Andrew Warner 0:04
Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of mixergy. And I’m interviewing a man who could have gotten out of New York before her period, he decided to stay in Brooklyn. Yes, sir. This is part of my series of interviews to understand what’s working in this in this recession. I know technically, it’s not a recession, but we’re definitely dealing with difficult times when you see how many people are out of work when you see how many businesses are closed up, and I want to see what’s working. Obviously, we don’t have the answers yet. By the way, of course, you should see how many people pitch me on being on mixergy to teach my audience how to like, like how to thrive in this new economy or whatever, it’s crazy.
Ankur Nagpal 0:44
It’s crazy, man. It’s so it’s it’s been it’s a super, super weird few weeks. I mean, again, we’ll talk about this but again, we feel so lucky right now. It’s crazy. You
Andrew Warner 0:52
You sold just before this whole thing happened.
Ankur Nagpal 0:54
Yeah, but still, I mean, like, again, people, I think someone call this the unfair recession in a wave Like some businesses are positively impacted, most are not. And it’s kind of dumb luck like I like I guarantee you when I started the business I was not thinking how would we fare during a growth global pandemic and deciding what business to run this is pure luck as far as I’m concerned. And there’s a lot of great founders that for no fault of their own are having a really rough time and we got lucky.
Andrew Warner 1:20
Did you at any point say to yourself, how do I create a business that’s recession proof or prepare for the recession? Do do anything like that?
Ankur Nagpal 1:27
Nope. I also don’t necessarily think our business is going to be recession proof. There’s this is there’s a lot unique here right? Like it’s not just an economic recession. It’s also a everyone is mandated to be at home, and therefore activities that can be conducted at home will do far better. So it’s not just like an economic recession that equally affects everyone.
Andrew Warner 1:46
Right, right. The local restaurant and movie theaters around much correct
Ankur Nagpal 1:51
and online education, or the creative economy or both, like benefit a lot from this almost accidentally, frankly.
Andrew Warner 1:58
The person whose voice you just hurt his ankle or neck Paul he is the Actually you know what I’ve never done this and I never liked when guests that when when interviewer said, Can you introduce yourself, but sometimes it works. How would you introduce yourself?
Ankur Nagpal 2:11
I’m quite an oddball. I’m the founder of teachable for people that have not heard teachable, we help people create and sell primarily online classes, but really our ideas. We want to enable people to make money with their knowledge on and give people a platform to transform their knowledge and income.
Andrew Warner 2:27
You know, as an interviewer, I always hate listening to podcast hosts as the guest to say what they do because they think that they could just go off on rants, but I’ve noticed that some people are good at it, so maybe I shouldn’t be so judgey Yeah, all right. We’re gonna find out why this is doing well for him why he sold his company did he pretended he was merging the company when in reality, he really sold the company or they’re talking about all that, thanks to two phenomenal sponsors. The first in this environment. If you want to understand whether your customers are happy with your product or not, and get a sense of where they are before they leave you. There’s a little tool called delighted Calm, I’m going to tell you why you should install that on your site and I’m going to give it away to you for you know, I’ll tell you right now you can go to delight it comm slash mixergy right now get it for free for free. And number two, if you want to grow your sales if you want to start in business, I’m going to tell you later on why you need a funnel, and why Click Funnels comm will help you get it. Click Funnels comm slash mixergy we’ll get it done, right? anchor what happened to sales? give me give me some sales numbers you and I’ve been talking in private via Twitter dm, what can you do?
Ankur Nagpal 3:26
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, basically, for the last 20 days or so, there’s only been one day where our creators have sold less than a million dollars worth of courses. We’re about to hit a million dollars for the day in the next 15 minutes today. That means your creators have sold a million dollars worth of online courses that are hosted by teachable
Andrew Warner 3:47
correct every single day. And before that, how much would they do?
Ankur Nagpal 3:52
So last month is a good example last month, our creators that closest 30 just about $30 million, which is up from 24 million the month before so Very, very, very large 25% month over month growth, which is far, far higher than we would have ever predicted.
Andrew Warner 4:08
And that’s a lagging indicator with you, right? Because it’s not like somebody goes and creates a course and boom gets a million dollars in sales, right?
Ankur Nagpal 4:14
So do tell me that. So that’s a really interesting question. So because typically what we see yes, it’s absolutely lagging indicator on average, it takes about 70 to 80 days from someone creating an account to selling in the last few weeks, it’s fallen to 40 days. And I think what’s happening is a lot of people are having sales immediately. A lot of them are like, in person businesses pivoting to going online, or in other cases, people that have intended to launch a course now doing it much, much faster. So for both reasons. We’re seeing the window come down, it’s still 40 days, but 40 days is a median, which means a lot of people are launching faster.
Andrew Warner 4:48
Okay, and then number of new creators coming onto the platform.
Ankur Nagpal 4:52
How’s that impacted also going up a lot. So a couple of metrics one is new customers new customers, we added about 2000 new customers last month. Moreover, The number of people having a sale for the first time grew almost 100% last month. So all our metrics and the other last side is students taking courses is also up about 100%. month over month. So it’s just crazy numbers like a lot of we’re fast growing business, not this fast like this is, you know, definitely circumstances outside our control.
Andrew Warner 5:21
Wow, wow, I you know what I have to remember to think about that part of the equation too. It’s not just that you’ve got more people who are selling, it’s not just you’re getting more revenue for yourself. It’s that they’re more students who have time because they’re at home looking for something to do. And instead of Netflix, they’re, like light up as they say that.
Ankur Nagpal 5:38
So we had two consecutive weeks, it finally stabilized with two consecutive weeks, where our traffic grew 40% week over week and 30% week over week. It was it was crazy. And this is all traffic to teach blended completely flatlined after that, but for context, like we would have taken 40 to 50% growth on that site over the course of a year or so. To come close to that in a week was unprecedented. And it happened for another week. And then again, completely flat, but it’s now flat at this new level. That’s about 50% higher. And so
Andrew Warner 6:11
what I’m taking away from this is actually before me giving my theories I’d rather hear from you. What do you think is going on? Why are people logging onto teachable creating accounts? What’s up?
Ankur Nagpal 6:23
So multiple things going on? Right? I mean, one online education is sort of having its moment like everyone thought online education would be a really big deal. It is a big deal. But it’s been developing somewhat, you know, steadily, this has been a forcing factor. All of a sudden, all education has become online education. So that definitely has been a big, big forcing factor. The second thing is the creator economy, which is again when we talk about basically other teachers earning money as creators. And I’ve invested in other companies also who were in the same space and they’ve all been doing incredibly well in the education space and the online And a creator economy basically influencers selling online digital products. And we also
Andrew Warner 7:05
an environment where people are afraid for their jobs, or they’ve lost their jobs, they don’t have much money they’re watching, they’re spending more. And as a result, they’re less likely to go and pay for an online course when there’s youtube for free. Why didn’t that happen?
Ankur Nagpal 7:18
So, so two things and one is this is a theory of mind could totally be wrong, because I’ve been asking myself the same question. Like, what I’m half expecting the other shoe to drop, like, we, for instance, think our sales can come down because there’s a real recession, people will spend less, we’re not seeing that. So either it’s gonna happen soon, or it won’t, if it won’t. My working theory, and this is no more than a working theory is maybe online courses are actually the cheap version of like an expensive thing. So a lot of times an online course is not like the difference between doing nothing or buying an art, or Yeah, it’s on YouTube as well. People are comparing it to their comparing to traditional education and other more expensive alternatives. So it is the cheap version. So okay, in that sense, I can see Why online courses will thrive in an environment like this because you know, a $99 course is very cheap compared to, you know, 1000 or 10,000 or $100,000 College program.
Andrew Warner 8:10
I don’t know average price when I go to college or do I go on to teachable or go on to I don’t think people are I don’t think do you think people are saying, Do I go to college? Or do I go to this online influencers course or this person’s this business is course
Ankur Nagpal 8:23
not in that sense. But if you sort of think about I need to level myself up and like to be better prepared for the job market, I’ll give you an example. In my own family, my brother is getting an MBA for that purpose. My brother was like, Look, I want to like see how my career is going. I want to step level function up in my career, and he’s doing his MBA right now. And traditionally, people did that people went to coding boot camps for the same reason. So I can see that sort of being a thing, right where, look, I want to change my career path a little bit. I can see that being a factor. I can also frankly, see for a lot of courses, the whole hybrid. It’s like educational, entertaining. meant to like $40 yoga class or something is sort of the kind of thing I think people would feel okay about spending right now. But you’re right, both of us just have hypotheses. Like I don’t have conviction behind any of these theories. And I’m curious to see sort of what happens in the coming months. I
Andrew Warner 9:14
am seeing the creator economy take, at least in my interviews, I’m absolutely seeing that Click Funnels. I interviewed the founder, he said something similar people who’ve been on the fence are finally creating up and creating landing pages gumroad people wanted to create an E book or going on and finally creating an E book another interview that I’ve done I’ve definitely seen a lot more of that what’s an example of a course that people are taking on teachable right now to level up?
Ankur Nagpal 9:38
It’s I mean, it’s all it’s all over the place, right? Like right now it’s we have courses on programming, doing really well building a business is going like starting an online business is like probably our fastest growing category. But we also had like a lot of fun caught by fun classes. I mean, like, you know, vocal training and yoga and cake decorating, sort of all over the place. There’s not been like very, very clear trends and types of courses.
Andrew Warner 10:01
So, it seems to me like you kind of lucked into not locked into this, you happen to be in a place where the economy
Ankur Nagpal 10:08
grew. It’s true. It’s true. It’s we’re very lucky. I’m not gonna shy away from that word.
Andrew Warner 10:12
So if someone’s listening to us and going, alright, I didn’t happen to create a platform for creating courses online and didn’t happen to be in a world where everyone is now stuck at home and either taking a course or creating a course. But I do want to take advantage of this new creator economy, what do you recommend that they do? Is it just go create a course or what else
Ankur Nagpal 10:31
create a product create, build an audience and build an audience and sell a product to that audience? Right. So I think I would, I would start with again, I would start with building an audience first. Like even though you can do that on teachable and teachable is not gonna help you there. I think building an audience I think to find your medium Everyone has different mediums for some people it’s writing. And if you’re writing I would recommend you know, like, long form and Twitter to build your audience. Some people are very visual people, you know, something like Instagram will work better for them. You know, some people are podcast hosts So finding your medium building an audience and then selling a product here, audience what that product is, I mean, I’m biased towards courses and information products, but it can be coaching, it can be consulting me services. But I do believe and again, that is the move that is what have more conviction in a lot of people in both the last month in the next couple of months will make their first dollar online like far more people than ever before. And that trend I’ve a lot of, I’ve always believed in that trend, like that’s why we started the company. But that trend is being accelerated dramatically. And I think when people kind of make their first dollar online, that’s a really, really special moment for a ton of people. Like if you look at our face, we have a Facebook community and like you like most posts get like, I don’t know, like 510 15 likes whenever someone says, Oh my god, I just got my first sale. I like like 300 people engage with that it’s such a special feeling. And I think a lot of people are getting their first sale online right now and I think that’s really cool. You know, for
Andrew Warner 11:53
some reason I don’t think of teachable as the platform for people to go when they’re creating their first product. I think they’re gonna go to some bad version. And then up, I think of you because there are a couple of examples that I think of with teachable Facebook is one that they’ve created an online course using teachable Am I right about that?
Ankur Nagpal 12:11
They had one for training a while back, I think it’s still alive. But then our target audience is more individual creators.
Andrew Warner 12:17
I put it it’s been some of the businesses that I’ve interviewed who created for some reason, I always think it’s like, this is where you want the polished version to be. But you’re right. There are people obviously right if it makes sense that there’d be people who are just getting started also who are going to teachable and, and seeing you can literally like for people who are getting started, I would literally tell them, you can tell someone to Venmo you $50 $100 or whatever. It doesn’t matter like technology should not be what holds you back. But yeah, teachable very often is not the quick and dirty, but it can be. Do you feel like you sold your business too soon? You sold it just weeks before this whole thing happened? Yeah.
Ankur Nagpal 12:50
So let me let me give a little bit more context. Yes. Is it a acquisition or merger and now I’m going to ask you to explain the difference between the two and we can accordingly sort of decide what this is. But the business we sold to is basically doing exactly what we’re doing in Latin America, about three times our size. So to me, it was just good business to put the two businesses together because you now collectively have just this larger business, non competitive, identical mission. It just made it just, to me, it was a good business decision. Like we weren’t trying to sell the company. Um,
Andrew Warner 13:26
but so now you’re a product head of teachable and teachable as the US based version of the product, right?
Ankur Nagpal 13:32
Correct. I mean, we should we remain a US only a US subsidiary. And basically, I remain the CEO of teachable, I report into the CEO of hotmart in Brazil. But yeah, our products stay independent, and we sort of keep running our business. They keep running there’s, there’s in time, we’ll sort of find synergies in terms of like, like, we shouldn’t all like duplicate all of our technology. But right now, I mean, are everything Thing stays the same. I mean, are we continue to execute the way we have been? It just now we’re part of this bigger global thing. I wonder if they’ll change name to teachable hotmart is a it’s a good brand but teachable is great. Yeah. I love it. And obviously, you know, I have I feel about that in a certain way, but we’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll see how it goes. So what was the merger acquisition? Yeah, good.
Andrew Warner 14:20
used to be called Fedora. What did you pay for to calm?
Ankur Nagpal 14:24
25 care. So it was in the mid 20s was not a bad deal, right?
Andrew Warner 14:27
No, that’s a great yeah. Yeah. And Dora wasn’t called like, get Fedora. Calm was use Fedora, calm use Fedora.
Ankur Nagpal 14:36
Yeah, he’s got
Andrew Warner 14:37
a good time. All right, I get what you’re saying. So you own equity in a business. Right. And so you own equity. They own equity. You’re leading your section. They’re leading their section. I could see it being called both of them merger or an acquisition. Yeah,
Ankur Nagpal 14:52
like the legal paperwork we handled was called a merger agreement. But again, m&a law is very different. Sometimes it makes sense to structure it as a merger or an acquisition. And I mean, it can be either way for press publicity and so forth. We’ve been calling it an acquisition. Why? Why does that help? I again, not that I don’t care. Either way, I have very little ego tied to this in any direction. And I think I think maybe because like our assets are wholly owned by that company. It’s an acquisition again, like this is all like technical stuff that I, I have, again, zero ego attached to this either way.
Andrew Warner 15:26
You know, my son finally understood what it meant to be an entrepreneur. And then, because he hears me say, I’m so proud of you at times the other day, he said, Is your dad so proud of you for being an entrepreneur? I’m gonna ask you. I remember you didn’t you grow up in Oman.
Ankur Nagpal 15:45
If your family’s still there,
Andrew Warner 15:47
they’re still there. So let me ask you, this. Is your dad. So is your mom are they so proud of you to quote my son for what you’ve done?
Ankur Nagpal 15:55
Yeah, there they are. I mean, they they tell me about this stuff. about this a lot. No, they’re there they’re very proud like about I think it was a good period of about two weeks where my mom says if I think about sort of what you’ve done like I can’t I can’t help but like cry and I’m like Thank you mom like now like that’s a conversation that no no they are they’re awesome I’ve been I am not embarrassed to say that I’ve been speaking to them for an average of 60 to 90 minutes every single day like now that like since we’ve been locked down so they’re locked down to its Oman so they take lockdown seriously they’re even though they’re you know things are things are a lot more current calm there, but yeah.
Andrew Warner 16:40
How much did you sell for?
Ankur Nagpal 16:43
Ah, I am not I’m not allowed to share that as part of the deal agreement but there there’s I was surprised we’re pretty happy with him. There’s, you know, estimates out there publicly.
Andrew Warner 16:53
I see so many and it’s hard to tell I did you take cash off the table?
Ankur Nagpal 16:58
Yes. Did they ask So I mean I’m yeah I’m happy to even like share the way I structured my deals and that’s information unique to me. But for me it was roughly half 50% cash 50% go forward value so so 50%
Andrew Warner 17:13
cash and then 50% equity in the new business that will go forward earnings so no
Ankur Nagpal 17:18
oh no are announced I get additional compensation tied to my employment which is the same as just being hired but not no, or an out in the traditional sense like I don’t need to stay there for X number of years for anything. Okay, at the same time, like I’m a member of the board and I got founder level equity in the company so it just makes it make sense to do feel like you
Andrew Warner 17:38
sold you sold too soon. Like if you would have waited a few more months
Ankur Nagpal 17:41
Ah, doesn’t matter at the end of the day like I think like this again, this is a case of like finding the right business like they’re growing also incredibly fast, right and like all so there’s so much the collective business is growing really fast. Same kind of growth you’re seeing, they’re seeing like similar trends again, I don’t have Full detailed access the way I do and our numbers and we haven’t had a board meeting since but everyone I’ve invested in other companies in the same space as well like at a company I invested in that had about four x monthly growth in sort of create earnings
Andrew Warner 18:15
without the companies that I can you say what it who they are I can
Ankur Nagpal 18:17
I can’t say who they are except we need to check with them but creator they’re in the creator economy they help people make money online. So
Andrew Warner 18:23
let me see I’m on your angel list page. Let me see if I could understand man. I don’t know yeah, you didn’t update it. By me You’re an investment buy me a coffee. Yeah, buy me coffee is where I could buy I just did this for one of my favorite YouTubers. I went I bought the guy coffee and just like like, it was really cool. Yeah, I didn’t even mean to do it. Here’s the thing. What’s the benefit for me for buying a guy coffee? I just want to see how does buy me coffee work I hit the link. And it was so freakin simple that I was looking at it was like well I’m using Apple Pay.
Ankur Nagpal 18:54
Probably I again like Apple Pay makes it so easy to spend money so it’s Yeah,
Andrew Warner 18:58
yeah. was just staring me in the face something like five bucks all I have to do is double click this on my phone Oh who cares I’m thinking
Ankur Nagpal 19:05
about it and are you gonna think about this $5 again it probably made a big difference than youtuber the creator
Andrew Warner 19:10
yes and it makes me feel a little bit more connected to him when we’re engaging on Twitter or something or feel like he’s my it’s such a weird thing because I would totally have just missed the whole idea what’s 12 gigs in crowd mob? The other those are
Ankur Nagpal 19:25
all those are all known so I’ve invested in 15 companies most five of them right in the creator economy.
Andrew Warner 19:31
Okay, none of them are on here. None of them are on here. So I think we talked you got you got money to invest right? It wasn’t it’s not do you invest your money to or is it’s
Ankur Nagpal 19:39
not it’s not my money yet. What that means is important in your head, which is an angel investing program. One of our our venture capital firm accomplice and Angeles has provided me but in a couple of weeks, I mean, now that this deal is done after I’m done with spearhead I will also start investing my own money because I’ve it’s been a lot of fun frankly, like I did not I did not expect investing to be fun, but It’s been like surprisingly rewarding in a way that like, it shouldn’t be because I’m doing no work like building companies really hard investing the company is really easy. Yet you still feel kind of good when a company have invested in does well and you’ve done such little work. It’s crazy.
Andrew Warner 20:16
To feel like there’s a lot of up and down with like, without any stability in investing, you know, at least when you’re you’re running a company that was largely yours. You didn’t raise that much money at teachable, yep. Right? At least you could take a little bit off the table or see something and feel like alright, I’m unstable here. It’s an all or nothing deal,
Ankur Nagpal 20:33
right? Absolutely, absolutely. But I think there’s so much less pressure for not being a professional like I’m not going to be professional investor, someone answerable to anyone. So worst case, I lose my own money, which is totally fine. Like I’m not betting the house on this, like this is you know, this would be like some part of the money I have. And in my mind again, with investing, I always tell people if angel investing, like be okay with losing all of it. So if you’re mentally okay with that part of it, I think it’s pure upside. If you’re doing it professionally, where you have fun with your fund managers. That sounds like a pain in the ass and I would not want to do that.
Andrew Warner 21:03
Alright, I want to hear a little bit about your investments. I’m also curious about a couple of things. Number one, I feel like the teachable product is so frickin good at understanding the Creator. I guess I’m not as sensitized to it as, as the end customer, the student or the Creator, you thought of all the frickin little things and I want to know what you did to talk to customers and get in their heads, and then acquiesce and say, Yes, I’ll give you this thing that you’re looking for. Yes. Here’s the other thing. And then I also want to know a little bit about how you got into angel investing what you’re seeing in it. I think they may have a conversation one time in person where you said I I’ve got an opportunity to be an angel investor. I mean, like, Austin, I think
Ankur Nagpal 21:38
yeah, it was some it was some conference. Oh, yeah. San Diego. I remember this any time we
Andrew Warner 21:43
tell you about my first sponsor, it is a company called delighted you do NPS score where you check in with people see how likely they are to share teachable you do how do you do it be open even if it’s competitive to have delighted?
Ankur Nagpal 21:53
Yeah, we don’t kind of think I think we use we might be using panda we’ve toggled provider a few times, but I don’t think we didn’t Dedicated provider anymore. I think we it’s just part of our it’s part of our in app messaging strategy.
Andrew Warner 22:05
But I know you created it, you created it yourself.
Ankur Nagpal 22:09
Correct. But I’m not going to embarrass him. I would not even definitively know which tool we use. That’s I guess, I’m embarrassed. Like, I guess that’s the type of company we are where I’ve no idea. So I think as if something you remember learning by asking by serving your audience and getting, we’ve looked at our NPS every like, every week, we have our leadership meeting, and we look at what our NPS for the week is it was 45 last week, but I don’t recall sort of what you tell
Andrew Warner 22:31
what’s increasing and decreasing it.
Ankur Nagpal 22:33
We’re guessing and like, like, again, we try and be scientific about it. But like, it’s like, we have data. But right now we’re like, oh, well, we had our summit and NPS went up therefore, we think our summit had to go up. So again, we’re not great at parsing it into short term insights. Long term. I think it’s a very useful trend on how things are going. It’s a good gut check. And we can certainly see it drop when we have like major issues like application stability, or like our customer care team is super bad. All that kind of stuff we see right away.
Andrew Warner 23:01
So NPS Of course, for people who don’t know, its net promoter score, it’s a it’s a rating by each of your users of how likely they are to share your product with their friends. So I asked when I when delighted wanted to sponsor I said, Well, can somebody just create it themselves? They said, Yeah, you could, in fact, we will make it easy. If you want, you can go create it yourself. I said, the more people signing up for delighted. And they said, well, and you do ever do this stuff. And I said, Yeah, I said, What do you do with it? I said, I don’t know. I just look at the feedback. And I messaged people privately in response. They said, yeah, that’s the challenge. We’re all asking these questions, even if it’s just Thumbs up, thumbs down, or what’s your rating or whatever. They said, Look, we’ll make it easy for you to do that with the light and you can pop it up in different ways. You can send it out by email, you can use the thumbs up, thumbs down, or the NPS score, whatever you want. Everyone could do that. The problem is you get all this data and you don’t know what to do with it. And sometimes it’s not just the feedback that people are giving you. That tells you what’s going on. Sometimes it’s something really random that you wouldn’t have anticipated. I said like, what is it? Well, what we do is we pull in people’s Net Promoter Score, but we can also tie it into the other data that’s coming in, in your business that you can make sense of, like, for example, what time of day they’re logging in, like, for example, which, which service was sending out your package to them, right. So if using FedEx and UPS, this is just a random example. But if you’re using FedEx and UPS, it’s possible that people just hate FedEx, because the FedEx guy will always put their box in front of their houses. And that’s why they’re upset that they didn’t get it or was delayed or whatever, it had nothing to do with you, and you’re trying to figure out what you did to get the low rating from them. It’s sometimes something like that. They said, that’s what we do. Our goal isn’t just to create these beautiful forms. And yes, we create beautiful forms. Our goal is to help you make sense of it so that you could do something with the data. I said, Okay, great. Who’s gonna believe that? They said we thought you’re gonna do that? I said, Look, we’re trying you out. Andrew, we’re investing a lot of money in the ad. So what’s a few more dollars for us to invest in letting your users try it for not try it have it for free? So really said yeah, We’re gonna do, we’re gonna let you have, we can create a level so that your people can go and have it for free. They don’t have to pay for anything, they just can go use it, get going with it. And our goal is through mixergy to get into the startup community and then be able to say, look, we are built for startups. I said, Okay, I can absolutely work with you on that. So here it is. If you’re listening to me, and you want to try this out, yes, it’s an easy way to get a form on your site, but look at the data that they give you back and see how useful it is. If you use this URL, you’ll be able to do it. It’s delighted comm slash mixergy full disclosure from what I saw, they did ask for a credit card they will not charge you if you get the free service, they will not charge you I asked them why I think they weren’t prepared to do a free thing because they’re not built for that number one, number two, they said if they let people use this because their email involved in this there spammers who start to take over they will not charge you not only will they not charge you My name is Andrew at mixergy calm is my email address right andrew@mixergy.com I will not let anyone fuck with my talk with my audience right? delighted calm slash mixergy. Go check them out and tell me what you think of them. All right.
Unknown Speaker 26:02
Let’s uh
Andrew Warner 26:04
why are you Why are you still in New York? I’m still in San Francisco. I asked myself that a lot.
Ankur Nagpal 26:09
Like why do I live in New York during a virus? or Why do I choose any or total doing Queen virus? I mean one remember I’m not from America right? So like, I don’t have family nearby is number one smell cheese. I go when I go show with friends nearby. A lot about one of my closest friends in the world is in New Hampshire right now in the woods. And at the time, I was already relatively late and would have to go there and self isolate for two weeks. And I was like, I want to be at home. You know, like, there’s merit to like being at home and stuff. Like I have all my books here. Like I’m, this is my like waiting time. That’s great.
Andrew Warner 26:39
So I’ve got friends who, who are definitely who left? They’re out of here, largely because a lot of my friends don’t have backyards in San Francisco. You know how unusual that is? I could totally get it if we didn’t have it. We’d go bonkers. Yeah, parties. They got a place they got a house. They’re going over to Utah. They’re going into Tahoe what’s the Like for you now in Brooklyn, you you guys are now we’re recording on April 8, you’re going through one of the toughest weeks for New York. What’s it like for you? How are you doing day to day?
Ankur Nagpal 27:09
Yeah, I mean, realistically, All my friends are like, What’s New York like all my information on what’s really happening in New York from a virus perspective is coming from the same place you like Twitter, like, that’s how I read about it, I go, going out day to day doesn’t look any different. I again, like a my I’m, I don’t know if it’s because like, I’m relatively happy. I always thought I was extroverted. But I’m finding myself to be surprisingly comfortable. Like in these periods of time, like, I’m going for long, socially isolated, walks every morning, which is a very, very important part of my sanity. But otherwise, this has been a very good time for me to like, you know, read a bunch, like, like, like, cook, be healthy. All these things that otherwise are hard to do while being and while being Well, probably working an unhealthy amount. But again, it’s just our platform has seen this sort of increased demand. And that’s one Very, very motivating until you can like see a real impact, like, so fast. You’re seeing all these people earn a living in this period of time. And it’s just like, I’ve never felt add. It’s funny, right? Like, typically people say after you sell a company or motivation, like changes, I’ve never been as intrinsically motivated about the business as I have the last few weeks and yeah, to be real. Yeah. Like, would not have like, even dreamt who would have seen this kind of growth, which is so motivating.
Andrew Warner 28:27
Why don’t you in like a quiz business before?
Ankur Nagpal 28:31
Yeah, personality quizzes. I was 10 years ago, and how long a long time was just
Andrew Warner 28:35
like a hustle. You saw? That worked? And you said, Oh, I see how
Ankur Nagpal 28:39
out. I was. I was Yeah, I started that when I was 18 years old. Ran that for 21. And I think I was on mixergy when I was 23 or 2431. Now
Andrew Warner 28:46
so that was a while back. Did you do you feel a sense of more comfort teachable? Because you had that success before? Or do you still did you still have the late night
Ankur Nagpal 28:56
I asked myself that a lot, right. Like I think for instance, now like
A lot of founders sort of when they sell their company would feel Oh man, this is a financial windfall, this is going to be really significant. I think the fact that I got some of that out of my system at the age of 20 has sort of made this deal feel like you know, business as usual, like not a substantial life event, like, frankly, like, which I think is good and healthy. So I definitely think from a psychology perspective, I got a lot of that out of my system pretty early on, which is
Andrew Warner 29:27
hell, like, what what is it because you just don’t feel the burning need to make it improve yourself. And so you’re at ease with yourself?
Ankur Nagpal 29:36
I think it’s more, I think it’s look, I think, like, for instance, every single person eventually realizes that money does not buy happiness, right. Like that’s a very classic. So
Andrew Warner 29:46
I do believe it does.
Ankur Nagpal 29:48
Yeah, what does a certain degree does, to a certain degree does but like, I made a million dollars before I was 21 years old. And since then, like money has just not been a very important driver in my life, but kind of not that it happens. would have been Right.
Andrew Warner 30:01
Right. If you if you don’t have any You’re right. And it is and it does. You’re right. And then at some point, I get it, then you just don’t. You just don’t touch it. It doesn’t impact your life, right? Yep. Yep. Yeah. So,
Ankur Nagpal 30:12
so from some kind of and as well as the other thing that I think it built was emotional resilience. Like, there’s nothing like we had Facebook apps that grew really, really big and got deleted by Facebook, the ups and downs and the emotional swings.
Andrew Warner 30:26
You get better at handling emotional swings. But having those experiences early on, I think have again, I’m not by no means excellent at it. But that better at it because of having been through that experience. So I think it definitely helps to that was the one that you think about. I know for me, I think about that time when I was down $5 million in debt, and I was in my early 20s. And I said I don’t know how I can get out of this and I’m so tired that I can’t even take a break. To think that comes back to me. I’m not that bad. And I feel I feel encouraged by the worst situations because I’m not that bad. What’s your example?
Ankur Nagpal 30:58
All my emotional baggage And they’ve been,
I would say anywhere between, I would say five to six, every single one of them have involved people in relationships. It’s always been like, again, I something I struggle with is I’ve realized my personality type or whatever, like kind of needs to see people around me be happy and if not, it causes me immense stress. And there have been numerous occasions where what’s right for the business is not right for the individual. And that sort of conflict is also why I wouldn’t like to be a CEO for the rest of my life because those are conflicts I hated dealing with I just like I’m not good at like, you know, like, I’m not good at acting for what is best for the business, which I think is an essential need for a CEO what’s best for the person?
I mean, no, eventually do what’s best for the business, but it’s like causing me so much personal turmoil that every time I’m like, Man, this is like, I don’t know, I don’t know if I’m cut out for this. But like That’s probably what a CEO requires. Right? Especially,
Andrew Warner 32:01
I remember yelling I think when you were 23 years old you said I was an asshole have a boss. Yeah, no, it made me feel like you are somebody who could just direct yourself towards your goal and not care about feelings here. You’re telling me that the feelings that other people have matters so much that causes inner turmoil? How’d you get to that point?
Ankur Nagpal 32:22
I don’t know. Like, I don’t know if it’s I like again, like a lot of times I think in a lot of ways teachable was the first time building an organization from ground up and like, I think I’d never done like in the past I was a boss to contractors that were like far away and stuff, right? It was different from like, people you work with every single day. Like at the end of the day, I’ve again, it sounds cliched, but like what I’m going to remember from all of these years is just going to be the all the people stuff like that. So that’s gonna that’s what’s going to stick with me both a lot with the team members when even like some of the calls summers we’ve worked with and stuff, a lot of them are basically going to be relationships for life like, and I think that’s, that’s what’s going to stick with you. But yeah, I like that stuff stresses me out like way, way too much like it’s just not it’s not healthy. But hopefully it gets better every year.
Andrew Warner 33:17
What do you guys do to understand what your course creators need? Like, I feel like you’re you’re really in touch with the needs that they have.
Ankur Nagpal 33:26
So I mean, one, we’ve made a very explicit decision to build a platform for creators, like students are not our customer. You talked about the end customer, we don’t even call it as soon as the end customer, the students or the customers customers. So one release are focused on the Creator, which means we’re only interviewing creators, we’re only talking to them. Secondly, I think some of it is is in the DNA like the first like the first course in the platform was created by Conrad and I like we were the Creator. So that was a big part of it. And then just very close relationships with A lot of creators I guess love a bunch of creators that text me i mean you know, Pat Flynn has been an advisor to the business and like still like, you know, I’m working with people like that on a like yeah like like we text each other all day. So like just getting very very close to our Creator
Andrew Warner 34:16
pad is really good that way
Ankur Nagpal 34:18
as soon as a person is such a giving person
Andrew Warner 34:22
I remember I think he moved all of his courses teachable but then he also started charging for his live events on teachable and why maybe it’s because he’s got a relationship with encore maybe because he’s like he’s got a vested interest in teachable doing well, but no it kind of maybe all those things are true but the reasoning behind it made sense. people enter their credit cards when they buy a course they already have it in teachable. Why ask for it again make it easy for them to buy right. Vice versa. That’s a thing that I wouldn’t have thought that you would have built in a lot of programs. Don’t think to put that in there. I’m guessing that comes from people like Pat saying, here’s what I need.
Ankur Nagpal 34:58
Yeah, absolutely. I also think when I think about our company, what are we good at? Right? Like the one I think we’re, as a business, this is not as a product as a business, I think we’re pretty good at growth, right? Like, that’s our that’s been our business DNA. Like, even if you look at the Facebook, as my dad has always been like, if you take a business, how can you grow it? So I think we’ve been, we’ve been pretty like, focused on both what we can do to grow as a business, and in turn what we can do to grow our creators, businesses, but that’s just such a, because like, a lot of companies have different things in their DNA. A lot of Silicon Valley companies have engineering their DNA like and again, we have really good engineering, but that’s not our like, core attribute growth.
Andrew Warner 35:38
I love specifics. What’s the specific example of something that you built up for your creators that’s marketing related?
Ankur Nagpal 35:45
So affiliates, right, like we were, we built an affiliate with one of the first people to build an affiliate program because we realized people in turn use affiliates to sell but then not only that, we also pay out affiliates for you. So to fully manage affiliate program, you can sell a ticket or you can sell anything online, higher affiliates will handle tax forms, we’ll handle compliance. We’ll do all of that because we realize it’s a big, big part of it. Right? We’re most software companies seem to not understand affiliate programs, let alone want to be bothered with all those payments and the 1099. And everything else that goes along correct and and a lot of times, what we did is we sell our product very similarly to how our customers sell their so in turn, like you’ve been a part of our summit, right? Our summit is a very, very sophisticated marketing funnel that we sort of learned by looking at how other creators use webinars. And like, so by virtue of us both selling in the exact same way, there’s a lot of things that makes sense for us. It also makes sense for creators and eventually do that. Another example is, you know, we have one click upsells where people can, if you buy a ticket to Pat’s conference in one click, you can also buy his course and it’s half off or something. So that kind of stuff. And I mean, again, you know, Click Funnels and so forth, also do that. We’re not the only person that does that, but it’s very, it’s very, very focused on that. We’ll make the creator of the most amount of money because my long term thesis is creators will go to the platform that makes them the most money. Yes, like, winning feature comparisons is cool. But if a certain platform will help someone make 20% more money,
Andrew Warner 37:12
they’ll go there. That’s important. And so just help them make more money and then the rest will will follow. Yep. All right, you mentioned clickfunnels I’m gonna use it as an opportunity to talk about my second sponsor, it is Click Funnels. Look at that. What do you know about Click Funnels? You know anything? Do you watch a product?
Ankur Nagpal 37:27
From afar? I know Russell Brunson is a he’s a marketing beast. Anyway, yeah.
Andrew Warner 37:32
Yeah. You know what, here’s the thing that I that I take away from both of you. I feel like there’s a lot of cynicism in this space. People get into it. Then they see maybe an info marketer or maybe like you see somebody who’s just creating a crappy course and making money and it’s easy to weigh people down, easy to weigh the software creator down. Russell doesn’t feel weighed down by it. You don’t feel weighed down by you don’t feel embarrassed by it.
Ankur Nagpal 37:55
By the software creator,
Andrew Warner 37:56
online education people because they’re a bunch of really Disgusting people in this space you just
Ankur Nagpal 38:02
yeah you know like I it’s it’s not it’s also not true right like we look at our like top hundred creators or whatever and it’s not it’s not the like start an online business pyramid schemes it’s people teaching all kinds of things so absolutely not like on the contrary like we see so many like insanely cool topics like we had like we have a course on copper deficiency and goats that does really well. We have one we had one of the women that are starting online business chat challenge teaches a course on hypno birthing how to have a natural water birth we had someone make close to a million dollars teaching how to play the hand pan which is a musical instrument like it’s it’s amazing so so
Andrew Warner 38:42
hypno birth we did that. Yeah, the whole thing went out the window once a bird Did you did you did you take an online course to learn how to we did it in person. It was wasn’t super necessary. We also had a midwife. We had that big tub in our veins. bedroom for weeks and weeks in preparation for the day. The truth is, is a lot of preparation for the day of the birth and then no one else do any preparation for after I wish they would say, all right, man, the wives and secret stuff. Go out there learn how to swaddle to say, oh, here’s how you can help a baby go to sleep. Give me like 20 minutes of what happens after? Yeah, that could be a good course. Right?
Ankur Nagpal 39:22
There’s probably a really good dad. Yeah, absolutely. I’ll be a really good one. unintentionally. That’s the other thing we discovered is a lot of times like people wanted to learn not from experts, which is very different from how we like initially raise money. People wanted to learn from people that like, reminded them of themselves. So which was fascinating because I love the idea of million dollar teachers and I still do but a lot of cases you don’t need the million dollar teacher. You need the teacher that like reminds you of you.
Andrew Warner 39:50
Yeah, I get that. I don’t want somebody who’s an expert gardener to tell me how to garden or the person who’s really good at cooking to tell me how to cook You’re too far ahead of me just to tell me when I don’t want Do you know how we can grow potatoes in my backyard just in case the whole world goes to pi
Ankur Nagpal 40:04
and I by the example, I use this I’m like, dude, like, I’m not gonna. I’m not gonna relate to Steph Curry teaching me how to play basketball. Right there. Right, like, let’s start. Let’s start with the other Indian kid. That’s like,
Andrew Warner 40:15
like, let’s start there. Yeah, you Indian.
Unknown Speaker 40:17
Yeah, I’m Indian. I didn’t know that. Yeah,
Andrew Warner 40:19
I don’t have been in. Well, you know, mine. Yeah, if you’re Indian.
Ankur Nagpal 40:23
So in the early 80s, there was a big immigration boom, just because the country had a ton of oil and like a ton of South Asians and moved there, including my parents. I mean, you just have better job opportunities. So they’ve been there 30 years and I might in Indians only school. Like there’s such a huge Indian community there. So I had no idea.
Andrew Warner 40:40
All right back to Click Funnels. Here’s the thing about Click Funnels, they see all these methods that do work for increasing your sales, and they just build it into their software. So we talked about one click upsell, boom, they built it into their into their software order, boom, boom, they click they put it in the idea that if you’re collecting an email address with a landing page, you shouldn’t just stop there and say, Okay, great. Go check your email account. We sent you a confirmation message, but instead say, all right, you just give us your email address, you know, we also have this $1 product, this is $5 product, try that. And then if they buy that $5 product you could do then an upsell, because you’ve got their credit card information, all that stuff, everything that goes into taking a stranger and turning them into a customer. It’s a tool that you have to mess around with and figure out do I want it? Do I not to feel good about it? Do I not? Can I put it can I not? The thing about clickfunnels is you don’t have to think drag it in there. Do for a day and then see what happens. I remember the one of the first times that I did with clickfunnels they had an order bump. I don’t know Do I have something that I could sell? And Rebecca was working with me said Andrew, you wrote this whole guide you’re sitting in Napa? You’re so freakin proud of it. How about I make that look good. And we sell that? I think that’s what you did. So maybe was the beads I had all these beads. You see the beads on my on my mic. That’s what it was. We were giving away the guy to get email addresses as a way of getting people to follow my journey to run a marathon on every continent. Right? And I said, if I have a big following for that the people who can get me to the end are the people who I’m somebody One out there is going to help me get to Antarctica because the people can get me to Antarctica refuse to let me get on the continent because there’s a big waiting list and then all these international laws no as I said, How do I get people on I created this landing page great Rebecca said Andrew we got to try this tool sell beads, sell beads, what do you mean? Let’s just sell it I got not I said fine. We sold beads for like five bucks people gave us $5 for beads. And then we had this like course she said, Andrew just do an upsell sell the course you have it is recorded tell people was selling for this much you’re gonna sell for that. Just try. Suddenly, there’s revenue coming in from this thing that all I was trying to do is collect email addresses. So somebody can help me get Antarctica. By the way, someone did a guy named Eric who created what he created a beer. He’s a nurse who’s helped people who’s helped runners and endurance athletes all over the world. He joined my email list. He said, Andrew, I think I know how to get in, get through to Antarctica send me a bunch of different ways. One of them hit. I got to Antarctica. We stayed friends. He created a beer. I said I want to be the first customer of the beer. And here it is. It’s called the ski patrol Colorado. So this is the thing that’s good beer. Anyway,
Ankur Nagpal 43:04
back to the thing that won the free endorsement rights k patrol Colorado, right? Yeah,
Andrew Warner 43:09
it’s a good t shirt too right there on the T shirt. You mean I bought beer you sent me a T shirt In addition, so here’s the deal. All that happened because I created a Click Funnels page didn’t even mean to sell but I ended up finding revenue coming in. I know that this seems over the top I know that you’re not going to believe it until you try it so I’m gonna let you try it for free. If you go to Click Funnels comm slash mixergy they will let you try it for free for two weeks. See how much revenue you could bring in play with the software. If you don’t like it cancel walk away if you do, this could be the beginning of something dramatic for your business. really dramatic for your business. I’m not over to sound like I’m overselling it dude, guys go out there clickfunnels comm slash mixergy you won’t know it until you see it and try it. Alright, speaking of selling, you did a summit. I came to do your summit. I wanted Can you talk about that? I feel like most software vendors feel like summits are not for them. But you do If you weren’t,
Ankur Nagpal 44:01
yeah, we do it twice a year now it’s one of our biggest acquisition channels we now have anywhere between 50 to 70,000. people sign up every time we do a live summit, have anywhere between 20 to 50 speakers. And at the end of it, we sell our software. And if we execute Well, we’ll probably get 2000 new customers every time we do it. And you can do the math, we make about 15 to $16 per customer and the 2000. That’s per month. These are correct. So when so yeah, so these are very, very large. These
Andrew Warner 44:29
are the summit.
Ankur Nagpal 44:30
It’s a free event 30 days with lots of great content. So it’s one it’s a good pitch, but we have three primary channels. One is our own audiences. We have like, you know, close to a million people in our own email, list our own properties, that’s about a third, then about a third from affiliates and partners. So every single speaker is also a affiliate and a partner. We have others
Andrew Warner 44:52
say I’m going to be speaking at this event. They come to thee they invite people to come to hear them speak every one of them is a potential customer. And this is what One of the things that most software makers look down on right? Yep. Yep, info marketing. They do it all the time.
Ankur Nagpal 45:06
Yep. And I think we’re in a unique place where a lot of art customers audiences are also ideal teachable customers. Pat is a great example, when people listen to Pat’s podcasts are also potential teachable customers. So it’s very congruent from to be like, Hey, I’m speaking of this summit, it’s completely free fully value pack, Pat, someone like Pat can drive 1000 plus people to the summit, multiply that by other people like Pat, all of a sudden you create this really great event that has great free content. On top of that, it’s always a really good offer to buy teachable, like we have premium courses from other people that that contribute to this. So now instead of buying the software and getting just the software, you get the software and the training. And yeah, like it just converts better than anything we’ve ever done before. And we now do, like two a year, any more than
30%. commission for lifetime for lifetime. Correct. So people like people can establish a really good passive revenue stream as well.
Andrew Warner 45:58
Oh, that That’s fantastic, man. So I could have in this interview, pitch teachable, correct and then leave 30% of off of everyone who signed up to teachable correct for life. But then it means that I have to be nice to my guests and then again, demand a lot from me. Yeah, I intentionally don’t take any money from my guests for those reasons. Let’s talk about your angel investing. How do you how do you find these companies?
Ankur Nagpal 46:23
This is Yeah, that like, this is gonna be funny, but like lately, I’ve found most of them through Twitter. But I think that’s a sign of me spending way too much time on Twitter, but both inbound and outbound just like looking. I look at a lot of companies doing cool things. So you put out sort of that energy into the world like buy me a coffee is a good example. Joe, the founder like cold pitch me in a Twitter dm and initially your reaction is always no because they’re like, like, seriously like is that the best way but look at what they were doing. And it was really, really cool. So spend a lot of time on Twitter. At this point. A lot of deals come from people in this space have a natural affinity to anything in the creator economy like As I said, I’ve invested in five companies in this space. Someone I saw this tweet actually about someone like, do you believe in your space enough to invest in your competitors? I’m not quite there but close, right? Like I believe in like this entire space being so massive and the amount of value being created in this space to be far greater than what teachable can capture, like, we’re gonna do really well and capture a large part of it. There’s going to be so many amazing businesses built and empowering people to be entrepreneurs online.
Andrew Warner 47:28
And so what would you say the creator space you mean? Well, you mean like,
Ankur Nagpal 47:33
I mean, I mean, people making people earning a living online from their passions, their knowledge, their skills, their experience. So
Andrew Warner 47:43
the kind of person you’re thinking about, you’re not thinking about, gee, Joe, Sunny, the creator, buy me a coffee, right? He is not an equator economy. He’s more like in the tech startup economy. Wouldn’t you say his customers are
Ankur Nagpal 47:53
he’s cutting? Correct. So it
Andrew Warner 47:56
seems like it’s the people who are in the content space who have a niche that they’re into and a following that’s willing to buy weather buy them a coffee where they get no response nothing in return, buy their course or buy their pillow if they happen to be on
Ankur Nagpal 48:13
or like everything from like a head pot paid podcasting paid journalism, like just selling information digital content to audiences directly. I think it sounds like the influencer world but it’s it’s not it The difference is that they’re making little things that they’re selling. Right? Correct. Correct. And again, I have this longer term belief that like right now it’s like influencer versus non influencer. But I believe everyone is some level of an influencer, your circle of influence might be small. So the gap between who is an influencer and who is not will keep shrinking until most people are sort of influencers in some way. And that sort of growth is going to be so massive and so interesting and so fascinating, that there’s going to be so many millions of like little individual, one person businesses being created. And that’s it. Again, we stumbled upon a teachable realize how big it is. And now I realize like, no matter how good we are at capturing the value of teachable, there’ll be many, many such companies capturing this value. It’s fascinating,
Andrew Warner 49:10
like, so then since you’re talking about buying me a coffee, what is the model there, I don’t understand. I get that I get a benefit and a satisfaction from buying somebody a coffee for five bucks, great. I’m not going to go back and do it every day. I’m not going to sign up for a subscription. I feel like unless they move on to buy me a coffee and you’ll get access to my secret videos or buy me a coffee and you get this other like they have to move to the Patreon model, Patreon started as us being a patron. Eventually it became more of a subscription to my best stuff.
Ankur Nagpal 49:39
Like Yeah, I mean, I would imagine again, I don’t like prescribing what path early stage companies would go on like you invest money, let them do their thing, but if I were to guess, like they would eventually end up more and more closer in that direction. I also think for a lot of creators, patronage is a lazy business model like you can do better. patronage is like oh, pay me $5 I’m like, you know, whatever happens, selling directly to people They want is infinitely a better business. And again, as you said, Patreon is sort of getting there where it’s less about patronage of getting stuff. Right.
Unknown Speaker 50:08
So So yeah, well, that’s interesting.
Ankur Nagpal 50:11
So shadow companies have invested in that I can speak of, I’ve invested in a company called member stack, which is really cool. It makes it possible to create a membership site members membership site without using any code, so you can run I don’t know how you set up your membership on mixergy. But theoretically,
Andrew Warner 50:27
it was a mistake correct? So many 10s at the time, but it’s like,
Ankur Nagpal 50:30
exactly you bought at a different time, but someone could build a make mixergy with member stack. That’s one of them. They’re super, they’re super, super cast, which is a paid for podcasting tool. That’s really cool. Again, if you look at sort of entrepreneurs in China, like a lot of like paid podcasts are a much much much bigger deal. They’re here they quite haven’t worked, I think, super cast exploring that love that space, and they’re super pure, which is peer to peer like one on one video calling. It’s kind of like clarity.fm if you remember that, like huh, there we go. They’re reimagining it in 2020. So love that face scare, there’s a lot of again, I’m like, excited by this space in general, like there’s a lot of great companies that are going to be built,
Andrew Warner 51:13
built over here. Are you looking and saying what are people trying to do already? And then maybe there’s an easier way to do it kind of like you did with teachable, you said people are selling courses online, it’s too tough. I’m gonna make it easier. Or you saying, here’s another thing that creators might want to sell their audiences and then the software that I invest in can take a percentage of that.
Ankur Nagpal 51:32
So again, I like at this point, I will go far enough thing to say that I think I have a pretty good idea of what creators want. Like we’ve worked a lot with creators for six years like they’ve been my people and I can quickly look at something. And at least in my I’ll give these judgments wrong, but in my judgment, decide are people going to pay for this or not another example a company invested in it’s called circle.so. It’s a creator community tool. So you can create a like, somewhere between a hybrid of Facebook group and slack but neither of us platforms like just an actual really good community, started by two x teachable people, but immediately I’m like, okay, I can totally see a world where creators, you know, like, the course is helpful. They all are stuck using their Facebook groups and slack or slack. And they hate both for different reasons. Whether their circle solves their problem, the jury is out, right? They’re building a product, hopefully it does. But the problem is Israel and someone will solve that problem. I feel the same way about a lot of like live video stuff like it’s a problem, someone will solve it, I have complete conviction, whether the companies I picked will solve it, I don’t know. Right. That’s where that’s where we’ll see how it goes. But these are real problems that I have lots and lots of conviction someone will solve. So that’s why angel investing is good, because you can have these theories about the world and kind of test them out.
Andrew Warner 52:42
The other upside is, especially if you’re in the space, I imagine you’re hearing from member stack, what’s working for them and then I’m right, I’m so sensitive. You had a friend, you wouldn’t necessarily share this much with each other but you’ve got a vested interest in this. Yeah, the other
Ankur Nagpal 52:56
the other thing you find is when you get to a certain stage of company things Like you kind of like become, I don’t know, like the uncool parent, like you don’t know what the young companies are doing anymore. So kind of keeps you young in some way. Like I almost live vicariously by hearing about these, like three and four person companies that like, have built a feature in like, four days that I know our internal processes that would take like six months and it should because that’s the right way of doing things. But it’s just fun to like, like, you know, like, it’s almost like yeah, like living vicariously through other people longing for the days of youth or whatever.
Unknown Speaker 53:29
Yeah, it’s fine. Well, you know,
Ankur Nagpal 53:31
there’s 31 man, I’m an old 31
Andrew Warner 53:35
All right, um, congratulations on the merger sale, whatever it is. I’m building it up on understanding this market way, way before it was obvious. I mean, I remember when you first told me about Fedora I thought, so easy. Anyone can just go and set up WishList Member and put it on a WordPress site and I didn’t realize that even I started with it. I hire someone. I kept thinking I made a couple of mistakes. It’s my mistake. Everyone else gets it right. No, it was a problem directly. knows that you’ve built up software for it, and it’s beautiful. Alright, I get no commission off of this. But I will tell you guys it is absolutely a stunning piece of software. If you’re looking to teach online and you can’t go wrong with teachable, you’ll, you’ll really appreciate the thoughtfulness they put into it. And now I understand why it makes so much sense. It is built for people to sell. And they do think about those little things that you only think of if you get to Pat Flynn level if you’ve actually built it and tried it and say I need it. And most of the companies, they don’t have it. What they have is they have like you guys don’t have community software. Right? You have we have we have comments built in but it’s not a full fledged community, right? Like I feel like a lot of your competitors they say what’s the all in one solution that we need to give course creators but in reality questionnaires don’t need all that stuff you need
Ankur Nagpal 54:46
Yeah, I’m not gonna I’m not gonna name names, but like, our conclusion is it’s basically impossible to do all in one. Well, we’d like love to, but there’s no way we’re going to be that good at email marketing.
Andrew Warner 54:57
I was going to but there’s one of your competitors who got into the email They’ve got a MailChimp competitor seriously no effing around here they created a clickfunnels style landing page no screwing around they created the whole I wanted to call the Infusionsoft like if then scenario it’s beautiful stuff but no one’s going to use it what they’re trying to do is keep things simple for their for their end customer alright it’s called teachable check them out at teachable calm and I want to thank my two sponsors who made this interview happen. Go check out this small limited time offer. I think they only ran an ad for them now I did one now and I’ve got one last one and then I think this whole offer is gone but they’re going to give you their software for free while this is going on. If you go to delighted comm slash mixergy just lock it in hold it up. I remember when I first got Zapier account, I got it for free. I now have like this lifetime forever account to Zapier. This is fantastic. The base camp people they said you know what? We’re gonna try giving out what is it Hi, where it’s gonna come. High Rise, high rise, their CRM, they said we’re starting it off. They never give anything for free. They give it out for free because they were trying to build up This momentum trying to get users I still have it for free everyone else is paying for a monthly same thing here guys go check out the lighter they’re going after the startup space that’s why they came out to me it is available for free go lock that thing in I was gonna say go lock that shit and they probably don’t want me to say that. Go lock it in delighted calm slash mixergy Click Funnels is going to help you sell more if you go to Click Funnels comm slash mixergy they will let you try their software and see how much you can sell for you. And finally, if you’re done with this interview and you want a podcast that I would recommend that will give you more tactics. And I usually give you I never give tactics but if you want tactics, go check out Russell Brunson. His podcast is called Traffic Secrets, loves to use the word secrets and all of his titles, his book title, right?
Ankur Nagpal 56:42
I mean, he’s a marketing genius, you know, so
Andrew Warner 56:45
I asked him, How did I end up speaking here? They flew me out to interview him on stage at an event. I said, How did I end up here and I bring on his people on stage and they said, No, it all starts with Russell sending us a slack or whatever staff software they’re using saying, I have a secret. Do you want to talk to me about it? I got him on stage saying to people, I need to get them excited too. And if they’re not curious in the beginning, they’re not gonna get excited.
Ankur Nagpal 57:09
I mean, dude, there’s some people if you’re a marketer, you can’t turn it off like someone on our team, our old head of growth, he would write an email to everyone, like long form sales copy was hilarious. Like,
yeah,
Andrew Warner 57:23
I’ll do that with my wife. And then I got, like, 10 years in and I’m now expecting her to just go along with it, because Come on, go along with it. back into the marketing with her. Yeah, you should rate plan for you. Here’s
Unknown Speaker 57:34
your seven simple steps.
Andrew Warner 57:38
All right. Great. Thank you so much for being here, I think. Absolutely.
Ankur Nagpal 57:42
Thanks, Andrew.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
