Andrew Warner 0:04
Hey there freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner and I am beyond the the guy who created mixergy. I’m also now passionate and curious about homeschooling. And I became that a little bit after my kids were told that they couldn’t go to school because of COVID-19. And for a while there was just kind of, alright, what do I do with this? I guess I’m the person in the family who’s going to take the lead on this in some way. But also, I just don’t know what to do. And I started out with that I don’t know what to do, but I’ll kind of figure it out. And then I got really curious about it. And then I got to watching what my kid does at school and thought, I always hated school. This I could see using the video chat that my kid is doing with his class that the teachers really working hard, but it’s not. It’s not picking up on who he is. And so I started at night to look into how do you do homeschooling, right? How do you teach what’s going on, and I’m not the only one. I’m looking online. And I see that people are both frustrated by this and actually, I was gonna say unexcited I don’t think I’ve seen anyone get excited about homeschooling. But we’re all in this and I feel like I want to learn as much as possible even if my kids go back to school in a few months, I want to know how to help them in school. This is too much about me so let me bring this off and give you guys a top view here. I think that the world is changing. I think there are many people like me who are in the in the world of homeschooling who are saying, I gotta take it on. I have to take it on. I’ll figure it out. Maybe they’re developing a passion maybe they’re just developing a new skill and, and the future of blabbing here, aren’t I this is like the most passionate interview that I’m doing and it’s leading me to blab. Aditya Nagrath is the founder of Elephant Learning. What they do is they take a math curriculum, they gamify it and they use it to help help kids learn one year of math in three months, as somebody was passionate about homeschooling. I’m curious about this. And as someone who’s noticing that the world is shifting towards homeschooling and remote learning, I’m curious about how it’s impacting his business. So I invited him here to talk about it. And I promise I will not be yapping like that throughout the interview. One last thing before I ask your first question, this interview is sponsored by hostgator. And Click Funnels a detail welcome. Thank you for having me. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that in conversation where you’re like at a dinner party or something and you just notice yourself in a hole that you’ve dug for yourself as you’re speaking. How do I get out of this?
Aditya Nagrath 2:38
That’s what was happening. I mean,
Andrew Warner 2:42
have you seen growth during this homeschooling thing that’s happening around COVID-19? Yeah, we’ve how much
Aditya Nagrath 2:49
we’ve seen a lot of people come I’d say we’ve we’ve, we’ve increased by 50%. And we’ve brought on thousands of parents in the last month. Since since this started,
Andrew Warner 3:02
and they’re all paying monthly, how much?
Aditya Nagrath 3:04
So right now we’re $35 per month, we do have scholarships through a nonprofit called math matters. And, and so many people are paying as low as $10 per month for this. Hmm.
Andrew Warner 3:18
I think that what’s going to happen is that parents are going to start to take a more active role in teaching their kids based on how they’re doing it right now. And I don’t think it’s going to be universal. It might even be a minority, but it’s a significant minority. What do you think? Do you think there’s going to be a blip and when parents have their kids go back to school, they’re just going to cancel and go back to the previous life?
Aditya Nagrath 3:43
Well, that’s challenging to say it depends on the parents goal. It depends on the student. I think that you’re likely correct. I think that what we’ve been seeing is that there are a lot of parents that are moving towards homeschooling. Because they do believe that the personal attention that their student needs is not being addressed. And and I think that potentially a lot more parents are aware of that because of what’s occurred because they have to sit with their students right now and, and and see that they may not be understanding what’s happening in the classroom.
Andrew Warner 4:23
I think, I think obviously, we don’t know. But there’s something happening here. I think if we’re going to start to see more parents go remote, they might start to be more accepting of their kids working remotely. And working remotely means learning remotely with some parental guidance. I think that’s what I think that’s going to happen. I don’t know if it’s going to be as huge a shift as remote work, but I just think for myself, it’s opening up a whole new world of possibilities. Can we travel Olivia Nye more again? The way that we did when COVID goes away and then bring the kids along and do some remote work for more interesting places and not be locked down? Can we pay attention to how our kid is changing from quarter to quarter? water from semester to semester from year to year, and then adjust their learning style where a school would just say, hey, you’re in here until middle school and then through middle school, you’re in the new school and then you’re in high school and you’re kind of locked in and old blocks. Maybe we could adjust more. What’s your revenue overall?
Aditya Nagrath 5:17
Right now we’re on a run rate of 4 million this year.
Andrew Warner 5:20
4 million would you do last year? 2019?
Aditya Nagrath 5:24
Hmm, I think we’re pretty close to three or over three. Wow, I’ll bootstrapped. Yeah, we started about three years ago. It was all basically funded out of my savings account. Wow. How much did you put into it? around three or $400,000. And are you guys profitable?
Andrew Warner 5:42
Yeah. Wow. How’s it feel to talk about money when it’s your own money and not like some VC money?
Aditya Nagrath 5:48
I don’t know. I never had VC so
Andrew Warner 5:52
I’m just looking at you as these questions and wondering. Am I making them feel uncomfortable now? You seem okay with it. Well, yeah. You had before I?
Aditya Nagrath 6:03
Well, no. So before I was running a contract software engineering firm and we bootstrapped that started in Ukraine. I was out there.
Andrew Warner 6:11
This is an open head
Aditya Nagrath 6:12
software that you created. That’s right. elephant head software.
Unknown Speaker 6:15
Okay. And what were you doing?
Unknown Speaker 6:20
Oh, boy, all sorts.
Aditya Nagrath 6:24
We were we were doing stuff like
embedded software on Linux, embedded Linux, iOS, Android web. We were doing Ruby on Rails for a while. And, and now and now if we were to turn back into a shop, we’d probably be a no JS shop.
Andrew Warner 6:43
And so I’m looking at this. You’ve had clients like Verizon Samsung, my right. That’s right. We started the big phone company. Then I recognized from my time in South America. It was a pretty successful business. You then joined an entrepreneur organization, is that right? And saw somebody do something that changed. I guess this sounds dramatic but it did it change your future what was this person doing?
Aditya Nagrath 7:08
Absolutely. So I went to a Thomas Edison event in Vancouver, it was put on by eo or YPO. And the CEO of plastic bank was there. And plastic bank is a $200 million company or at least that’s what he said at the time. And the story behind it was that he had seen in the Pacific Ocean that that thing on the news where there’s like, plastic the size of Texas on the ocean, right? Yeah. And he thought to himself, there’s no way that’s not worth money. So what he did was he devised a plan where people in India would pick up plastic as a washed ashore, they would deposit in the plastic bank, and they would recycle it and it just so turns out that the amount they pay him is more than they would get paid in the shops, and they’re able to recycle it at a profit and they’re able to measure how many pounds of Plastic they’re taken out of the ocean. So it’s what they call a triple bottom line company. And so after I had seen that it kind of opened my eyes that business could be about something more than just making money. But then you could just kind of a join on something that typically a government would do. But then you would have an organization that is profitable. But that also has enough revenue and organization behind it that it kind of lives on by itself.
Andrew Warner 8:27
I’ve never heard a plastic bank before you but I’m looking at them right here. And I could see that they’re collecting plastic, they’re collecting all kinds of different products, and they’re, they’re helping people who are picking it up, make some good money. And so you decided what were you going to do after that?
Aditya Nagrath 8:43
Well, so I bumped into a professor of mine, and we had done some contract work for them. But he had a national, yeah, National Science Foundation grant that he was applying for, and he needed a business to partner with. And the idea was that we were going to try To take some games that he had, and create some new games for older students basically had maybe pre K and kindergarten, and we needed to build a first second third grade kind of thing. And at that time, I was looking to move out of the contract software engineering space, I was looking to try to get into maybe something that was more product, something that was more scalable without human beings. And and so I kind of took on his, his, his proposal and I said, Well, we could do this for the money or we could try to do this seriously. I’d rather try to do it seriously. So in which case, you’re going to have to show me that there’s a business here. And he’s saying to me, let’s take it to schools. You know, there’s all this title one money. And I said, Yeah, that’s probably not going to happen to be honest with you because I’m watching the news. Like, I think on john oliver was saying that, you know, companies Giving hundred dollar gift cards to principals and superintendents for putting something like, you know, like at the rate of 1000 apiece, I’m like, I don’t have $100,000 to, to do that, and I don’t have any of the relationships that would be necessary. Do you have any relationships now? Okay, so that’s a no go on that business. Like, you’re gonna have to convince me about this. And so what he told me was that four out of five students start kindergarten unprepared for the kindergarten curriculum. And I thought it was like, that’s kind of surprising to learn. Could you tell me, like, how could that even be? And so he says, Well, for the typical parent, if you say the numbers one through 10, then that’s typically a thumbs up, my kid is counting to 10. And the kindergarten curriculum actually starts counting to 20. So they assume that your child can count to 10. But what they mean by counting to 10 is give me 10 things. The students slides over 10 things And stops on 10. So I was like, Okay, I can see that’s a very different skill, right? In the first case, they could just be saying the numbers. But in the second case, they have to really understand what 10 is. And it just turns out that like, as you if you look at the research that’s out there, preschool math scores predict third grade reading scores better than preschool reading scores. And preschool math scores also predict fifth grade overall scores, meaning that’s not just fifth grade affected. 75% of high school students right now are not proficient at high school mathematics, and 79. That’s right, that was a 2019 statistic, AP.
Andrew Warner 11:45
And you’re saying all this goes back to even pre K. And if they can’t get pre k not just counted 10 but be able to move 10 items over to show that they understand what counting to 10 means they’re going to be set up for failure later on. So if I understand you right at first you, you came at this with this idea that you can partner up with schools. But you saw there’s just too much competition partnering up with schools. It’s too expensive. And it’s just not the right entry point. Meanwhile, there’s a simpler entry point in helping kids do something that’s a little bit more basic that people aren’t paying attention to. And you said, that’s our entry point into this education space. Am I right? Just about Yeah.
Aditya Nagrath 12:28
So so. So the entry was basically Can we go straight to parents, right? Can we tell them this story that like, to be honest, what the research literally says is that if your student enters kindergarten prepared, then they tend to do well, and it makes absolute sense. It’s just common sense. If your student understands the teacher than they do well in class,
Andrew Warner 12:52
I just wouldn’t have thought that it would be an insurmountable issue. I would have thought all right. If they don’t know anything, if they don’t know anything, even going into kindergarten fine, but Learn in kindergarten if they don’t know it in kindergarten, they learn it by first grade. Why does it even matter that much?
Aditya Nagrath 13:06
So, so imagine this right you have a student that doesn’t understand the jargon of math. And on average, students in low income neighborhoods are three years behind their funded peers. This all happens along income lines. So it’s the bottom 20%. They’re the furthest behind the top 20% are the only students entering prepared for kindergartens typically, because the parents can afford to send them to preschool where the preschool ensures now that they have exactly what’s necessary to enter kindergarten. And the next chart that we see is basically the same break up by by income, and the percentile at which they enter and the percentile at which they exit actually tend. It just tends to be flatlines with only the top percentile trending up, okay. And so literally what the two graphs together mean is say is that if you enter school behind, then you start You tend to stay behind statistically speaking. And so what our system is designed to do is it’s designed to fill that gap from a jargon perspective. So the way I like to explain this is like, again, if you’re if you’re three years behind, it would be like me, are you going into a third year biochem course. We hear the professor. They wouldn’t be speaking English, but they’d be speaking English, but we wouldn’t understand what they’re saying. because they’d be using so much jargon, the three years worth of jargon that we missed that we wouldn’t get it.
Andrew Warner 14:30
Okay, I, I think I’m following you. I would I just didn’t know. I definitely am falling. I just wouldn’t have thought that it would be that traumatic. I can understand how that would be an easier entry point. At that point. Did you say okay, we’re starting to close up. elephant head software, my software consulting company.
Aditya Nagrath 14:46
Yeah. So
Andrew Warner 14:47
before you even had a new product, you just said I’m closing up the consultant company starting from scratch. That’s
Aditya Nagrath 14:51
where you start when you start taking on new clients. Yeah,
Andrew Warner 14:54
got it. Okay. And you started to focus on creating your own software. Your first version was what? what it looked like?
Aditya Nagrath 15:04
Um, it looks probably pretty close to what you’re seeing now. And I mean, we’ve had we’ve had some major version upgrades over time we switched from technology one to technology to meaning it was it started out in Flash. We start so there the the original thing that they gave me was in Flash, but that was dead on arrival things already. So basically, it’s the University of Denver so they had a project that they wanted to license, they wanted us to license but it was developed in Flash and I said, You know, I really can’t do this in Flash because time it’s flash a but like, it’s 2016 I mean, Apple killed flash in like 2011 seven Jobs was all alive. Yeah.
Andrew Warner 15:50
2007 when they released the iPhone, and then they started going battle.
Aditya Nagrath 15:55
I can’t even remember it was so long. Yeah, she’s still alive. That’s all I gotta say.
Andrew Warner 16:01
It was one of his big fights. But we they said to you, you, we have this you license it, what’s the connection to to the University of Denver?
Aditya Nagrath 16:11
So they they this was the thing is they already had the preschool and kindergarten games, right? So the professor had that. And it was owned by the University of Denver. But what we did was we ultimately started over. And the difference between what they had and what we did it, I mean, is huge. So they were under the Oh, one game per topic type of type of mindset mindset. And I looked at it, and I said, so what’s the issue here is, is that for each of these games, you got to keep going back and forth with the developer. And I mean, and this is right, I mean, like, this is all my wheelhouse at this point. Right? I’ve done contract software development for you. So many different companies over the last, you know, 10 years and I’m looking at I’m saying, what we really got to do is we got to build an engine. It’s a gaming engine, right? So like, he’s building the activities from the research. And we’re marrying it with graphics in order to provide to provide what we’re calling a gamification. It feels like a puzzle game. But really, it’s the activities that were proven to best teach the concepts and that’s the value. Okay, got it. So you bring in this new software sophistication, and they get rid of their
Andrew Warner 17:36
flash, but he has his understanding of what of how to teach, right, you just take that you gamified and was the plan to sell it to someone or was it first going to be a free a free option?
Aditya Nagrath 17:47
So it was we started with math games, it was gonna be $10 per month. What I realized was there was nothing effective out there because if we saw 75% of high school students not being proficient Then that’s a gap in the market, in my opinion, the school would already be using whatever is effective.
And so
that’s what we did is we went straight to parents. I started coding in, say, July of 2016. I actually had a broken hand, I got hit by a tuck tuck in Thailand. So like I was in a cast and I’m early to fingering on on one hand when we started this thing. And by 2017, February, we had our first 10 customers for sorry, first 50 customers of the 5010 had used it. Now we had made it more effective. So like, what he came to me with was they would learn on average a year of math. I looked at it I said, I think I can make this more effective by like taking out some of the animations and some of the like story and like, it’s just wasting time really. And so we had by April, basically from the customers the data we collected on our Average they were learning 18 months in about 22 and a half minutes and I said, Okay, so we’ll say 30 minutes a week. 22 and a half minutes a week, right.
Andrew Warner 19:11
And this was a cone cone product, you and he co owned it.
Aditya Nagrath 19:16
So he was one of the founders and he decided to exit last year.
Andrew Warner 19:21
Okay. You bought them out? Yeah. Were there other founders.
Aditya Nagrath 19:27
My father was a while he was still alive.
Andrew Warner 19:30
Okay. I want to ask you about your dad in a little bit. He did something that I’m fascinated by. Let me come back and ask you about how you got your first customers, why you turn some of them away what you learn from them and how you evolved in. But one of the things that I noticed is, I’m going to talk about my first sponsor hostgator. I’ve been looking for curriculums for worksheets for all kinds of stuff. Whenever I get into something, I tend to get a little obsessive about it, you know? And so what I got into teaching my kid I got a little bit obsessive about it. And what I discovered was these homeschooling websites that are basically WordPress sites that yes, they have a few worksheets on them. But beyond the fact that it’s new top, a new topic for me, it’s the same model that I’ve seen operate all over the internet, except now they’ve applied it to this to a topic that I now suddenly care about homeschooling. And where I started to think, maybe this whole idea of blogging and lead magnets and that whole thing, maybe it’s worn out, I realized, no, it’s not. When you’re burning with the desire for something like I am for homeschooling, you don’t you are excited when somebody says get this ebook, enter an email address because I want an E book. I don’t just want to click around and just read your blog post but your blog posts are the entry point into the ebook and then the E book leads me to buy more anyway, this whole stuff that we are all paying attention to that maybe at some point we think this is. This is overwhelming. We’ve seen it already a million different times. I have to tell You even if you’ve seen it a million times, if the topic is right, you’re excited about it. And so what I’d say to you is, if you’re listening to me and there’s a topic you’re excited about, bring it over to Hostgator set up one of these websites that you might have seen a million different times. So WordPress website with a lead magnet with blog posts and all that, if it’s a topic that is exciting to you, that is an urgent need to your audience, it will be something that will grow it will be something that people want to engage with. And they won’t care that the techniques that you’re using and the back end software that you’re using with WordPress is one that they’ve seen a million times, they don’t care. They just care that you’re solving the problem for them. And so if you go to hostgator.com, slash mixergy, you can get started right now they’ll give you a hosting package, it will let you have unlimited domains hosted not unlimited domain names, but whatever name you come up with, you could host it with them unlimited. They will put it all together for you and make sure that you run it in a benefit of that is you can try an idea, close it up, try another one, close it up and then when you hit the big one, just keep going and going and going with it. So hostgator.com slash mixergy. Bring your ideas They’re build it up if you’re feeling a little bit burned out like all this stuff is already happened WordPress is just old technology don’t don’t it’s still one third of the internet built on WordPress don’t it’s still works when the topic is right. And if you use hostgator.com slash mixergy, you’ll get their lowest price you’ll get tagged as a mixergy customer, and you’ll get us standing behind you Hostgator calm slash MIXE rG Why? I’m really grateful to them for sponsoring. You know, by the way, the teacher one of my favorite blogs is I forget the name, but I wrote it down in Notepad just to make sure that I have it. All this woman does is she has these little projects for her kids. She takes a picture of her two kids doing the project and then she describes how it’s done. And she puts it up on our website. Super simple. Everyday is another blog post. I’m going to copy one of hers tomorrow, tomorrow morning. I’m gonna have some time with my coffee before the kids like sucking suck me into their world. And so what I’m going to do is have a treasure hunt around the house. For one kid, the youngest one it’s going to be upset. picture so they’ll get a piece of paper, have a picture of his yellow Lego box. And he’ll know and love to go into his yellow Lego boxes. That’s what’s on the piece of paper, I’ll open up the yellow Lego box. And then he’ll see a picture of another part of the house. And I’ll go and find another scavenger hunt note there. And I’ll just keep going until he’ll do six or seven of these letters. And then I’ll find a piece of chocolate for the kid who’s a little older, there’ll be some of the sight words that we’ve been working on. And that should keep them busy for a good 30 minutes while I have my coffee and read the Wall Street Journal in the morning and see why the world keeps exploding and the stock market keeps going up with that. Anyway, but it’s all from this one woman’s blog. It’s nothing but that. Right? You got the first 50 people that you mentioned earlier by going on a podcast, what’s the podcast or what was it about?
Aditya Nagrath 23:47
It was ultimate homeschool radio, and
it’s a homeschooling podcast is what it was. So I guess probably the first 50 were homeschoolers and you just told them what your product You
Andrew Warner 24:00
said it was coming. And 50 of them said we’re ready to pay.
Aditya Nagrath 24:07
Well, she interviewed me for an hour. So they they kind of got a good year full of what the value proposition was all the work that went into this. And, and and what could come out of it. So, to be honest with you, we had like, we had a four year old that was doing multiplication division at the end of three months. So they were very for you were on there. No, you’re saying afterwards, afterwards? Yeah. So they got some good results from it.
Andrew Warner 24:33
And did you give them a commission?
Unknown Speaker 24:37
No,
Andrew Warner 24:39
okay. I see a page on their blog. That’s called something like elephant learning special offer, but that’s not a affiliate deal with you. They just interviewed you. They did it. Why did you turn away 50 people who said that they wanted excuse me out of the 50 people. Why did you turn away What was it like 30 of them.
Aditya Nagrath 24:58
So we Just let them all in. And what it was was that
Unknown Speaker 25:05
I mean,
Aditya Nagrath 25:08
so my founder, you know, being a being a professor, he, he wanted to be able to maybe do something like what he had done in a classroom where it was like 10 minutes a day, five days a week. But you know, once you give it to the parent, you’re kind of at the whim of whatever the whatever they’re able to do. And, and we, of course, we were there to support right, because at that point in time, we didn’t have customer success. It was being him.
Andrew Warner 25:34
And basically, after three months, we said, well, we need to figure out what a minimum threshold of usage was. And we said if they use it on average, 10 minutes a week, then they they would be included, and that’s where we got the 10 from, so it was 10 people used it more than 10 minutes per week on average, and the average was 22 and a half minutes a week. Oh, and, and so you let all 50 of them use the product, but it’s only 10 who really used it the way that you wanted them to use. And that’s who you were looking at to see how well does this work when people actually use it? Absolutely. Yeah. And they understood that all right. And that’s when you start to see we have some some case studies, we see what’s working what, what was working, what wasn’t working.
Aditya Nagrath 26:16
Well, gosh, at that time, I think we were only covering the multiplication, division.
What wasn’t working was the marketing. Being called math games was not working very well, people wouldn’t give us a lot of attention or time, they’d come to our website, they like type something into the chat. And within two seconds, they were gone. Even though I was telling them that, hey, we’re going to guarantee that your child learns a year of math in three months. What was working was the product. So like everything that we were doing on that side was going extremely well. We were able to make revisions very quickly because of the way we built the system to both the curriculum and the software. And I mean, that was my expertise. So that’s what I was able to control. And when we switched the marketing to be more of, Hey, this is serious. This is like a math Academy for your children. And we’re giving you a very, very powerful tool for mathematics. That’s when people started to pay attention and by
Andrew Warner 27:16
and, and this was in the ads or on the website itself.
Aditya Nagrath 27:20
It both
Andrew Warner 27:21
Yeah. Okay. How did you get on Channel Nine news? I heard that sent you some customers? Yeah. So
Aditya Nagrath 27:28
that was through the initial partnership with the EU because Oliver was d U. I’m a d u alumni. This was a great deal of story.
Andrew Warner 27:38
And so a friend of yours, I guess, introduce you to somebody there or he knew someone there and
Aditya Nagrath 27:43
the marketing department just got wind of the stimulus out. The school’s
Andrew Warner 27:47
marketing department said hey, let’s make sure that the this is covered, how many customers you get from out do you remember?
Aditya Nagrath 27:55
From that initial one, maybe another 200 and from the 200 We had a whole bunch of success stories, we were able to go back to the same reporter and say, hey, look, these guys came in from your news report just be a good follow up story to let people know the kind of success they had. We found someone in town that was the mother of a two year old. She the two year old, just turned three, when we scheduled the interview, and that student was doing kindergarten math, almost first grade. And so we thought this is perfect. Why don’t we talk about that? Because that really, that that fix is literally the beginning of the problem that I was telling you about?
Unknown Speaker 28:37
Yeah.
Andrew Warner 28:38
At the time, I think you were charging what 10 bucks a month you said?
Aditya Nagrath 28:42
Yeah, we had switched to 35. By the time they interviewed her,
Andrew Warner 28:47
the $10 235 happened because of a ride. You had an Uber car. You’re smiling, right? Tell me about that. Okay,
Aditya Nagrath 28:55
so I was in Uber, and like, I mean, this was the thing was like, I’m telling the Uber drivers about like what we do, because I was going to talk about, okay. I mean, start talking with Uber drivers. Generally they ask you what you do.
Andrew Warner 29:09
Okay, I thought maybe you were trying to do some research and understand what was exciting people and what wasn’t? No, it was just you telling them what you do,
Aditya Nagrath 29:16
they ask Okay, and I was refining the pitch I mean, every time you give the pitch, right, so on average children, our system, right, I got the whole thing down. But, ya know, I was I was in the Uber, I was telling them about it. And I got to the end of what I was typically saying at the time, and the guy was like, sold, I’m in I’m gonna go home. I’m gonna sign up my children. What’s the name of the website? I’m going to pop it into my phone right now. And I was looking at the guy and I was just getting this this vibe like I was in this time bowl bizarre. And I was like, This guy is one of those guys, right? Like, he’s totally savvy, and I bet you I could like, I’m gonna ask him a question. So I said to him, I was like, Hey, listen. You just give him I literally told him you’re giving me this vibe, and I got to ask you, do you feel like people are coming to our website and they don’t believe that we can deliver on our proposition? Because it’s only $10 per month? And at first he didn’t understand me. And he’s like, no, I love the price. And I said, No, but do you think people believe that we can do what we do? And he you know, like how they like you. You’re just the mirror, they you look at someone back through the rearview mirror, that’s what he did. He’s looking me straight in the eyes through the rearview mirror. And he’s like, you need to be charging at minimum $35 a month. If I were you, I’d be charging $55 a month.
Unknown Speaker 30:35
Because
Andrew Warner 30:36
charging too little makes the product feel less effective a little more. I don’t know. It takes away credibility somehow.
Aditya Nagrath 30:45
It takes away the credibility of the learn one year of math and three months and I mean, we’re guaranteeing the result because we know the average is 18 months.
Unknown Speaker 30:55
Yeah,
Andrew Warner 30:56
you know what another part I don’t know. Like, whether it’s my place to say it or not, but I I feel like the logo also there’s something about the logo, that as I zoom in on it, maybe it’s just that it’s, it’s looking jagged. And so it doesn’t look as crisp as everything else.
Aditya Nagrath 31:10
You know what I mean? Oh, I’m gonna take a look. Now you gotta
Andrew Warner 31:14
Yeah, this, I was looking at this too. I’m telling you, I’m in the market. I want to know, what can I sign my kid up to? I’m cutting everything back. That makes no sense for us as a family where we’re not buying food. We’re not getting. We’re not going to restaurants, obviously. But we’re also not having any takeout. any food deliveries from restaurants. We’re cutting stuff back, because who knows what kind of depression recession we’re going to end up in? I have no idea. But when it comes to education, I’m willing to spend it’s worth it. It pays back and it’s nothing compared to other expenses. So I’m in the market and I’m looking and one thing that made me question it is that you know, the other thing that made me question it is the reviews in the App Store. As some of them I just dismiss completely anyone who says this is too expensive. I feel like that’s not a reason if it works, then pay 100 bucks a month, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work, then let’s talk about, some of them are legitimate, where I’m looking at the App Store reviews, and people are saying, too much noise, just all those bells and whistles going off all day, you see that? You guys have like a three out of five rating in the App Store.
Aditya Nagrath 32:16
We do have a low rating in the app stores. So first, the thing is, is that we built this all using web technology instead of trying to build native iOS and Android apps in town. And because of that, yeah, because of that early on. There were some rough edges within the apps that we had to smooth out and we got some low reviews because some people ran into some bugs. We’re seeing less of that now than we were seeing in the beginning. Now, there are a lot of people that experienced success, and we asked them to review us on Facebook. So if you look in our Facebook reviews, that’s where you’re going to see that people are coming in saying this is the success. Yeah. On the App Store. I think more of what it is is people I kind of have these expectations. And if they’re not met, they feel like they can go to the App Store and just rip it apart for the bells and whistles. I mean, basically, we play a sound when the student is dragging something across the screen. And so if their student is just pushing that over and over and over again, at least they know it happens, right? So when I built this tool, my child was not born yet. He was on his way. And I, I literally imagined, like, okay, three years down the road, I have to do this, I got to teach this child how to count how am I going to do it? And so like, I thought, well, I want to be able to know he’s playing. So if he’s doing it, I want to hear something in the background number one, number two, I want to hear when he gets something, right, because then I can try to give some positive reinforcement helps him like the app. It also helps him understand that he did something successfully. Yeah. And, and so we got that we got that loop working and so on. money
Andrew Warner 34:00
sitting in the room, you want to know that that’s happening?
Aditya Nagrath 34:03
Absolutely got it. So
Andrew Warner 34:04
like you were saying the funny part is,
Aditya Nagrath 34:06
yeah, the funny part is, is that like, my child now is three and a half years old. So I literally just got there two weeks ago. This is not in any of our marketing. But this is the level of detail of thought that we put into every single feature, including the noises that the app makes
Andrew Warner 34:22
another party that is a part that I think you guys do well, that I haven’t seen other apps do. Let’s take Khan Academy, for example, everyone talks about Khan Academy. I’m not watching my kid as they’re using Khan Academy for more than I do for 510 minutes tops, and then it becomes a little bit annoying for me to just watch them count over and over again. The problem is, I don’t see what they what they do on that thing. If I give them 30 minutes of Khan Academy, kids, that’s supposed to be a really useful experience for them. I don’t know if it was or it wasn’t. Were they just staring at the same thing over and over again. I know when I go back in the room, they’re playing the muffin man over and over again. There’s no parent, there’s no parent dashboard. And you guys have a parent dashboard, right? Here’s what your kid did. Here’s what your kid answered, I find that that’s incredibly thoughtful. And for some reason, I don’t know of a single other app that does that. I’m sure they exist, I just don’t see any of the popular ones do it. And none that I’ve used, does it?
Aditya Nagrath 35:19
That it’s the other half of the equation. So if the student is playing, right, the other half of the equation was okay, if if I have my child in here, what would be the other half of it, I’d still want to work with him, I’d still want to make sure everything’s clicking, everything’s working. So we tell you exactly what the students working on exactly how we would teach it if it was us in the room doing it, and exactly what our activities are trying to do. And, and then on top of that, we even give activities that you should do outside of the system, in order to further the learning right now. So for example, if your students learning to count, we recommend playing board games so we went and bought chutes and ladders. The actual board game, because when you roll the die, they have to identify the number, they then have to produce that number of spaces. And I mean, they’re doing it in game in fun with you. So like it becomes cemented how important this is to life.
Andrew Warner 36:17
Let’s talk about the marketing that you mentioned earlier, you had a friend who came to you and said, well, you guys must be blowing up. I see your stuff everywhere. And you weren’t happy about that. Do you know the phenom talking about why will you not happy about that? Um,
Aditya Nagrath 36:31
so we had just created a 1% Facebook audience, and it was 2 million people. And so this Yeah, he came up to me at a at a networking luncheon. And he’s like, Oh, yeah, you must be blowing up, man. I see your stuff everywhere. I’m like, Well, you know, you don’t have children. That would be the right age. Right? He’s like, no, my children in college and I’m like, yeah, you you really shouldn’t be seeing my ads. I’m gonna go fix that.
Andrew Warner 36:59
And when you did What happened?
Aditya Nagrath 37:01
So when I came back and I overlaid our target audience on the 1% audience that Facebook gave us. First, we dropped the reach from 2 million people to 600,000. But the conversion rate went up by quite a bit enough for us to make it cost effective for us to just buy out the 50 per week that Facebook needs for its algorithms to tune. So we got to 50 per week, 55 a week. In this case, it was 50 actual conversions.
Andrew Warner 37:32
okay for them to be able to do it. Just by making that one change getting rid of parents of older kids or people who aren’t parents that Which one was it?
Aditya Nagrath 37:44
It was it was basically going into Facebook and saying only give me parents of from ages zero to 12. I think at the time got it.
Andrew Warner 37:52
Have you noticed that advertising rates on Facebook are going down and is that are they also more effective for you?
Aditya Nagrath 38:01
I don’t know if I’ve noticed them going down, I could go back and look and see if that’s true. What I feel like is that there’s more eyeballs now on Facebook. I, our ads are starting to work as though they were last year when we were hitting the audience for the first time.
Unknown Speaker 38:18
Hmm. All right. Alright,
Andrew Warner 38:20
I’m going to come back and ask you about some of the changes that you’ve made about the agency that you discovered and then other things that are helping you grow. actually know is there an agency that you work? Yeah, there is there is a tap cast, am I right?
Aditya Nagrath 38:32
We’re no longer working with top cast.
Andrew Warner 38:34
Are you doing it yourself now?
Aditya Nagrath 38:37
We’re working with Kurt Malley. And the belt
Unknown Speaker 38:41
method.
Andrew Warner 38:42
Really? That’s right, this Kurt Malley, do it for you or he teaches you how to do it.
Aditya Nagrath 38:48
Well, we’re working with his agency, so both
Andrew Warner 38:51
Got it, okay. I like that guy. So I’m at a conference and he had somebody following them with the camera. He goes, Andrew, so many people at this conference. What I’m doing is I’m taking photos of my myself at this conference targeting the people at this conference, and now it feels like everybody knows who I am. And I have more credibility selling to people who they can see me here at the conference with them. It’s like stuff like that that I thought was so good. All right, let me talk about my second sponsor if Do you know Russell Brunson?
Aditya Nagrath 39:19
I’ve heard of him. Yeah,
Andrew Warner 39:20
he’s the guy who runs Click Funnels. So he’s got a book about how to get traffic for your site. I think you’re gonna like it. The book is called Traffic Secrets. But he also has a podcast. And let me give you a couple of the techniques that he’s gotten his podcast what he does is he took the idea from Traffic Secrets, the the concepts and the stories from Traffic Secrets, the book and turn it into a podcast where he’s sharing some of them. There’s one where let’s see episode number five. He talks about the dream 100 lists where he explains it. This is what he did. Because look, I can’t write the software, somebody else’s writing while they’re doing it. What I’m going to do is we don’t have money for a bunch of ads. We don’t No anybody because we’re a bunch of people who are outsiders, I’m going to get a list of the people who, who have my audience, I’m going to target them and watch what they’re doing as much as possible. And so we created these lists on Facebook, on Instagram, we started following them and just obsess on the hundred people wonder if I was in that hundred list. And he sent them messages from time to time when he saw their stuff. He’d follow up with what they’re doing and understand it and comment and just get into their world. And then when his software came out, and it was time for him to promote it, he went back to some of the people on the list the ones who established some rapport with and they started promoting him to their Facebook groups or to their, to their podcasts, or whatever they had, I think Tony Robbins was on his dream 100 list. And he got to do a few different events with Tony Robbins. And the beauty of this is it doesn’t cost much money and allows him to pay attention to the people who really cares about wants to work with and it allowed him then to grow his business. He’s got a bunch of ideas like that. They’re in his book. I read his book. I love that. book it’s just one of these quick reads with full of full of good stories that are backed by real people who, who he has worked with, or are in his world somehow and his own experiences anyway. I recommend the podcast if you’re out there listening to me and you’re looking for another podcast, go listen to this podcast. It’s Traffic Secrets, they sponsored and as a follow up to this interview, I think they’re going to be a great podcast for you to listen to it’s Traffic Secrets with Russell Brunson. Each one of these episodes is full of another technique like that dream 100 list and it’s all in there for you Traffic Secrets. You know what, before we even get into tap cast, let’s talk about your dad had your dad ended up being a part of this business?
Aditya Nagrath 41:42
That’s a great question. No one’s ever asked me that either. So it’s a it’s a new story.
So actually, we were working on an IoT product and and, and we weren’t getting a lot of traction with it, but like Basically, when at the same time, as we were looking at doing elephant learning we were considering, should we try to maybe get this IoT product to market? So I went to my dad. And we had lost a couple of clients at that point, like some people just kind of roll off naturally they they bring things in house, etc. So we had lost a couple of clients, and I’m trying to figure out which direction do I head. And so the person I was working with said, you know, what, try to raise $50,000 from friends and family, right? So I went to my dad with the IoT thing, and the and the math thing. And I said, like, which, which of these two would you invest $50,000 in? And he said, I want to do the math thing. I’d rather I’d rather teach children math with my $50,000 then try to, you know, put some stuff on trucks. And I was like, oh, okay, and I went Back to the teammate. I said, That’s what he said. And he was like, well, gosh, that’s talent. So that got that got him looking into maybe some of the research that that Albert presented me he went and verified at all. And unfortunately, he wasn’t a marketer. He was more of a sales guy. So he was he was the IoT sales guy.
Worked himself out of a job at the same time.
Andrew Warner 43:27
And so your dad, one of the things that was fascinating to me was, what was his involvement with motels that he owned these these motels? He built them up back in the 80s. Yeah, for his own motels. Like, tell me about it.
Aditya Nagrath 43:42
Yeah. So he he was with like, maybe eight or nine other families that were all from Indian descent that they kind of pulled together got an SBA loan built. The first one out in Cheyenne, Wyoming was called luxuriate in and I think by like 1990 something they had maybe 50 or 60 of these things.
Andrew Warner 44:06
Wow. And it was called luxury eight. Yeah, what’s the eight about?
Aditya Nagrath 44:11
Well that was the problem because super eight got pissed about the eight
they sued them and then the next thing you know all of these were days ins or Ramada ins or whatever sending known at the time.
Andrew Warner 44:25
They started then going in franchising those is that is it called the franchise where you get to put those names on it is That’s right.
Aditya Nagrath 44:31
Yeah, they they, I mean, that was how they settled the case. I guess
Andrew Warner 44:35
was I know that wasn’t super eight charging $8 a night That’s why they call it super eight, right? I don’t think that’s where it comes back. You don’t even know they just came up with like luxury eight with a
Aditya Nagrath 44:48
register there was something like $29 No, they I think, I think honestly, one of them was trying to like game the eight so like, you got it.
Andrew Warner 44:58
No, no, look at this note. So Perhaps name is derived from its original room rate, which is $8 88 cents at night when the first location opened in 1974. In that, yeah, no, I
Aditya Nagrath 45:10
like the 90s it was quite a bit more. That’s what
Andrew Warner 45:12
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s
Aditya Nagrath 45:13
I wasn’t alive in 74. I got
Andrew Warner 45:15
a lot of foresight into that name, but I guess it first it helped them pop. Wow. Do you remember anything about that? That sounds like a pretty impressive business, huh?
Aditya Nagrath 45:26
I mean, part of my skill set came from that, to be honest with you. I learned to code in 1994 when I was 14 years old.
And I remember walking around the motel saying I could automate that I could automate that. I could mean just pointing things like putting, I mean, putting processes around the housekeeper’s. Like give them a checklist for God’s sake right?
Andrew Warner 45:51
off, you help them implement the checklist or you just bothered you enough that you said I think I’ve got to do better when I when I run my own life.
Aditya Nagrath 45:58
I mean, I recommend it. They didn’t take that on what I did was what I did that they actually accepted at one point was I wrote down a process for the front desk. Because the biggest problem was that in December when the rate was like $25, a month or a night, someone would call and say, hey, I want to book something on June 18, which was like, the Hot Rod festival or something. And it was like $90 a night or something. So it’s like, they’re booking $25 a night at like June 18. Because they don’t understand that the room rate changes from December to June.
Unknown Speaker 46:35
Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 46:36
yeah.
Aditya Nagrath 46:38
So that’s that like, and then I did that. He’s like, this is amazing. I’m like, now try a checklist for the housekeeper. No, that’s too much.
Andrew Warner 46:46
Was it all families that you knew or were that were connected to you or it was just a business thing your dad did? I tell
Aditya Nagrath 46:54
you I was in I worked in one as a manager for a while. I was set 13 years old.
Andrew Warner 47:04
I remember watching my dad in that hustle phase for him. That was exciting. And then I also remember when it was no longer exciting and like, I got to do it another year. And I missed those exciting days. Seeing them, seeing my dad and his friends build things up getting to go and work at his office and watching things just build and build and get bigger. You remember that? Yeah, we’re right. Yeah. Tell me about tap cast. Then coming back now to elephant learning. How did you find them and what was it about them that attracted you?
Aditya Nagrath 47:36
Well, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
I got on the phone, I guess with the CEO.
So it was a little confusing at the time if that’s who I was speaking to. And he basically said, You know what, we’re going to carry you for two months for free just to show you what we can do. And if you like it, you could pay us and then you were buying ads yourself.
Andrew Warner 48:00
Look, yeah, we’re okay. And he said, Look, we will take on your ads don’t pay us any of our agency fees, we’ll just just pay the ad feeds. Got it. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 48:11
And
Aditya Nagrath 48:13
I mean, at that time, so like we it started around a $30 CAC, then we, I guess blew out the 1% audience after three or four months. So I said, oh, let’s take it out. Let’s take it to a 4% audience so that I don’t have to do this every two or three months. That was a bad idea. And now I’m at a $54, CAC, and tap cat steps in and the next day, they added at $22. And I was like, this is this is wonderful, right? So like, two months later, he’s like, so now you got to pay us I’m like, whatever. Why Why
Andrew Warner 48:44
was that? So high considered cost of acquisition was what what did you say when you were doing it? 40.
Aditya Nagrath 48:49
It was like 30. And then it went up to 54. When we went from a 1% audience to 4%
Andrew Warner 48:55
audience that’s two months of subscription, right? what’s the what’s the lifetime value of a customer for you?
Aditya Nagrath 49:05
We keep people three to six months, I think they get the value at three months, they get the one year and they say, maybe I keep going. Many of those children learn quite a bit more two or three years. They say, Let’s keep going.
Andrew Warner 49:16
Okay, so then it seems like 5060 is not a problem, then it feels like from what you’re telling me that cost of acquisition going even $200 is not that big of a deal. It’s a big deal. But it’s it’s manageable. No,
Aditya Nagrath 49:28
I think the the
Andrew Warner 49:32
I think the issue is cashflow, because at that point, we still weren’t profitable. So we were out of pocket to do the app. So you give the money to Facebook, you have to wait a few months for it to pay off. And if it doesn’t pay off the way you expected, then you’re really in trouble.
Aditya Nagrath 49:48
I think what you’re saying is true, though on the ground, it exhibited in a different way and to us on the ground and exhibited as the growth wasn’t wasn’t coming on as fast as we, we needed it to. Okay. And, and you know, obviously taking it from 54 to 22. Very, very quickly it was coming on as fast as we needed it to. Okay.
Andrew Warner 50:15
Okay, but it but it was just not something that you could afford to do at the time they come on board, they reduce the cost of acquisition, the CAC cost of customer acquisition, and you’re golden with them and why did you leave them then?
Aditya Nagrath 50:29
They they went into a different business and now they they’re in the credit markets and I think if you go to their website, that’s that’s what they’re advertising. Something like they’ll help fund your Facebook ads. They use their algorithms that they used for us to make us all that money to now be able to predict whether someone will be successful or not. Non dilutive financing to scale Facebook ad spend so does that mean that there get up to a million dollar monthly received funds within days? No no collateral or guarantees. So they’re lending money.
Unknown Speaker 51:03
Yeah,
Andrew Warner 51:04
got it. And that’s not what you want to be you don’t want to be in the space of taking on debt to do this?
Aditya Nagrath 51:10
Well, I mean, ultimately, the conversation for them is they don’t want to do anything extra. So very quickly, we hit ad fatigue. So what they did worked quite quite well, like very, very, very well, I will I want to say that, yeah. Then at some point, they said, well learn one year of math in three months is exhausted, and you can’t do that anymore. I’m like, What else? Like, what else am I supposed to do? That’s the value proposition, right? Yeah. And they wouldn’t help create new content. And we were just kind of stuck going back and forth. And how do we get new content in here? And so ultimately, I had to go to something more advanced and of course, what Kurt offers is the complete package. So that makes it makes a lot more sense from a marketing standpoint. We use novice
Andrew Warner 52:03
what yeah, that’s something that you’ve said to us to me in the interview to our producer that you’re not a marketer that that’s not where you feel strongest influencer ads you did that too. How did that work out?
Unknown Speaker 52:17
Um
Aditya Nagrath 52:19
yeah I mean it was it wasn’t let’s just say I was getting better results out of promo calm but I mean, it added it added people and it was a system that we had working and it required very little effort from my site. We were using social native so like if you want to try to do that, I’d say go talk to social native, we will
Andrew Warner 52:41
promote calm what social native, I don’t know any of these.
Aditya Nagrath 52:44
So social native tap has connected us with them. And what they do is they will run campaigns with influencers and you can then use the videos to go remarket if you want not remarket, but like literally put them into your Facebook ads Your Pinterest ads or wherever so you could take that same ad and push it out to your channel and they kind of work with smaller influencers so it works well for the influencer and it works well for me.
Andrew Warner 53:11
So I made a video run into their audience and then you get to use it to promote to your audience too.
Unknown Speaker 53:21
That’s right. Okay.
Andrew Warner 53:24
All right. And then what’s promo calm? You said you got good results with that.
Aditya Nagrath 53:28
So promo comes wonderful. You it stock videos, stock audio, and and you can put basically three slides worth of text on so works very nicely for Facebook. You just put that ad in there. three slides of text, the last slides, typically your logo and stuff,
Andrew Warner 53:43
and then do you do that? It’s a tool for creating that.
Unknown Speaker 53:49
Yeah, got it.
Andrew Warner 53:50
And so you’re just saying you using those tools help using promo.com to create videos, aren’t you? How are you doing? I see you looking up like there’s something coming up. We’re on oh no nose
Aditya Nagrath 54:01
for some reason slack pinged me and I’m trying to d&d it.
Andrew Warner 54:07
Okay, I didn’t realize so promo calm just software that you’re using creating videos using stock photos, stock photos, your do look good. And then you’re running it on social media and that’s helping you.
Aditya Nagrath 54:17
Yeah, we had a lot of those.
Andrew Warner 54:23
Well, let me see what else is going on for you guys. Oh, you mentioned earlier, you couldn’t do everything right right from the start Android, iOS, iOS, Facebook, it was just killing you told our producer and you had to cut back. And that’s why you went all web in the beginning. Right? That’s right. Why back away from it. If all web was working, why do you need an iPhone app?
Aditya Nagrath 54:46
Um, so the the iPhone app now literally pops open the web browser and pointed at our website. Okay. But because of the JavaScript web browser getting very technical. Because of that bridge, we’re actually able to control some native stuff. So we get a better feel for iOS on our web app, than if you just went to our website in that, like, you know, the games are landscape so we can turn everything landscape and force it to be landscape. Whereas in web, we have to say, can you please turn your phone sideways? Uh huh. But But yeah, so like, we don’t actually back away from it. We’re kind of we’re sticking that route until, until we get to a place where maybe it doesn’t make sense anymore. But honestly, it’s so much easier to have one code base than three.
Andrew Warner 55:38
What I told you before we get started that I’m fascinated by homeschooling, you said, we can talk about that. But what I’m more passionate about is the way that we teach math. What is so special about the way that you teach math?
Aditya Nagrath 55:50
So what we do is we we address the language, and we’re able to help them the student Connect what’s happening in the classroom to the language and that’s the gap. That’s the struggle for the homeschool or for the teacher in the classroom. Right? So the the issue is again, the the jargon behind it right? And you got to imagine what it’s like for one of these for one of these students, I’ll bring up that biochem thing that I said earlier, right? If you’re a third grader, and you’re three years behind conceptually, it’s the same as me, are you walking into that biochem course and not understanding the professor, except that the third grader can’t walk out a class and mean you could get up and walk out because we’re not getting value from it. Now, it’s worse than that, because not only are they forced to be there, but at the same time, they’re telling themselves that maybe they’re not good at math, or that they’re stupid or that right I mean, the stories of defeat are being seated right there. Because they can’t understand the teacher. Right. And, and it’s very, very challenging for us to teach those concepts through instruction. It has to be done through an experience. So let’s You can’t instruct a student what is five plus four? You can tell them the answer is nine. They don’t understand why the answer is nine. But if you tell them give me five things, give me four more things. How many do I have now? And they count up to see nine, right? And you say, well, that’s what five plus four means. Now they have the capability to connect it. And that’s what’s missing. And that’s what’s hard to do in a classroom environment. When it’s 30 students to one teacher, it’s very, very challenging for the teacher to know, who is at what level of understanding and then how do I build them to where we are now? Right. You can’t understand multiplication unless you understand addition.
Unknown Speaker 57:43
It’s there, right? Yeah.
Aditya Nagrath 57:45
But in many schools, and we talked to one superintendent, I think out in Illinois, we told him what we do. And he says, you know, it’s really, really sad because if we have a fifth grader that’s behind, we put them in the fifth grade materials. We just take them slower. So instead of torturing them fast, we’re going to torture them slow. And it’s just common sense that if they didn’t understand something beforehand, we should go back and build them from.
Andrew Warner 58:16
Oh, no, we just lost them. I want to know what’s going on in your house. I wonder if it’s all. I don’t that I just lost you for a minute. You’re saying, If instead of torturing them fast, we’re torturing them slow. And we lost you for a moment.
Aditya Nagrath 58:28
Oh, I apologize. Yeah. So let me try again. So yeah, so like, basically, he said, it’s common sense what you’re saying, right? If we don’t go back and address where they didn’t understand something and then build them up from there, there’s no way to recover them. We’re all we’re doing is teaching them materials that they’re not going to understand slower. How are they going to catch up? I don’t even know why we’re doing it this way.
Andrew Warner 58:52
So hopefully, they change their system based on the conversation we had.
Aditya Nagrath 58:55
But that’s what our system does is our system finds that level of understanding. starts giving them activities like actual experiences that the student can do to then connect the ideas to what’s happening in the classroom or what the parent is saying or what the teacher is saying. And by reading the reports and maybe trying the activities in parent mode, we’re giving the teacher and the parent the ability to connect those two ideas.
Andrew Warner 59:22
Okay, and the way that you do this, it, here’s what I’ve noticed about your app. And again, I this is just me researching and I still haven’t gotten my kids into it, because I, I’ll explain why in a moment. What I like is that you’re assessing the skills of each person, which kid instead of saying, well, you’re five years old, so you must be in this class. And you must know this stuff, right? I’ve noticed that even with my son, I say he’s five years old, but most of the kids in his class at this point are six years old. I made a mistake by saying to Khan Academy’s app that he’s five, which means the stuff that he’s being asked is so insanely simple, that he’s dropped out of it, and he’s moved on. To just, I don’t know, do another stuff. So you test them first. Here’s the thing that held me back. I want to see what it looks like, I want to see I want to try it. I want to, I want to see am I about to put my kid into Adobe game? Can I play the game? Can I watch it over someone’s shoulder like the more I could see it before I put them in, the better because I feel like I only have one shot with them. If I put it if I get them playing a game that’s not great. Then it’s done where I’ve lost them on that. And if I do four or five different apps, that suck, we’ve kind of I lost my credibility for the next one. They’re not as enthused. There’s not as as willing to try. And or if I worse if I get them sucked into a game that stinks. I can’t break them over that. It’s like breaking them of Netflix. And I’d rather not have something like that in my life.
Aditya Nagrath 1:00:47
That’s so much asking this question. By the way, what do you think?
Well, so this is actually our challenge right now is being able to explain to the parent what it is and being able to set the expectations properly with the student. Many of the students that make it through our system, they’re extremely grateful that they had it. And you can imagine why right?
Andrew Warner 1:01:07
At the same time, right, our goal was never to be the coolest game out there. Right, our goal was to be the most effective thing out there. And you know, I remember I want to see it at that I want to see it before implementing it, I want to just try it, take it for a test drive first. And I don’t even know like how to explain it. But I wouldn’t introduce my team to pipe drive to organize the way that we booked guests until I just went in and messed around with it. Even if it’s with an account, I was going to toss away. And in some cases, what I do is I go into YouTube, and I watched like, here’s the first step in the second step and see what happens to understand it. I think we want to know what it is before we bring it into our lives and it’s really hard. So I did that with Khan Academy a little bit but they have enough of a reputation. So I just I didn’t do too much of that. But It’s really hard. Without that, I feel I throw them in there.
Aditya Nagrath 1:02:06
But I know this is, this is what I keep trying to tell my marketing people help me make a video, or something that will give the parent more information about what they’re getting. Because I look at my homepage, and I do see some people come back and complain and say, I’d like to buy this. But this is the complaint that I have. And what I tell them is that
Andrew Warner 1:02:26
I want to turn that over to you. It’s too late by that by that I’m sorry, but what do you what do you tell? No, I hear you.
Aditya Nagrath 1:02:31
What I tell them when they come to me is that we do we do allow you to try it for three days. If you cancel for three days, we don’t charge you. So like if your kids aren’t gonna like it, then then you don’t have to do it. At the same time. I mean, again, we’re not trying to build the coolest game out there. And when I was a kid, I remember playing games kind of like what we built here. And I remember playing games to try to hide the math and what I remember was that that you know what you’re not passing anything off on. This is a math game. So if you’ve got a student that doesn’t like math or is going to be affected by the fact that it’s math, then we’re not going to be passing anything by them, that’s for sure now, and we don’t even recommend that you try. However, what we are doing that is different is that you only have to use this 10 minutes a day. And then you don’t have to do like, you can go play any other video game that you’d want to like a video game that you actually want to play, right. And so by doing that, we allow the child to do what they want to do, without having to be forced to play some video game that may or may not be something they like. The graphics are completely modular. That tends to be the next complaint. But the fact is away
Andrew Warner 1:03:45
that it’s that it’s boring or repetitive. And so you’re thinking it’s modular, and you can change it.
Aditya Nagrath 1:03:50
Well, the so the next complaint that we see that’s kind of like a throwaway complaint is the graphics suck. Well, every game that I’ve ever had in my entire life I’ve shown to a friend that graphics suck. We had a game though. Like I saw a game we had a game once it was live action video, like it was the it was like seven CD ROMs a gimmick was like seven CD ROMs. And like it was all live action video. And I showed him some of the graphics stuff. I’m like, dude, that’s live video, like, like, at what point are the graphics good? No, I didn’t want to be in that game. Like I’m not trying to make great but at the same time, I gave enough power to the designers that they can make it look however they want. And you’re right. Another complaint that we have is that it’s repetitive or boring. I believe that’s a lot of the parents looking at it. Yeah, because Give me five things. Give me one more thing. Give me six things. Give me one more thing. That’s the same question to the parent. That’s a completely different question to a five year old. Now, if you got a 10 year old working on that material, we do have a method to put it into test out because I think as soon as they pick up the language, they’ve already had years of experience that helped them and now It might look repetitive. But what we’re doing is we’re selling you a tool and so that you know your child best. If it’s too easy, put them into test out mode, it will quickly accelerate them and put them back to when they need to let them test out at this stage so that they don’t keep learning it and then move on to the next.
Andrew Warner 1:05:17
I feel like you, I feel like you’ve hit on something that is going to be more and more appreciated. I don’t yet know how but this was not at all obvious to me. And I don’t think other people are paying attention to it. And I think that this is going to become increasingly more important in the world. And so if I were to sum up some what I’ve learned doing interviews with entrepreneurs who are doing well during COVID here’s some of the things that I’ve noticed. Number one, creator economy growing strong, you see people like gumroad Click Funnels, they’re catering to creators teachable and they’re growing their businesses because more creators are creating right now especially in like the independent side hustle which now becomes a main hustle, food businesses like Mercado And I see a few smaller ones that haven’t yet agreed to do an interview with me but they’ve been sending me private messages. Obviously they’re doing well that people are buying things remotely, food remotely much more. Ecommerce in general is growing and you see this obviously in Shopify numbers overall, but even smaller stores that brew. What is it called brew? I can’t remember the company that I got brooming I’ve got their cup at home, they are doing better just selling cups and selling things to people who are who are drinking alcohol. And now what you’re helping me realize is, anyone who’s helping parents teach their kids is a good contender for for an interview for me because their business is probably growing as parents are becoming more sensitized to their part and teaching their kids and you didn’t pick this because of COVID. But it’s you doing it well, and COVID is helping you do it to more do it with more customers. That’s right. All right. So basically, I started this interview yapping in a long winded way, I closed it in a long winded way and it’s coming from a position of passion so I should stop doing interviews that I’m passionate about and focus more on interviews that are more wrote.
Aditya Nagrath 1:07:10
Alright, I think it was great. I don’t know.
Andrew Warner 1:07:13
I think it was great. I’m I’m excited about your business. I’m excited to have you here. Thank you so much for doing it. For anyone who wants to go check out the site. It is elephant learning calm start there probably I liked the video that you have with a woman who explains it and show some of the screens. It’s and that’s available at elephant learning calm and I want to thank the two sponsors who made this interview happen the first is going to help you host your website right if you haven’t started a business if you haven’t created yet this is the time to do it, go to hostgator.com slash mixergy they’ll make it super simple for you and you’ll get started and grow and if you hate your hosting company and they charge you too much now’s a great time to switch Hostgator comm slash mixergy and finally now that this podcast is over, go check out Traffic Secrets with Russell Brunson each episode we’ll give you a few techniques that you will be able to use to get results and frankly, Russell’s just a good story. Tell her an interesting guy to listen to. And so I think you’ll get motivated and be entranced by him. I know I am. So go close this out by listening to Traffic Secrets podcast on whatever app you’re listening to me on.
Andrew Warner: 1:08:11
Bye, everyone.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
