We happen to know Guy Kawasaki is, I’m assuming, a very big fan of Mixergy. I got to believe that he’s listening to us right now. He’s probably one of the people who’s watching us live. Guy Kawasaki, a mega star in the space. It would be nice if he didn’t just teach on eduFire but maybe taught for charity and all the money would go to charity.
Interviewee: I think that would be awesome.
Andrew: I would love that too. Guy, if you’re listening, I would love it if you helped out my friends… what else and charities in general. Alright. Let’s go over what we’ve learned here. People want me to go over a little bit in my interviews. I don’t know that I can always do this but I think we should do it now.
Anyone who’s building up any kind of community should be thinking of bring in the rock stars of their space, right, whether it’s Otis for Good Reeses doing it or you guys on eduFire, you want to find out who are the people who the spotlight and attention is on, and you want to find a way to bring them in. And the way to do that is to do as much of the work for them as possible. So you create their bio. You don’t just say, “Hey, you should love eduFire. You should love my website. Go create an account and see how great it is.” What your proposition to them is, “You should love it. It’s a great way to connect with your audience and with ours. And I created a bio for you on it, and I did all this other work for you. All you have to do is click ‘accept’ or respond to me and say that it’s okay.” Reach out to them through friends and friends of friends, right?
I’m going to say this over and over to everyone who’s listening to all my interviews: “Connect with the people that I interview. Say ‘thank you’ to them by twitter or by email with every single one” because when you have a website five years from now, six months from now, three weeks from now that needs a rock star introduction, the people who I interview will had a connection with you beforehand. You’ll be able to reach out and say, “Hey …we talked about Mark Suster. “Hey Mark Suster, I emailed you twice before to thank you for doing the Mixergy interview. I’m going to ask for a favor. Can you introduce me to someone who you mentioned on Mixergy or someone who you brought up on your blog?” So, that’s the next thing to do. Reach out to them through friends of friends. Understand … here’s the next note that I took down. Understand that they’re going to be passionate about their subject matter. So, they’re going to be … if you’ve got a community or if you’ve got something that speaks to their passions, they’re going to want to be a part of it. What else did you say? Teach them how to recruit their followers. And let’s see … and that’s it for how to recruit rock stars. Did I get that right?
Interviewee: Sounds about right.
Andrew: Did I miss any … Guys, if you’re watching us live or if you’re listening to this in a recorded way and you think I’m doing too much talking here, please give me feedback. I’m open to suggestions. I’m not looking to pontificate here. I want to just be helpful. Okay. And the follow up with people who are making mistakes we talked about. We talked about how if you want to get people excited about the tools that you have, find a way to speak to their passions before you speak to their rational needs for what you’re offering. Did I miss anything there?
Interviewee: That sounds good to me.
Andrew: Alright. Well, thank you everyone for watching. Thank you Koichi. I got to thank you too for being so helpful with what I’m doing here on Mixergy beyond this interview. So, thank you. People should go check out eduFire.com. How do you spell eduFire …How do you spell eduFire? They should know how to spell eduFire or they don’t belong here on Mixergy.
Interviewee: [laughs]
Andrew: How can they contact you directly? I keep telling everybody who’s watching me, they should contact the people who I interview. How can they contact you directly?
Interviewee: You can email me at Koichi@eduFire.com. That’s K-o-i-c-h- i @eduFire.com.
Andrew: And on twitter, do you have a handle that you can give out here?
Interviewee: Sure, at T-O-F-U-G-U. It’s probably my main twitter account. I’ve like six twitter accounts.
Andrew: Alright.
Interviewee: It doesn’t matter.
Andrew: Good, good. Never sit back and just take this information in. If I’m wrong, you can tell me about it. If you think that this is useful, then go out there and use it. Regardless, connect with the people who I interview. That’s the first thing. Connect with Koichi. We’ll have links for him up on mixergy.com. Finally, click around mixergy. Tons of other interviews with entrepreneurs, with investors, with people who just want you to build an incredible Internet company so that you can go out there, build a legacy leading company and then come back a couple of years from now and let Andrew Warner interview you so that everyone else can learn from you. There it is.
Interviewee: Awesome.
Andrew: Thank you Koichi, thank you everyone who’s watching us live and I’ll see you in the comments.
Interviewee: Alright, thank you. I appreciate it.
