The argument in one line.
A community platform wins by relentlessly removing choices and features to maximize engagement and growth — the two things members actually want but never ask for — and by being built to a world-class engineering standard from the first hire.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A founder building a marketplace or network who is stuck on the chicken-and-egg problem of getting the first users and the first supply at the same time.
- A bootstrapped course or software business owner deciding whether to add more features or strip the product down to what people actually use.
- An operator trying to hire a technical co-founder or first engineer good enough to set a standard the rest of the team follows.
- A creator in the info or community space who wants to understand how Skool's Discovery, ads, and pricing actually work under the hood.
- Anyone forming a sober, first-hand view of where AI genuinely helps a software team and where it quietly introduces errors.
SKIP IF…
- You want a step-by-step SaaS tactical checklist — this is a founder's mental models and story, not a playbook of screenshots.
- You're looking for hype about AI writing all your code; the guest argues the opposite.
- You need short, skimmable tips — this rewards listening to a long, meandering conversation for the pattern underneath it.
The full version, fast.
Sam Ovens built Skool by betting against the whole info-platform industry: instead of customization, white-labeling, and pretty URLs, he stripped the product down to maximize engagement and growth, then wrapped a network effect around it. He solved the cold-start problem by running his own business on a single group before letting anyone else in, spent a year and 500-plus interviews finding one engineer good enough to set the standard, and later cut the price 11x from $99 to $9 to go mainstream — funding the leap with a roughly $5M raise from his own mastermind. He runs the company in founder mode: a 30-day roadmap, no one-on-ones, decisions made on intuition and confirmed by data, and a refusal to let AI write the code because the goal was never to ship fast, only to ship things that work.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00hostCole Gordon
00:00guestSam Ovens
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 08:20
01 · Prioritizing engagement over customization
Sam's strategic bet: while Kajabi and Circle prioritized customization, white-labeling, and custom URLs, Skool prioritized engagement and a network effect. Less customization produced more of what people actually wanted.
08:20 – 10:02
02 · The cold start problem
Why a network is worthless until everyone is on it — the first-telephone problem — and why getting it started is the single hardest part of building Skool.
10:02 – 15:58
03 · Origin story: forums, race cars, first failures
From learning to build a race car on internet forums at 18, to a failed cafe loyalty app, to SnapInspect, to discovering Mixergy and Andrew Warner — the path into the online entrepreneur world.
15:58 – 21:25
04 · Lessons for entrepreneurs: ask the market
The lesson that changed everything — stop inventing ideas, cold-call the market, learn their problems, and build the solution they'll actually buy. 'Weird doers teach' is what makes the info industry work.
21:25 – 23:41
05 · Simplifying the fragmented info industry
The 20-tools problem: funnels, pixels, CRMs, checkouts, calls, accounting. Fragmentation forces everyone to spend all their time marketing, and rewards being famous over being good.
23:41 – 26:57
06 · Bringing Skool mainstream: passion over money
If the industry were efficient, talent and passion would be what pops. Examples of the new market: a GTA community that hit ~250 paying members in a week with no audience, and a $9 community that became a top seller.
26:57 – 36:23
07 · Discovery, ads, and programmatic growth
How Skool tests communities against the market automatically — packaging as thumbnail, programmatic ads through the API, and Discovery search feeding trending in a two-way loop.
36:23 – 46:19
08 · AI and engineering standards
Why Skool doesn't write code with AI, where it does help (SQL, code review, codebase as source of truth), and the North Korea CSV error that proves you still QC everything high-stakes.
46:19 – 51:02
09 · The Skool business model: $9 vs $99
The 11x price cut framed as 'unlimited expensive things for 90% off.' The leadership team was terrified; the move only became possible once there was capital padding.
51:02 – 56:44
10 · Raising capital and choosing investors
Whoever needs who the least. No deck, ever. Raising ~$5M from Quantum in a 20-minute pitch, and later choosing a VC on timing, likeability, and their strength (data) being Skool's weakness.
56:44 – 1:00:00
11 · Using product intuition
With infinite possible directions and infinite data, being purely data-driven leaves you paralyzed. Intuition is primary; the business gives you fast data to confirm whether it was right.
1:00:00 – 1:03:27
12 · The season of madness: School Games
700% growth hid a culture problem — pump-and-dumps, Cybertruck giveaways, churn, scam complaints. The $99 price itself was forcing people to teach 'make money on Skool.' The fix tied back to the $9 plan.
1:03:27 – 1:14:00
13 · Design, product taste, and good inputs
Living through the whole evolution of the internet — Google, forums, YouTube, Facebook groups, mobile — gave Sam a palette to pull from. You can't create good unless you've seen good; taste is having consumed enough great work.
1:14:00 – 1:22:06
14 · What Sam does all day
He owns the roadmap and design; Daniel owns the code standard. Work ahead of engineering, work with engineering live, then monitor and iterate after shipping — plus putting out fires like fraud and DDoS attacks.
1:22:06 – 1:30:35
15 · Company structure: founder mode
Validation for his flat, hands-on style. No one-on-ones for himself, Slack huddles instead of scheduled meetings, and a rule that product managers must be former engineers who still understand the code.
1:30:35 – 1:48:00
16 · First-party data and the science of intuition
Third-party data (books, advice) matters early; first-party data (doing it) matters most once you're building. Intuition as stored body-knowledge — plus the Global Consciousness Project, Soros's reflexivity, and Newtonian economics.
1:48:00 – 2:00:00
17 · Cross-pollinating ideas and learning from outliers
Jay Abraham's cross-industry combustion, learning from Rockefeller, Carnegie, Napoleon, and the Men Who Built America, and the Michael Jordan lesson — the most savage competitor's real secret was falling in love with the game.
2:00:00 – 2:08:57
18 · What's next: global financial rails for Skool
The next build isn't features — it's internationalization: payments, payouts, languages, and currencies so any landing page adapts to any user anywhere. Studying Bretton Woods for the subscription-FX problem, then the sign-off.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Skool bet against customization and white-labeling because less flexibility produced more engagement and growth — the two things members actually wanted but never asked for.
- People say they want features; what they actually want is growth, members, and money. Nobody wakes up wanting a feature.
- Skool's detailed roadmap only runs 30 days out, because shipping one thing changes what the most important next thing is.
- Sam did 500 to 600 engineering interviews over about a year to find one co-founder — talented engineers only follow talented engineers, so the first hire decides the ceiling.
- The right first engineer made more progress in a week than the prior team had in a year, and rebuilt the entire product in his first 30 days.
- Skool cut its price 11x, from $99 to $9, and pitched it internally as 'unlimited expensive things for 90 percent off.'
- Sam raised roughly $5M from his own mastermind in about a 20-minute pitch, using one committed investor as social proof to close the rest.
- He has never built a pitch deck; VCs cold-call good companies because capital is abundant and great companies are rare.
- Raising money is a game of whoever needs the other the least — 'like being a hot girl at a party.'
- Skool runs fully programmatic ads: it packages a community into an ad through its API and lets the market decide if it hits, the same way YouTube's algorithm tests a thumbnail.
- On Skool, packaging is everything — the cover image is the thumbnail, plus a title and short description, mapped almost one-to-one to YouTube.
- A creator with no audience and a $9 product became one of Skool's hottest sellers in about four months, purely through Discovery and programmatic ads.
- Sam won't write code with AI — they tried it and found it sloppy on the details that matter; the goal was never to ship fast, only to ship things that work.
- AI earns its place in narrow spots: SQL query optimization, early-and-often code review, and treating the codebase as the source of truth instead of documentation.
- AI quietly amasses errors: asked to diff two country CSVs, it returned North Korea, which appeared in neither file — so high-stakes work still gets done by hand.
- Intuition is the primary decision tool and data is the confirmation; when the two start to agree, you learn to trust the intuition more.
- The School Games' 'season of madness' — pump-and-dumps, Cybertruck giveaways, mass churn — proved a growth metric can hide a rotting culture.
- Good inputs equal good outputs: you can't create good work until you've consumed enough great work to know what good even looks like.
- Great companies are often run by people who don't want to be in business — the company is just the structure they need to build what they actually care about.
- The best time to solve a problem is when you're closest to it; strategizing a solution far in advance wastes effort because everything changes by the time it matters.
How a billion-dollar platform actually gets built.
WHAT TO LEARN
Strip the product to what drives engagement and growth, hire one person good enough to set the standard, price for the mainstream, and decide on intuition that data can quickly confirm.
01Prioritizing engagement over customization
- Bet on engagement and growth over customization — members say they want control and features, but what they actually reward is a product that makes them grow and keeps them engaged.
- Study why one tool replaces another — forums died to Facebook groups because a network gives users convenience (one login, one profile) and creators distribution.
02The cold start problem
- A network is worthless until it's populated, so solve the cold start by making one instance genuinely good and running your own real business on it before opening it to anyone else.
03Origin story: forums, race cars, first failures
- Don't invent ideas and hope; cold-call the market, learn their actual problems, mock up the solution, and sell it back to them — the lesson that turned Sam from clueless to successful.
- Learn from doers, not credentials — a single call with someone who has actually done it beats a PhD from someone who studied it but never built it.
05Simplifying the fragmented info industry
- Fragmentation is why an industry spends all its time marketing; consolidating scattered tools into one place lets talent and passion win instead of fame and proxies like a rented Lambo.
06Bringing Skool mainstream: passion over money
- Passion is becoming the actual growth driver — communities that pop now are fun, accessible ($9-$100/mo), and led by people who obviously aren't only in it for the money.
07Discovery, ads, and programmatic growth
- Package for the algorithm: on a discovery-driven marketplace your cover image, title, and description are your thumbnail, and they decide whether search, trending, and ads ever surface you.
- Let the market test itself — automated, programmatic distribution can validate an offer for a creator who could never afford or execute real market testing on their own.
08AI and engineering standards
- Use AI where it's genuinely good (SQL optimization, early code review, codebase as source of truth) and refuse it where details are load-bearing — shipping fast is worthless if it doesn't work.
- QC everything high-stakes by hand, because AI amasses invisible errors; a clean-looking answer that includes a country in neither source file is how bad assumptions compound.
09The Skool business model: $9 vs $99
- Price for the market you actually want — cutting $99 to $9 looked insane, but 11x cheaper unlocked the mainstream, and capital padding is what made the risk survivable.
10Raising capital and choosing investors
- Raise from strength: make something great and money chases you, so you never need a deck; the leverage always belongs to whoever needs the other the least.
- Choose investors on timing, whether you actually like them, and whether their strength covers your weakness — you'll disagree constantly, so you'd better like the person.
11Using product intuition
- Make most decisions on intuition because gathering perfect data every time paralyzes you, then let the business feed you fast data that confirms or corrects the instinct.
12The season of madness: School Games
- Watch culture, not just the growth chart — 700% growth masked pump-and-dumps and churn, and the metric looked great while the community rotted.
13Design, product taste, and good inputs
- Develop taste by consuming great work across eras and industries; you can't build good until you've seen enough good to recognize it, and genius clusters around good inputs.
14What Sam does all day
- Plan only about 30 days out and solve problems when you're closest to them — shipping changes what matters next, so a rigid long-range roadmap plans for a world that won't exist.
15Company structure: founder mode
- Match management style to the person and the standard — no one-on-ones worked for Sam, but only because managers under him do them, and PMs must be engineers who understand the code.
16First-party data and the science of intuition
- Weight first-party over third-party data once you're building; advice like 'delegate and get out of the way' can be exactly wrong for your style, and only your own experience tells you.
17Cross-pollinating ideas and learning from outliers
- Cross-pollinate from the absolute top of unrelated fields — Rockefeller's oil consolidation, Napoleon's speed, Bretton Woods, Michael Jordan's love of the game — patterns map even when the domains don't.
- See the company as scaffolding, not the goal — the greatest builders treat a business as the structure they need to make what they care about, and the money is math, a byproduct.
Terms worth knowing.
- Cold start problem
- The chicken-and-egg challenge of a network or marketplace having no value until enough people are on it, and no reason for people to join until it already has value. Skool solved it by first running one real business on a single group.
- Network effect
- The property where a product becomes more valuable to each user as more users join, because value comes from everyone being there rather than from the tool itself.
- Info industry
- The business of selling information, courses, coaching, and communities online. Sam argues it is highly fragmented, marketing-heavy, and historically strong at making money but weak on passion and soul.
- Discovery
- Skool's search-plus-trending surface where more than a million people a day browse communities. It ranks groups by packaging and demand, functioning like a marketplace storefront.
- Programmatic ads
- Fully automated ad buying run through Skool's API: the platform turns a community's packaging into an ad, tests it against an audience, and scales it only if the economics work — with no action from the creator.
- Packaging
- A community's cover image, title, and short description. On Skool this maps almost one-to-one to a YouTube thumbnail, title, and description, and largely determines whether Discovery and ads pick it up.
- Founder mode
- A flatter, hands-on way of running a company where the founder stays close to product and people instead of delegating everything through a deep hierarchy. Popularized by Brian Chesky and cited via Jensen Huang and Elon Musk.
- First-party vs third-party data
- First-party data is what you learn from doing the thing yourself; third-party data is what you learn from other people's experience, books, and advice. Sam weights first-party far higher once you're actually building.
- Reflexivity
- George Soros's idea that observing and participating in a market changes the market itself, breaking the assumption that participants are perfectly rational with perfect information.
- Bretton Woods
- The 1944 agreement that pegged global currencies to the US dollar and built the modern system of international trade and payments. Sam studied it as a model for connecting Skool's fragmented global payments.
- MRR
- Monthly recurring revenue — the predictable subscription income a community generates each month. Skool plans to award physical trophies for holding an MRR tier for 90 days, similar to YouTube plaques.
Things they pointed at.
04:00productKajabi
04:05productCircle
12:00bookThe Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman)
10:40bookThe Cold Start Problem (Andrew Chen)
13:00productSnapInspect (snapinspect.com)
15:00channelMixergy / Andrew Warner
53:20channelAlex Hormozi
1:31:20channelDan Kennedy
1:44:10channelJay Abraham
1:25:00channelJensen Huang (NVIDIA) on founder mode
1:24:50channelBrian Chesky / founder mode
1:39:10linkGlobal Consciousness Project (Princeton)
1:40:50bookThe Alchemy of Finance (George Soros)
1:42:30bookPredictably Irrational / behavioral economics
1:50:00productThe Men Who Built America (TV series)
1:45:50productMichael Jordan to the Max (documentary)
40:50toolClaude Code
41:00toolChatGPT (image generation)
Lines you could clip.
05:00
“If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. But what they're really saying is they wanna go A to B faster.”
13:40
“Who wakes up and thinks 'I want a feature'? Normal people don't want features. They want growth, engagement, or they want it to work.”
27:30
“There's nothing more repulsive to a talented engineer than a non-talented engineer. Who you have first is very important.”
28:40
“We made more progress in a week than we had in a year.”
46:35
“My plan is unlimited expensive things for 90 percent off. I was serious, and they were all terrified.”
52:10
“Raising money is a game of whoever needs who the least. It's like being a hot girl at a party.”
52:30
“I've never made a deck. Still to this day. VCs are constantly spamming — there's way more capital than there is good companies.”
40:00
“The goal was never to ship a lot of stuff. It was to make something that works. With software, the devil's in the details.”
41:40
“I told it to diff two country lists. It gave me North Korea — which wasn't in either file. People have no idea how much error they're amassing.”
1:01:00
“We started giving away Cybertrucks. I called it the season of madness, and it went completely mad.”
1:07:30
“You can't create good unless you know what good is. That's most people's problem — they don't know what good actually looks like.”
1:57:00
“The greatest of all time weren't even businessmen. They have a business, but they didn't want to be in business — it's just the structure they need.”
1:45:50
“The key is to fall in love with the game. That was Michael Jordan's whole secret — love at the core of the most savage competitor.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 10:02denseNetwork-effect strategy vs customization
10:02 – 21:25denseFounder origin story and first businesses
21:25 – 26:57steadyFixing the fragmented info industry
26:57 – 36:23denseDiscovery, packaging, and programmatic ads
36:23 – 46:19denseAI's real role in a software company
46:19 – 51:02densePricing and the $9 bet
51:02 – 56:44steadyFundraising philosophy
56:44 – 1:03:27denseIntuition, data, and culture
1:03:27 – 1:14:00steadyTaste, inputs, and product design
1:14:00 – 1:30:35denseDaily work and company structure
1:30:35 – 2:00:00steadyIntuition science and mental models
2:00:00 – 2:08:57steadyGlobal payments roadmap
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metaphoranalogystory
00:00So where I wanna start, do you remember when you visited me in Scottsdale? Mhmm. And we were hanging out.
00:04And I remember we were having dinner at True Food, and you told me so this is back when school was kind of like in its infancy, at least compared to what it is now. And you told me you were making a strategic bet because a lot of the other kind of competitors in the space, Kajabi and Circle, they had prioritized the creator's ability to customize the platform in specific URLs and domains and almost kind of a white label feel.
00:30Whereas your bet was really the opposite, which was to prioritize user engagement and ultimately create a network effect.
00:37So obviously that bet paid off, but I'm curious if you can think back to that time, how did you kinda come to the conclusion that was the right bet to make, and how were you thinking about that decision making process?
00:48Sure. So
00:50I've used the internet a lot since pre Google. Right? So I've, like, experienced the evolution of all of these different things.
00:57And it's always just been super interesting to me, like, how things evolve. And I used to use forums a lot. Like, that was where I used to hang out.
01:09But then they got kind of killed and replaced by Facebook groups. Right. And I found that very interesting.
01:16And I would ask, like, why? And I realized it was because one profile, one search, one login, one domain to remember.
01:26Right? Everything's there. And so for the end user, it's simple.
01:32Right? Because people have more than one interest, and you can have them together.
01:36But the other one was like the distribution. So, you know, you build your own forum and you need distribution.
01:46Facebook groups also provided that. Right? So there's serious advantages to networks because like creators of things need distribution and users of things like convenience.
01:58Right? Mhmm. And also users of things aren't one dimensional.
02:03Right? Like, they have multiple interests, and their interests also change over time.
02:08And so, like, they it fits well with that, if that makes sense. Yeah.
02:14Mhmm.
02:15And so how did you know that it's obviously you knew there was an advantage to a network effect.
02:21What sort of because everybody in the industry was kinda going that way in terms of prioritizing, making a pretty, you know, a pretty interface that they could customize,
02:31etcetera. Was there something that you saw besides like the old web, which is like, I don't know, like like a Kajabi kind of thing.
02:39Yeah. Exactly.
02:41What so what are asking? Well well so because I'm I'm curious. Is there anything beyond just the fact that you wanted to create a network effect that made you take that strategic bet?
02:50Because you were really school's really the only platform that went against the grain compared to, let's say, the circles, Kajabis, etcetera. True. Well, I mean, there's also you like
02:59it's hard to out Kajabi Kajabi. Right? Mhmm.
03:05They're all so much further ahead and like and so that would be a and that would be a terrible, like, competition too, by the way.
03:14But also, I was a user of Kajabi, and I didn't need 90% of the stuff in there. Right? And I also found it quite confusing, and so I thought it was more of a, like, negative than a positive.
03:26And then I tried to, like, boil it down to the most simple thing. And I was like, people want engagement.
03:37I'm pretty sure people want engagement. People also want growth. Right?
03:41And so I was like, whatever I can do to make it grow and be engaged, that's better.
03:47And I realized that less things, less customization, less white labeling, less of basically that led to more engagement and more growth, which is ultimately what people wanted, even though they didn't say that that's what they wanted.
04:02They said what they wanted was that. Yeah. Yeah.
04:05Yeah. Yeah. So that's where, like, the art of it comes in.
04:08Right? It's like the that overdone saying from Henry Ford.
04:15If I'd asked the people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. Right. Right?
04:18But what they're really saying is they wanna go a to b faster. Right? Mhmm.
04:23Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're big on simplicity and design.
04:27I think even, like, five years ago, is there a book called The Design of Everyday Things or something like that? You recommended me that book. So I'm curious if you think about, like, AI right now and these coding agents and you see Anthropic, they're shipping a new feature every other day, and now you can't it's like I can't even keep up with it.
04:45How do you balance the fact that now with software, with these agents and all of this stuff, you can ship things so fast? And how are you balancing that with holding the line of making sure school doesn't become such a conglomeration of a bunch of new features nobody needs?
05:00Yo. The game was never to just ship a lot of stuff fast.
05:04That's that can lead to the end. Right?
05:08Like, we could quickly end ourselves if we just went on a rampage of shipping random shit. Mhmm. Like, every time you add, you make it more complicated, and you can also make it worse.
05:21Right? It's also hard to take away once you've added. Right?
05:26Because people if once people start using it, right, it becomes very hard, and you can kind of become trapped. So just because it if it just because it's we can do something doesn't mean we should. Like, we still have that philosophy and approach.
05:39And then, like, right now, I know what people want isn't different features. It's, again, growth Mhmm.
05:45Engagement. Right? Yeah.
05:48Like, who wakes up and thinks I want a feature? Like, I'm pretty sure no one. Maybe some weirdos, but, like, normal people don't want features.
05:58They want, like, actual growth or engagement or, like or they want it to work. Right.
06:05You know? They want more members. Yeah.
06:07And they wanna make money, and they want their members to show up and get value. Yeah.
06:15So when you think about because obviously,
06:18you're you're in the community and you're trying to help them achieve that goal. And there could be a lot of features that you could add, etcetera. And there's some, I'm sure, that are good ideas and some stuff.
06:27I mean, obviously, you gotta ship some stuff. So when you have all the things that you think, let's say, you box into are a good idea, how exactly with the engineers you're prioritizing what needs to come first versus, okay, that's maybe a good idea, but that's gonna be next year, the year after,
06:43etcetera? Yeah. Well, it's quite simple because there's a billion things there's, like, infinite things we could do.
06:52Right. Right? But there's only, like, a few things we can do now.
06:58Right? And so it's always about it's not about yes or no. It's about prioritization.
07:04So, like, what are the most important things right now? That's all you really need to do.
07:12Right? Because once you've done those, everything changes again.
07:16Not everything, but a lot changes. Right? And so it's pointless to try to be like, that's a good idea.
07:22We'll schedule it in for this time. And we don't do that. Like, our roadmap in terms of, like, detail is only thirty days out.
07:32Mhmm. Like, because things can change a lot in thirty days.
07:36Right? Then we have, like, a list of vague ideas that we want to do, and and those are always kind of moving in terms of priority. But in terms of, like, actual road map of what we know what we're gonna do, it's it's not that far out into the future.
07:50That makes things a lot like, that's the only way to deal with this because otherwise, you would go insane.
07:57Yeah. Yeah.
07:59So going back to the decision to really build something with a network effect from the very beginning, I know one of the books you had all your old consulting.com employees read, David Dre told me this was the cold start problem.
08:12Because obviously, with a network effect, you're not just going it's not like a software I would sell, you know, where I go out there and do a sales call and sell it. It's something that has to kind of take hold and essentially grow.
08:22So for the people listening, can you explain what the cold start problem is? And then I'm curious
08:28how you thought about overcoming it and how school really did overcome. Hilarious. I didn't know that I recommended everyone read it.
08:35Because I only read, like, two chapters.
08:37And then you got it? I think I got it. Yeah.
08:40It looks it looks like it worked out. Yeah. Yeah.
08:43But it also didn't age too well, because I think one of the first examples is that it was what's it called? Clubhouse. Yeah.
08:52Yeah. And then, like, it quickly disintegrated. But, you know, the the core idea is right.
08:58I'll give it that. And it's basically like when you deal with a marketplace or a a network, the value comes from everyone being there.
09:10Right? So, like, what's the point in buying the first telephone? Who are gonna call?
09:15Who's gonna call you? Right? It's useless.
09:18Yeah. Yeah. And networks are like that.
09:21If you're the only one in there, there's it's not a network. And the the value of the network grows with the number of people that are on it. And so you have to figure it's like the chicken and the egg problem.
09:31Right? Like, which one do you get first? Because you need an egg to get a chicken, but you need a chicken to get an egg.
09:37Right? That's that's the hardest part about this.
09:41Like, well, getting it started, it and still, it is the hardest part about it. It makes it very complicated compared to just building a tool that you can give to people. Right?
09:50So how do you think because you have to get initial like, you know, the story of Facebook, right, is they started with one college, then multiple colleges, then high schools, then everything.
09:59Right? What was the version of that for school? One school.
10:03Like Yeah. My one for my own for my business. Right?
10:07I remember I moved one one over first. Just me. There was no other you couldn't even create a group on school.
10:13It was on it was only one group. Um, and I think it was, like, Accelerator or Quantum or, like, one of the things think it was Quantum.
10:22Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
10:23And so I was like, if I can just contain this one network, like, and make it functional and and good and and run my business on it and and it and it'd be nice for everyone, then more should want to do it too, right?
10:37Mhmm. And so I spent a long time just trying to get things right with my own stuff.
10:42And then when I did that for long enough, people said, hey, can I use this too? Then we let them use it too. Then they add questions and things, and we improve it for them, and yeah.
10:52Yeah. Well, I would think too that when you think that really the info industry is kind of the first initial user base for it. And then now, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that there's all sorts of different stuff that they wouldn't consider themselves info.
11:06They wouldn't even know what info is. Right? But it's expanded beyond that.
11:10Like, let's say, I know there's you have sea fighters who have communities. There's Chris Bumstead as a community. There's communities for pottery and stuff.
11:18So I would think that, like, kind of the initial schools' culinary for, um, what Facebook's was for colleges
11:26was kind of the info industry, and then it sort of kinda expanded on from there. Would you agree? Yeah.
11:31That was like it was what I was doing, so it was easy to start there because I knew it, and I could put my own stuff there. And it was also who I had in my network, and I also like the space.
11:43But, you know, I actually started as a user of forums long ago and not about info of money or anything, like about rock climbing or overclocking computers or or playing count professional Counter Strike or building race cars.
12:03Like, just random hobbies and interests that I had. Like, I learned how to do almost everything on forums on the Internet Yeah.
12:12Including building a race car, like, while I was at school. And you built one? Yeah.
12:18Yeah. Like, the whole thing, the engine, like, the internals, like, all of it.
12:22Roll cage, like That's wild. Yeah. And I just learned.
12:26I was, like, 18 years old, and I was just on forums chatting to people, and they'd just tell me yeah.
12:33Yeah. And so I started there, and I loved that about the Internet. That's the thing that I fell in love with, was that you could do anything.
12:42And I remember one day, I was, like, pulling the engine out of my race car with this engine hoist thing in my parents' driveway, and the neighbor looked over the fence, and he was like, that is crazy.
12:54How do you know what you're doing? And I said to him, the Internet. Yeah.
13:01And he was just like he didn't have any idea. But it was like, that's how I knew what to do.
13:07Right? The Internet. And so that's what I loved about the Internet and that I could find no matter what the interest was, even if it was, you know, building a race car, I could find that forum or that space online.
13:22And there would be other people as obsessed as me, which was really nice. Because if I just talk to someone on the street, like, don't give a shit about an engine. Yeah.
13:31And that they would freely because they like the interaction too with other like minded people. They would freely share with me and help me. Right?
13:39Yeah. And so and I would even trade parts on there. Like, I'd buy parts from people.
13:44I would meet up with people. I'd I'd hang out with people. And so that was my, like, passion, was the internet and random interests and like minded people doing doing things.
13:57And then, you know, I got into the corporate world, didn't like that, so started my own business. Right?
14:04So it started just as a user and being a passionate user of it. But then I went to university, got a corporate job, went there.
14:12I really didn't like it. It kinda sucked. Then I thought, well, start a business.
14:20Do you know this full story? The story, but go on. Yeah.
14:24I I I'm making it kinda brief. But then how I tried starting a business, and it it didn't work.
14:33Like, I sucked. Like, I failed a few times. Did I tell you about the Cafe loyalty card app that I made?
14:40No. I don't think so. Yeah.
14:42I always wonder how much detail I should give in these little parts of the story, but, like, back then, everyone was making apps. That because the iPhone was new, and it was all about apps.
14:53So I was like, what kind of app can I make? Make? And I went to this cafe and bought a coffee.
14:57And you know how they've got those loyalty cards where you just get Yeah. Five And I had one of those, and I was like, I can make an app for this.
15:04Right? And then so I mocked it up and everything, and then I went back to the cafe, and I tried to pitch this guy, like, this app.
15:13And I pitched him, and he was like, what's wrong with my paper one? And I thought about it, and I was like, fuck. It's probably better than my app.
15:23Yeah. And that was the end of that. I had a lot lot of ideas like that, and I really wasn't I was clueless.
15:30I had no idea what I was doing. I started listening to interviews online from entrepreneurs, and back then, it most people won't even believe me, but there was, like, no interviews of entrepreneurs on the Internet back then.
15:44There was, like, one website, and there might have been 30 interviews. Not even shooting you.
15:48It was called mixergy.com, by the way. Andrew.
15:52Right? Yeah. That was the only place that you could hear entrepreneurs do interviews back then, which is crazy.
15:58Now, this it's all over the place. This guy had started a software company, and he was gonna teach people how to do it, and he started this course.
16:08And I joined that. And so I started in this industry as a customer and as an end user of an info product or community, whatever.
16:19And then he taught me, like, the most don't come up with ideas. Instead, go and ask the market what their problems are and solve those, and it will work.
16:28And I was like, this is genius. This is I've been coming up with ideas, and then I find that no one wants them. So then I just started cold calling people, trying to learn about their business.
16:39It was fascinating that they would just tell me everything. And I came up with this idea for a property inspection app because everyone said they hated inspections.
16:48Then I mocked that one up and came back to them, and they bought it. And I was like, holy shit. It was like a magic experience.
16:56And that company was successful, and it still exists today. I sold my shares to my co founder. It's called snapinspect.com.
17:03But I didn't like property management, right? But what I fell in love with was that online entrepreneur community and experience.
17:12Like, that was awesome. And I flew over to America to hang out with these people, and that's what ultimately led to me moving to America. And I just wanted to be in this industry.
17:24Right? Like and so then I started in this industry with, like, making courses and things.
17:31And what I learned about this industry is it was great. The thing that makes it great is that it's weird doers teach, right?
17:40And so have you heard the saying like, those that can't do teach? Yes. It's true in the classical education space.
17:49And because, for example, I took an entrepreneurship paper at university, and the guy had a PhD in entrepreneurship, but he had tried to start one business that failed, and he had a PhD.
18:01Whereas I listened to, like, one call with some random guy on the Internet, and I started a successful business because he had done it, right?
18:11Exactly. And so that's what I loved about this industry is it was it made a lot of sense to me. It was very very similar to how it worked building race cars and all of that.
18:21You were just talking to the people doing it. Right? Mhmm.
18:26And so, you know, I started doing courses industry and stuff, and and I love this industry.
18:32But then I started to see that there was an opportunity for a platform that could make this a lot easier. And then I thought if I made this simple enough, the mainstream could adopt it and all of those interests could come on too.
18:47Because the thing info is figured out is how to make money with info. That's what they're really good at.
18:53But what it's missing a lot of is, like, passion and soul and and and things like that. Yeah.
18:59And so I I knew that if I made it simple enough and and solved enough of the problems that I could get all the hobbies and interests on too, and then it's like all that would matter was the passion.
19:14And
19:16so does that kind of answer your question? And what I want to know is when you when you feel like our industry, so we've we've figured out how to make money, but we're kind of losing the passion and the soul. How do you think that
19:27shows up in kind of the way the industry operates or what you've seen? I mean, running the businesses, if it starts to feel bad, it's a good indicator. Right?
19:36I was running one of these businesses, and I didn't really like it. I didn't like what I had to do to make it work.
19:45I also nothing was really inspiring me that much. Mhmm. Like, I didn't I wasn't, like, browsing around being like, this is so awesome.
19:53Like, a lot of it looked like the same, and it wasn't, like, very fun.
20:03That's that was just my experience of it. Right? And I thought it was extremely inefficient.
20:09If you think about, like, this industry, it's, like, highly fragmented. Mhmm.
20:14And most of the time is spent marketing.
20:18Right? Yeah.
20:20So that showed me that it was prob the fragmentation is why everyone spends so much time marketing, by the way. What do you mean by that?
20:29So every like, it there's no place where you can just see, like, where the best shit is. Yeah. It's all, like, over all over the place.
20:37Right? Right. All disconnected all over the Internet.
20:40And people use all of these proxies to to to determine if something's good or not. Like, oh, the dude's got a Lambo.
20:48Must be good. Yeah. You know, like It's like the the signals aren't reliable.
20:51Yeah. It's a it's a complete minefield. And, actually, the most efficient tactic has been not to be good at what you do, but actually just to be famous, which shows me that it's completely kinda corrupt.
21:09Yeah. Do you know what I mean? No.
21:10Exactly. And then because it's all fragmented and everything, people have to spend all their time and money like marketing, not looking after their people or working on their craft, unless their craft is marketing.
21:22Yeah. Then so I was like, there's gotta be a better way to rearrange this.
21:29Right? Like, I thought a lot what if there was an Airbnb kind of thing for this?
21:35Right? Because to to make money in info how it has been, you when you think about all the little things you need to, like, figure out, it's insane. So, like, if you've got a website, if you've got a funnel, if you've got Facebook tracking pixel, if you've got like a CRM, an email system, Zapier, then you need like a checkout, payment processor, you know, then analytics, like, how are you supposed to do that?
22:01Because you're using 20 different things. Then where do you put your core stuff? Where do you put your videos?
22:06Where do you how do you do your calls, your live calls? How you know, like Yeah. We're we're talking about 20 systems already.
22:13Right? Yep. And then gluing them all together and then trying to, like, look at all of this disconnected data to try to figure out what's going on.
22:23And then don't even get me started on the accounting of it all. Like, it's crazy.
22:27Like, to expect that to go mainstream is it's impossible. Imagine if someone's just talented at at knitting or cooking, and someone says to them, oh, you should you should make a community for that online, or you should do this online.
22:44You could make money doing this online. They can't. Like, they would have to sacrifice their passion.
22:51Yeah. Right? And hate their life.
22:53Yeah. Yeah. If you ever wanted to get my one on one help in terms of scaling your business, then listen up really fast.
22:58So we're taking on a few clients where I can personally one on one audit their business across marketing, sales, operations, fulfillment, finance to be able to tell you what your constraint actually is, and ultimately, what are the one to three things you need to do next to be able to scale working entirely one on one with me.
23:14So if that's interesting, there's a link in the description that'll say Cole one on one that you can go book. But, essentially, not only will you get my personal advice, but we'll also be opening up our entire playbooks of my $36,000,000 a year company across marketing, sales, operation, fulfillment, finance.
23:28So you can basically model the best practices of what we've done right into your business, and it'll include the opportunity to meet in person up at an event with me. So if that's interesting, click the link in the description and mount back to the video. Do you do you think kind of part of your own personal mission is because this industry has done so much for you?
23:45You wanna help sort of take it mainstream and almost legitimize it more so more people can have access to it and not have to worry about the marketing and the advertising and all this stuff and just focus on the passion?
23:58Yeah. I think if this industry is properly
24:00efficient, then talent and passion should be the most important thing. Obviously, market need is always there, right, because you can't fight the market.
24:09Mhmm. But if you come up with something that is cool and you're good at it and you're passionate about it, it should pop.
24:18And you shouldn't need to go and learn all this other shit. Yeah. That was what I that was the the dream.
24:24I didn't know if I'd be able to achieve that. What's crazy is that that started happening now. I don't know if you've seen this GTA community that we've got.
24:33No. It's gotta be good. You've seen it?
24:38Okay. So this this is crazy. This guy made this community.
24:43It's called GTA Creator Academy. Mhmm. He just comes up with the idea, makes the artwork for it, and he's he's teaching people how to make money with the GTA six game before it launches.
24:55Right? Costs, like, I don't know, $25 a month, something like that. He has no audience, just an idea, puts it on school.
25:04Within one week, he has, like, 250 paying members and just popped. Just like that.
25:09Like, he didn't do he just k. Just the idea and the concept and his passion for it, just that was all he And it's still on the home page.
25:21Well, when I checked this morning, it was like number three trending on the home page of school, and that's what's starting to happen now. Interesting.
25:29So it that's real and what's so cool to me is, you know, you can't fight the market.
25:37Right? You what we have on school must match with what the market wants.
25:43Right? And I was wondering I wonder what the market wants. I guess we'll find out when we started doing all of this.
25:49And it's really refreshing to see what the market wants. Yeah. They're the things on the homepage of school, like, that are trending.
25:56They're all fun. They they are they're not they haven't lost the make money part, which is what info had, but they've made it way more fun Yeah. And way more accessible.
26:07Right? Like, the price points are, like, in between, I don't know, $9 and a $100 a month kind of thing.
26:15Mhmm. So very accessible, fun, and and that's that's what's working right now.
26:23We we had another community. It's called like AI video boot camp. Have you seen this thing?
26:28So these guys don't have an audience. They have a $9 product. Like, you know, in the old orthodoxy of info, you if you said you were gonna make a $9 a month product, everyone would call you an idiot.
26:40Right? Yeah. Okay.
26:41Yeah. So this community makes, like, $250 a month, and it's the hottest selling thing on Skull.
26:51And they had no audience, and their product's $9. And they got there in maybe four months.
26:57And this is coming from the discovery
26:59feature. Right? And the ads that we run.
27:01Yeah. So explain that because that's been, over the past, what, three to six months,
27:06probably the biggest focus of what Oh, this the ads and the growth stuff we've I mean, we've been optimizing discovery on school, which is like search and trending and stuff Right. For maybe like two months.
27:20But then when we started running ads for people, that's only like two weeks old. Oh, really? Explain that because most people probably don't know what that is, what the the growth is.
27:28Like I said earlier, people want engagement and they want growth. Right? I it's and if you ask people really what they want, they want more members because that would help them make more money.
27:37Right? Mhmm. And the the old way of doing that has been, well, you've gotta go start a YouTube.
27:42It's like, woah. It's massive job, and that might take a year or some shit. Right?
27:48But that has been the answer up until, like, two weeks ago. But then we had this idea which was like, what if we tested basically everything on school, just all of it?
28:01We we started running programmatically ads for the products on Skill. So it's fully automated.
28:06You don't see anything. So this guy, this GTA guy, just added his cover image, added a group description and stuff, and, like, within, I don't know, a few hours, it was just like that.
28:19And so what's happening in the background is it's all programmatic, like, through API and everything.
28:25We take that community, put it into an ad, and try to find an audience for it, and run it out to the market to see if there's and to see if it hits or not.
28:36Right? The same way when you upload a YouTube video, it the algorithm takes it, and it sees, like, how hot it is.
28:45Right? Interesting. And very similar to YouTube, and and it's almost a one to one mapping.
28:50It's crazy. It's all about the packaging. So the cover image is the thumbnail, the title, and the little description.
28:57If you look at the homepage of school right now, it's just banger packaging. Right?
29:04And this guy this GTA guy had a cool concept and good packaging. And when we and there's also a market for it. Right?
29:10There's a lot of people who like GTA. Right. So our algorithm found it and the economics worked, so we pushed it.
29:18Right? So that's what's going on just all behind the scenes now. It's like, usually, you would have to test the market.
29:25Like, think about how hard it is for a regular person to, like, do market testing to see if this their business is viable. Right. Like, fuck.
29:33Yeah. It's forget about it. And so the way that would show up is at the the end result of all that is just a Facebook ad, essentially.
29:41But it all comes from how they essentially set up their thumbnail, so to speak, within the discovery page and so on and so forth. Yeah.
29:49Well, it's more than that because, you know, a lot of people just visit Skull Discovery anyway, like more than a million people a day, and they're browsing and searching. Search is huge.
29:58Like, search, I would say, is most of discovery still. Even though we're running ads, search is still the main thing. And so naturally, there's people coming there every day browsing and searching.
30:09That's one way you can be discovered. Right? But then we added this other element to it where we go off our platform, and we just run the ad to see if it's if it hits.
30:21Because one's like intent based where someone searches, and the other one is like going out and seeing if it's there. Right? Yeah.
30:28And then when it hits there, it starts trending on our homepage too. So, like, people coming in normally can find it, and the two kind of feed on each other.
30:38Or something might hit from search and then get distributed on ads.
30:42I don't want to explain too much about how it works. Right. Because it's But but and and can you answer this?
30:47Like, because you mentioned it's all API based, and that you essentially created an algorithm for it as well. So is that I mean, that algorithm, is that AI driven?
30:57Or has that been a big has AI been a big part of this, um, being able to do this? And also, broader question about this is I was gonna ask this but I'll ask it now, is how much of AI is being used in school, and how has it affected how you guys operate day to day?
31:13There's definitely some
31:15AI involved, not the normal, not like, you know, LLMs and GBT and things, what what normal people would think.
31:23But there's a an algorithm is like a form of AI. Right? And so there yeah.
31:28There's a lot of algorithms. There's also, like, image detection stuff and and and some AI.
31:35But, you know, like, with this feature and the rollout of it, like, I never even wanna say the word AI because I don't think most normal people care.
31:43They just want it to work. Mhmm. Right?
31:45And so
31:46if it just works, who cares what's under the hood? Yeah. Yeah.
31:50When it comes to AI because so I was watching your My First Million podcast. This was years ago with Sam and Sean, and you weren't too impressed with AI.
31:59You're kinda like, it's like slop. I just use Google. I don't have much utility for it.
32:03Has that view changed
32:05at all for you? For images? Yeah.
32:07Like, I I used to go to Photoshop, and I was I was I was pretty average.
32:15Now I go to chat GPT for images. Right?
32:19So like I think it's image generation capabilities pretty cool. I hate its text generation capability.
32:27I think it's awful. Like, I think people sharing things written by machines is is stupid.
32:33Yeah. Like, write it yourself. If you've got nothing to say, just don't say anything.
32:36Right? Like Yeah. I I really don't like that.
32:39There's also something special about, like, it's almost like the spirit of someone comes across in their words if they carefully select them. Right? But when it's some you know what it's like reading someone's AI bullshit?
32:50Just don't even read Fucking awful. Send it right back. Yeah.
32:53Yeah. So I hate that. And then just day to day decision making, honestly, I never really use it because, like like, what am I I always ask people, like, what am I gonna use it for?
33:05Like, what am I gonna use it for? Really? Like, tell me.
33:09Well, do your engineers use it, coding agents? We don't write code with AI. Really?
33:14Why not? Because we've tried it, and it's not that great.
33:21And I'm sure you've even heard now it's starting to come out that, like, even Meta's kind of fucking up their product with too much Oh, yeah. Vibe code.
33:30Yeah. Yeah. You like I said, the the goal was never to ship a lot of stuff.
33:36It was to make something that works. Right? And with software like the devil's in the details, it's insane.
33:43Sometimes you can chase a little detail for months. And AI, like, can is very bad at that.
33:51Right? Like, it's kind of sloppy. But it has definitely made us more efficient.
33:57There's places where it's useful. But it's, like, not in for us, it's not writing code. You know, there might be some things that you can use it for that will help you.
34:08Like, it's quite good at at SQL query optimization. So if you've got a a SQL query and you it's slow and you ask it, how can I make this faster?
34:17It's pretty good. It's also good as, like, code base being source of truth instead of documentation. So instead of, like, laboring to create all of this documentation to explain what's in the code and always updating it, which sucks, you can ask if you use, like, Claude code and stuff, you can ask Claude about the code, and it knows it.
34:40So the code base becomes the source of truth instead of the documentation. Makes sense. That accelerates things a lot.
34:46And then, you know, in the, like, monotonous stuff like code review. So reviewing code before it gets shipped to production is a huge thing because you gotta thoroughly check code before it goes to production.
34:58Otherwise, everything can go haywire. And this is getting kinda technical.
35:05I don't know how No. I think it's very interesting. Okay.
35:07Okay. Yeah. But, like, usually, how that would work is, you know, someone an engineer's kinda finished up their feature.
35:14Like, they wanna go to code review. They send it over to code review. One of our best engineers has to stop what they're doing to review it and then give feedback, and then that person might do it again.
35:26Now they submit it again, and that person so you're taking your talented people offline to review stuff, and you're also waiting for, like, some lag. So now there's a you know, we've got a, like, a AI code review thing.
35:42What that allows the engineers to do is just hit it early and often because it's not taking someone offline and do their own cycles of code review a lot before they go to a human. So then when the human comes to it, it's already probably they've caught a lot of the stuff that the human might.
35:59And then the human can also run the check using AI too, so it it massively accelerates that process, basically. And it can also be good for, like, you know, for for many things.
36:15But, like, I think the Internet's very bad at, like, nuance. Right?
36:21You hear AI is gonna take everyone's job. Right. AI is gonna write all the code.
36:25Like but at the same time, you also see that the demand for software engineers is through the roof. Exactly. So, obviously, it's not true.
36:32Yeah. Even the companies that are saying AI is gonna take all the jobs are hiring the most amount of engineers at the highest pay. Yeah.
36:40It's like the the reality is much more, like, nuanced, and it's good at some things. It's really not good at other things, and you gotta kinda take a pragmatic approach where you use the tool where it's best.
36:53Right? Mhmm. But you can't build insane hype around that.
36:56So
36:57yeah. So on the on the note of technical talent, tell me the story about finding Daniel because I know that I think you had built up school a little bit, and then you found him, and then basically, it was building it up again.
37:11But I'll let you tell the story. Yeah. Well,
37:14to build this thing, you know, you're a step one was to make a better Facebook groups.
37:21That's what I was thinking. Right. And my the sentence I had in my head was like Facebook groups, but better.
37:27Right? Like, that's an enormous step one. When you look at what's inside Facebook, you got DMs, notifications, you got app, video, lives, posts, comments, likes, just a lot.
37:39Right? Mhmm. Look at this.
37:40It's insane how much there is in them. And it's also a social network, which is it they're quite hard to make, honestly.
37:48There's a reason why there's not a lot of them.
37:52And the standard that everyone expects is extremely high, because it's like Facebook groups but better.
38:00That they've got some of the best engineers. They've got, like, trillions of dollars, and, you know, there it's hard to meet that standard.
38:12Right? And even the things like the speed of it is extremely important.
38:18Like, yeah, most people dramatically underestimate how important the speed is.
38:26Because if something's a little bit laggy, people just out. Right? Like, it's gotta be fast.
38:31And that's hard to do. And you need exceptional engineers to be able to achieve standard.
38:38So I knew that in order to even have a chance, I needed to be at the standard. Right? In order to have a chance, not in order to succeed, but in order to, like, have a chance.
38:48And the only way I could do that is if I had some of the best engineers in the world, essentially. Right?
38:55There was no other way. You achieve that standard with talent that isn't also at that standard.
39:03Right? So the hardest part about school, especially in the beginning, was finding engineers talented enough to make school.
39:12And talented engineers tend to follow talented engineers. There's nothing more repulsive to a talented engineer than a non talented engineer.
39:21Right? So who you have first is very important.
39:26Because if you have someone average, you will continue to get people worse than them. Right?
39:32But you have someone great, you'll be able to get other people that are great. And so I knew that we needed to do that.
39:40And so the first essentially, like, the first engineer or the co founder and the CTO had to be really good. And so then I set out to try to find a really good software engineer or co founder.
39:53And that took a long time. It took me about a year. I did maybe five, six hundred interviews.
39:59It's like all I did for like a year. It was pretty, pretty hardcore.
40:04And I eventually, just by chance, found it was just like a fluke.
40:09You know, if you do something enough, you get a fluke. Yeah. Yeah.
40:12And I managed to find Daniel, and without him, it would be completely impossible. Like, nothing really happened until we found him.
40:19And then, you know, I'd hired some other engineers, and and we'd built something, but it wasn't very good, and we were also moving kinda slow. Then he came along, and we made more progress in a week than we had in a year.
40:32Mhmm. And then we that's when we started moving. And that's when I had my first taste, too, of what, like, really good talent is like.
40:42Yeah. And it immediately made me feel inferior, which I really liked. Because I would rush to the office.
40:49I was like, gotta I get ahead of Daniel before he catches up and asks me for the next thing. And I was, like, living in anxiety that I couldn't keep up, like but I I loved it.
41:00I've never had that feeling before. Usually, it's the other way around. Right?
41:03Right. Yeah. Yeah.
41:05The other thing was is I would think about something a lot, give it to him. He would ignore some of the things I said, break the rules, and come back to me with something that was better.
41:17And I was like, woah. This has never happened to me before. Usually, you give someone something, it comes back not how you wanted it, then you have to exert effort to get it there.
41:28This was something very different. Yeah. So you knew immediately
41:32he was the right person. Yeah. And so was there a obviously, that was when he started working.
41:38When you were in the interview process, did you know right away, or what was kind of the signal that that was obviously the right person to go with? It's hard because
41:49if you're not a software engineer, you can't really know what a good software engineer is. Right? Right.
41:54But also, the people I had said he wasn't good.
42:00Preservation. Oh, yeah. Mhmm.
42:02There's so many complicated things going on. Right? All my wife was like, have a good feeling about this guy.
42:10And I did too. And what we were doing currently wasn't working so well, and so, like, it took me a little bit to, like, untangle that, and I was like, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna have a go. Because ultimately, you don't know until you until you try.
42:24Right? But then and once he started, like, day one, it was very it was immediate
42:30immediately obvious on day one. Yeah. Hey.
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43:18You know what's interesting you said about culture in terms of hiring that person and them keeping the standard? I have a I had a lot of clients ask me, like, they wanna create a culture like my company. And they're like, how do you create such a good culture?
43:31How do you create almost like it's something you do after the fact. Yeah. And you know what's funny is I realized because I was really thinking about it that way too and then I realized it's actually something you really set with the initial conditions.
43:43Yeah. Because I thought back to well, I never really tried to do it. I just had my first six hires were all phenomenal hires, all full stack, not like people who were doing little jobs, it was people who were doing many jobs.
43:58And then they just love the culture so much that they really preserved it and made sure we kept hiring. So it sounds like it was very similar. Well, yeah.
44:05I mean, I I had built a company before. Right? And I knew that when I wanted to do this, had to start again.
44:12Sometimes the answer, if you depending on the standard you're trying to achieve. I knew that in order to hit the standard, I had to start again.
44:19Yeah. Yeah. And he basically redid the whole product in the first thirty days.
44:23You had to scrap everything that you had built Yeah. Up into that point. Yeah.
44:26So by, I think it's 2022, school has, like, a recognizable shape. There's users.
44:33Um, I don't know if there was revenue at that time or not, but you were still running Quantum Yeah.
44:38And maybe Uplevel a little bit or I think it was WeTube at the time. And so I know, I believe you were doing $300 a month maybe profit from those businesses and school's burn was just eclipsing $300 a month and that's when you decided to just go all in.
44:54So two part question. How did you know that was the time? And do you think maybe you should have just done it earlier if you had to do it again?
45:03So in in the beginning, like, to start school because
45:07the most important thing wasn't the business model. It was making something that was like Facebook groups but better. And if if it if I couldn't do that, who cares of what the business model is?
45:15It won't work anyway. So ignoring the business model part, found very helpful for me because it was many years of just building to achieve that.
45:24Right? And thinking about making money just just changes the dynamics.
45:29Yeah. And then, you know, over time, we've hired more engineers. We have more users.
45:33Our costs have gone up. Right? And we need to hire more engineers and spend more money.
45:39And so now the no business model problem is a prob real problem. And also the I was cash flowing the cost with my info business, but now it it wouldn't work.
45:51And also my info business needed my time. So I was, like, money constrained and time constrained, and both things, like yeah.
46:00It was it was very stressful. And my first instinct, because it was this is just how I used to think, because, you know, how I used to run the business was like, you want more money, you you sell something.
46:12Mhmm. Right? You, like, make a a course.
46:14So I made WeTube. Right. Made a million dollars.
46:17That disappeared pretty quick. Was like, fuck. And I also had to make WeTube, but it was taking time away from school.
46:23And I was like, I can't. This isn't working. Like so I thought we need to start charging for school.
46:30And so we came up with a simple business model, like $99 a month.
46:35Then we emailed all of the users and said, will you pay? And surprisingly, a lot of them said, yeah. And so now school is making some money.
46:43Not a lot. Maybe, like, no, a million dollars a year.
46:50But you know, its costs are probably more than that. So then I'm like, I'm still running Quantum, and I've got this, but at least there's a business model there now. So I was doing all of this math to be like, if I shut this down now and go all into this, how long will it take to get to the point where, like, we'll survive?
47:11And it was like this gap. I was like, can I make this gap?
47:15It's like trying to or something. Because, you know, if I go all in, maybe we can grow faster, and then we get to this point.
47:24And I can go all in if I shut down Quantum, but the hard part was that to shut down Quantum, had to refund a bunch of people because they had unused time.
47:35And so that made the math more interesting.
47:39It wasn't until it's I couldn't figure it out still like this. It just the math wasn't working.
47:45But then I came up with the idea to to ask Quantum, my my Mastermind people, if they wanted to invest. Right.
47:53And that actually worked.
47:57And I started, I think, with you. Right? Yeah.
47:59I was I think I was the first one outside of maybe you let a few of the consulting employees, uh, invest first, but I think I was the first outside investor.
48:10I thought if I got you, then I'd get Quantum. Yeah.
48:14So I went and got you first. Yeah. I flew over there.
48:18I'm glad you did. I was like, I'm gonna get coal. And then when I pitch Quantum, I'm gonna say, coal's already in.
48:25Yeah. And then I knew that probably And then you said the amount too, and they were like, oh, I guess if he did that much, I at least gotta do this. Yeah.
48:31Yeah. Yeah. And so it's like marketing in a way.
48:33Right? Yeah. Getting some social proof.
48:36And then I told people at Quantum, I remember I only mentioned it for, like, five, ten minutes. That was it. I just said, if you're interested, apply here.
48:42It was I didn't know what to expect. And then later that night, after the mastermind, I remember looking at the Google Sheet, and it was, like, 5 or 6,000,000.
48:52I was like, holy shit. It's like, I wasn't expecting that. So I raised 5,000,000 from people in Quantum, basically Yeah.
48:59From, like, a twenty minute pitch. Yeah. And then I redid the math, and now I could jump that gap.
49:07So then I closed down Quantum and refunded people. So it's kind of a funny sequence. Right?
49:12Like Yeah. I was doing Quantum to fund it, but then I raised
49:16money from Quantum to shut down Quantum to to do this thing. What what's so funny about that, that that weekend, which we were here in this building, was it was honestly a blast.
49:27And, you know, I was already invested, so, obviously, I have a vested interest in trying to make that as as successful as possible. And you didn't ask me to do anything, but I'm just like, my inner sales guy can't help it. So I was like, I think you need to do a little bit more, man.
49:39Like, I think I think no. You should a 100% do it. I almost just turned on my, uh, sales gear, and I was like, trying to make as much of that as possible.
49:47So since then, you've you've raised more money.
49:51And I'm curious just because I know you've delved into this world so much. Like, what's the biggest thing you've learned just in general about venture capitalists?
50:00It's a game of whoever needs who the least.
50:04You it's like being a , basically. Like, if you make something great, there's not many of them, and everyone wants to invest.
50:13The hard part is making something really great. Right? Yeah.
50:16So I never learned anything about raising or anything. All I was trying to do was make something good. That was it.
50:23And I never really pitched anyone. I've never made a deck. Like, still to this day, never made a deck.
50:28And I have VCs constantly spamming.
50:32We get cold calls and shit. Like, it's weird. They they like you know, they want to put money into goods good companies, and there's not a lot of good companies, you realize.
50:43Yeah. There's way more capital than there is good companies. Right?
50:46Capital needs a place to go. So if you just make something great, you'll people will knock on your door and want to give you money. Whereas, you know, if you try to raise capital, like, okay.
50:59Now that's a whole effort, and you can probably still achieve it, but how much energy you're gonna exert to pull it off. Right? Like, I don't know.
51:07That wasn't worth it for me. Yeah. And so
51:11I never tried. It just people started coming and asking. Yeah.
51:16Yeah. And so when you're I mean, you have the limited supply, right, and all the demand. So when you have all these VCs wanting to give you money and you do need to raise, are you choosing them I mean, obviously, the terms is probably part of it.
51:28Is part of who you choose a values alignment thing? Or, like, what's the decision making maker, uh, making filter decision filtering that you kinda go through to choose who to go with?
51:43So for ages, I just ignored it and put them all into a folder in my Gmail. Right?
51:47That was all I was doing. I wasn't even assessing them because I was, like, just building the thing. But then, you know, we did the Hormozi thing and blew up, but then I was starting to see, like, the cracks in our business model, like charging $99 a month just for people to create communities.
52:05It was getting harder and harder to grow, and the main complaint we were hearing is it's too expensive. Right?
52:12So I thought we need to lower the price. If we're serious about making this thing mainstream, we needs a lower price point. $9 felt like free, basically.
52:23Mhmm. It's also 11 times cheaper than 99. And I this was my idea.
52:27I was like, we need to do this. And I pitched it to our team, our leadership team, and everyone was, like, terrified.
52:34They're like, we can't do it. We don't have enough money. Because everyone was trying to do this math, how many people will down grade and, you know, all of this.
52:41Making lowering your price by 11 times generally isn't good business advice. Right?
52:46Usually, are saying increase your prices. And you were doing more because you're adding live streaming Oh, yeah. Video and all of that stuff.
52:52So is my plan less for 10 times more. Yeah.
52:55Said to the team, my plan is unlimited expensive things for 90% off. I was serious, and they were all terrified, and they said we need to raise money. And I was like, oh, fuck.
53:09Then a VC emails me that day. Says, hey.
53:14Like, do you want some money? BaseLimb? And I was like, actually, this time I do because, you know, I just I wanna do this line And of then I chatted to them, and I liked the I liked them.
53:25That was the main other than the timing is a big part of it. Right? Because it it came at a time when I really needed it.
53:32But, also, I really liked them. Like, I just I think that's super important because you're gonna disagree on so many things. And if you don't just like the person, it'll be terrible.
53:42Right? But if you like the person, you can still live with it when you're disagreeing.
53:47He also had some very good experience. Like, he was, like, CEO of, like, Blizzard Games when they change business models and stuff.
53:54The other thing was their strength was really data. Like, they were hardcore on data.
54:04And that was also our weakness. And I liked that. Right?
54:09So I liked that they were, like, exposing things that we didn't even know, and, like because I knew that was gonna make us better.
54:18So a combination of timing, liking them, and their strength being our weakness and and me liking what that did to to us.
54:29And also, like, they just they, like, almost, like, forced it. Because I said to them, I don't know what I'm gonna do with this money.
54:37I was like, I got no idea what to do with it, and I don't even know if now is the right time, and they said, just take it. I was alright, then. Fine.
54:45Like, let's and good good deal, good terms, all of that.
54:49Yeah. So and you've mentioned repeatedly now, you know, when it came to raising money and also just the focus of school overall is it's not about money.
54:58It's just about your only focus was creating something great. Right?
55:02Wanted to do the $9 plan. That was it. I didn't see VC money.
55:05I saw a $9 plan. Yeah. So I'm curious.
55:08Do you do you take a because when you say that, I think about, like, Steve Jobs. Like, he's famous for saying, you know, money is a, you know, it's a byproduct,
55:15but all we wanna do is just create great products. Yeah. And so have you taken a lot of inspiration from him and John Ivy and stuff like that?
55:22Yeah. I really don't care about the money, which might sound like but I I do care about the money because it's important to build. Right?
55:29But I don't the money isn't the main thing for me. It's the building that that I like.
55:34So
55:35it's math. Money is like math. Right?
55:37And there's a lot of math in this. Yeah. Yeah.
55:41So back to the decision about the $9 versus 99. Obviously, you ended up lowering the price and creating a new tier. The leadership team was really scared.
55:52How did you guys get through that decision to finally just be able to
55:56give it a shot? Well, once we had the money, everyone's like, alright. Fine.
55:59Let's try it. They were still scared. Yeah.
56:01Yeah. But, like, once we had the money, it was like, there's a lot of padding. You know?
56:06Okay. So it was really the the the the funding is what made it kind of essentially possible. Yeah.
56:12Yeah. And also the plan of unlimited expensive things for 90% off, like saying unlimited live streaming, unlimited video, and dropping the price right down.
56:21Right? Like, there's kind of ballsy, and we were only willing to take those kinds of risks knowing that we had more capital.
56:30Yeah. Well, and one thing is I feel like it's an intuitive decision. And I think one of the biggest things, because I've known you for a while now, that I've seen change in you over the years is developing more intuition and then using that in business.
56:46So can you speak on that and how you think about using intuition and following it and the importance of that as it's been in terms of, you know, running school? Yeah. Well, you can imagine
56:59how many possible things we could do with school. There's, like, a million different directions we could go in. Everyone wants different stuff.
57:08We could go in all kinds of different directions. Right? And the amount of data you could look at is infinite.
57:15Right? Like, you could just you would die just trying to, like, look at all the data. Like, it's just crazy.
57:24And so if you're trying to be, like, calculated and data driven and stuff, it you won't go anywhere. You will be, like, paralyzed. Right?
57:35So I think it's you if you don't have intuition, it's I think it's extremely hard.
57:45And I don't honestly don't know how you would do it. Because to to actually gather data and make a, like, data informed decision is a lot of effort every single time. Right?
57:54And you have to make so many decisions all the time that, like, you you would just be stuck. So when you in the absence of that, like, what do you have, right, to to make choices with? You that's really all you have is your instincts and your intuition.
58:11The cool thing about this business, though, is that if you use that, you immediately have data to show whether your intuition was right or not. Right.
58:20So I do make pretty much, I would say, most of my choices with intuition, but I also cannot deny the data.
58:30And so the the both of them together has been very, very fascinating because when the intuition starts to map to the data, it tells you your it's right, and so you trust it more.
58:44Do you get what I'm saying? Yeah. Reinforces it.
58:46Yeah. And I think you will notice this with all of the best people. Like, they use it a lot.
58:51Like, whether it's like basketball players or traders, financial traders, it's they use both, but the intuition one is the primary.
59:02Yeah. Because if you get it really tuned, it's kind of And and so part of, you know, part of the reason I was asking that too is I know when you did this you were doing the school games, and school was growing, like, 700% or what have you in a certain time frame.
59:17And can you tell a story about how it started to kind of bring in some people or kind of start to create a culture you didn't like? And I think then intuitively that led you to shift some things away.
59:30Because obviously, the metrics weren't showing that. They were just showing growth. Right?
59:34But can kinda tell that story and then how your intuition led you to sort of change the school games and also, you know, some of the pricing and so on and so forth. See, we did the school games, grew, like, 700%,
59:44then started to see cracks. Like, one, the growth was slowing.
59:51So, like, it wasn't like it was still going how it was earlier that year. And the culture and vibe was the big
1:00:00Big indicator. Right? Like, people were doing we called them, like, pump and dumps to try to win the school games.
1:00:07They just launch, go hard, make all this money, win the school games, get their photo with Hormozi, run ads, piss Hormozi off, and then everyone would churn.
1:00:18And then we'd get complaints at customer support. This person's scam me, blah blah blah.
1:00:23And I was like, holy shit. This what have we done? The peak of it was when we started giving away Cybertrucks.
1:00:30It was crazy, and I called it the , and it it did. It went completely mad.
1:00:36There was, like, stories coming out, and people would DM me, and they're like, I don't like what's happening here or, like and I also saw some interesting things. Like, there were there were some communities on there that were, like, hobby based, like this guy, this doctor Seuss community, and it looked real cool.
1:00:55And it was about his passion, which was doctor Seuss and all of this. But he had closed it, shut it down, churned, and started a new one about how to make money on school.
1:01:06Yeah. And I asked him why, and it's because he had to pay $99 a month. And so the the even the price was forcing people to to make money.
1:01:17Right? And then the the the, meta or like the the most efficient tactic was to teach people how to make money with school on school.
1:01:27And when you get too many of those, it's incest, essentially. Right?
1:01:32And it and then people judge school as it's it's just like this MLM thing or Hustlebro thing or And so, you know, I'm seeing parts of this from all over the place, and I can detect, like, what it is.
1:01:47And then that's what led me to think the way out is $9 plan, but then the capital and then, you know, the VCs and Yeah. That was all kind of tied into one. You're trying to solve a problem similar to how I was back when I started school and raised the money to drop that and do this.
1:02:04It's like Yeah. Yeah. And and are the school games I think I heard you're changing how that's done.
1:02:11They're gonna be, like We did change them, like Yeah. A while ago, and we made them a lot cleaner. Like, we don't have the same problems as we did before.
1:02:18But now we're just stopping doing the school games because there's a new school game. The new school game is getting your packaging right and blowing up on Discovery.
1:02:30Right? Yeah. And we're already seeing it happen.
1:02:33And then the effect of that the side effect of that is MRR there will still be an MRR leaderboard and stuff because I love the transparency. And, you know, status emojis for different levels, like of MRR.
1:02:46Right? And then but just more like Evergreen always open, and you get a physical reward if you hold your MRR emoji for, like, ninety days or more.
1:02:58Very similar to how YouTube does their plaques. Right? Yeah.
1:03:01Yeah. So like let's say you get to a 100 k MRR, you maintain it for three months, you get your trophy shipped to you.
1:03:08You're still on the leaderboards. You've got your emoji. Right?
1:03:11So it's there's still, like, a game, but it's not, like, quarterly based trying to win a school game to come to an event.
1:03:20Like, we're removing that part. But there's absolute there's a better game now than there's ever been, honestly. Yeah.
1:03:26Yeah. That's gonna be super exciting. And one thing that has always impressed me about you is I remember one time we were on a call,
1:03:34and you were kind of showing me this feature in school. And then you would show me, like, a gaming website.
1:03:39And you'd be like, you see how they do this here with their engagement and their gamification? Like and then that was incorporated in school. And then you'd show me Airbnb and this one thing you liked about there and incorporating into that.
1:03:50And I think there was the same with Google. And you just mentioned, like, YouTube.
1:03:54And I think what really separates you as an entrepreneur is, I mean, it seems like you just love software and you have a great taste for what good products are.
1:04:06And so I'm curious if you can talk about how you think about that at all and
1:04:11how that's helped you create such a good product. Well, you know, I like I said, I've been using the Internet since before Google. Right.
1:04:20So I had to write down websites in my notebook and then go to them, and if I got a single letter wrong, it wouldn't work, right? And then to call my friend back to find out what their website was, I had to disconnect from the internet to call them. Yeah.
1:04:32That's where it began. And then Google changed everything.
1:04:37I was like, Google was insane. Google, to this day, is my favorite evolution of the Internet ever.
1:04:43And why is that? Think about what it did to the world. That's really what unlocked everything.
1:04:50Yeah. Before Google, you couldn't you had to go to the library or some shit.
1:04:55Right? Or you had Encarta. Oh, no.
1:04:58Encarta was the evolution after the insight. The Encarta physical copies, remember people had those in their bookshelves? Yeah.
1:05:05That was your knowledge base. Then they put it on a disc, and that was your knowledge base. And I remember exhausting that shit pretty quick.
1:05:13And then you needed to get on the internet, but then then you could get more, but you didn't know where to find it, so you had to like trade websites with your friends. Google just made it.
1:05:23You could just type in any word, and boom, there it was. That changed everything, honestly.
1:05:30And then, yeah, that was that blew my mind, and it it it really without that, the Internet would not be the same. And then, you know, all the other parts of the basically invented the Internet.
1:05:43Not really, but pretty much. Yeah. It it organized all the world's information on a way that there was a directory.
1:05:49Yeah. It's my favorite. And so and then, you know, using forums and then seeing what happened, and, you know, it was the combination of Google and forums that was very interesting.
1:06:02Mhmm. And then, you know, YouTube came out, and then the videos started being embedded in the forums. And so you were like, you've got a search engine, you've got a forum, you've got videos in there.
1:06:13And then seeing what Facebook groups did to that. Right? And then seeing what mobile apps did.
1:06:19And just being a using this stuff and experiencing it all over the time and being immersed in it, you just notice a lot of these patterns and and the evolution of things.
1:06:36Right? Mhmm. And these are also like world class products we're talking about.
1:06:40Like, Google was way like, Google was, like, revolutionary when it came out.
1:06:45So was Facebook, even YouTube. Right?
1:06:48Yeah. And so if that's your that's my you know, I always think that, like, people in order to make good stuff, you need to consume good stuff.
1:07:03Right? Like, you don't know what good is unless you've seen it. Right?
1:07:07I honestly think this is most people's problems. Like, they might think that their thing is good, but only because they don't know what good actually looks like.
1:07:15Yeah. And you can't create good unless you know what it is. Or even employees.
1:07:19Yeah. It's for everything. And you notice this too if you look at, like, the social network of all geniuses or, like, scientists or whatever.
1:07:31They had other people that like, they had good inputs, basically. So with
1:07:38do you know with the Brazilian jujitsu black belts, it's basically a spider web that all goes to, like, one or two people at the very top. And so this person influenced this person who influenced this person or this isn't it the same with, like, Newton and Galileo Yeah. That's what I'm saying.
1:07:53Yeah. And and those people. It's the other one is, it's either Bill Belichick or Bill Parcells.
1:07:59If you Google, like, the coaching mat or, like, who was inspired by Bill Parcells or Bill Belichick, it's one of those two. It's like all the coaches in the NFL literally came from, you know, almost that one guy.
1:08:11Because it's good inputs equal to good outputs. That's what you realize.
1:08:16And so it it's not like magic. Like, there's good so, like, I grew up with that.
1:08:22I experienced the whole evolution of the Internet. Mhmm.
1:08:26Right? Like, the whole damn thing. And so when I'm working on something, what I can draw from is quite interesting.
1:08:35Right? Yeah. I've also been all over the place.
1:08:37Like, because I was doing it before info just out of personal passion. Right? Like and even my first experience with info was as customer, not as a creator.
1:08:48Right? Yeah. So, you know, when I'm using things, think back to like, oh, that reminds me of when like Google did this or when YouTube did that, and then
1:09:00Yeah. Then I go back and read about it. Like, what was going on back then?
1:09:03And And and don't you think that's really like because I hear people say, oh, you know, taste is what matters now with AI or whatever. And then it's like, okay. Well, what is taste?
1:09:12And I think that's the best description of it. And also, the problem a lot of people have with AI and why it is just slump is because they don't know what good looks like, and they lack that taste.
1:09:24Would you agree? Yeah. And, you know, it's just it's wrong a lot.
1:09:28Like,
1:09:29I remember I said something to Kirby once. I was like, with Facebook, when you make a new account, does it ask you for your profile picture first or your bio?
1:09:38Then Koobie asked ChatGPT, and he said, oh, it said this. And I was like, I don't know. I I seem to remember it might be different.
1:09:45So I just opened Incognito, create a brand new burner account. It's the opposite. I'm like, see, you can't fucking use this thing for anything.
1:09:54Yeah. That's Like, if you start building something based on, you know, bad assumptions, every, like, choice and assumption you make, like, is important.
1:10:04It all adds up. Right? And you wanna be right as much as possible.
1:10:09And some things don't matter so much if they're right, and fine. AI is good for that.
1:10:14But there's some things you really wanna be right on, and I like to do things manually
1:10:21if I if it's high stakes. Yeah. Yeah.
1:10:24It's it's almost like if you wanna know the truth, you have to go analog and just write to the source. Yeah. So, like, I'll give you an example is we are creating another division of our company to address a different market where there's a labor supply shortage for recruiting.
1:10:36And there's a lot of good information I've gotten from AI, but what I'm doing right now is just setting up as many calls as I can with people who are on the front lines in that industry. And I guarantee what I have learned is probably gonna get a lot of those assumptions are gonna get shattered Yeah.
1:10:52Just because of essentially learning actually what's going on right now. Yeah.
1:10:57You I think it it leads to mania of some form. Right? Like, if you all you do is chat to, like, this AI thing.
1:11:05I still think the best information comes from doing it and talking to people who do it.
1:11:13Mhmm. Right? Like, that is very pure, very close to reality.
1:11:17It is reality. Right? And I do that all the time.
1:11:21Yeah. And then I might make an image or some shit with ChatGPT.
1:11:27Or if I say to Claude but, you know, you gotta be careful with with Claude too. Most people have no idea how, like I'll give you another example, which is pretty and Claude's pretty good.
1:11:38Right? Mhmm. So, like, I had two data sets.
1:11:40So I had a list of countries that were supported by one payment processor and a list of countries that were supported by another one. And I all I had two cleanly formatted CSV files, and I told it. I was like, tell me the countries that are supported in this one that aren't supported in this one.
1:11:57Very basic. Does it? I get the list.
1:12:00I start looking at it. Cool. Spotchy.
1:12:03North Korea. What? I'm pretty sure no one allows that one.
1:12:07Then I checked both sets. North Korea's not in any of the fucking sets. And I'm like, I can't trust this.
1:12:13Someone's gotta have to do this shit manually. Like Yeah.
1:12:17People have no idea what how much error they're amassing.
1:12:22You know?
1:12:24That is what's interest because we would like to think it increases productivity. And, I mean, my company uses a lot. Does.
1:12:29Right. But, also, it creates more work because in that example, even if you use Claude to go through those countries, it still creates the work of somebody having to QC basically the work that it did in the first place. Yeah.
1:12:42And if you QC it and it's right,
1:12:44you I would have probably accepted it. Right? Yeah.
1:12:46But, yeah, I think you it's definitely a useful tool. Mhmm.
1:12:52And we do use it, and we are more productive. But you gotta be pragmatic with how you use it.
1:12:58And when it's high stakes, you gotta be I wouldn't trust it with something so high stakes.
1:13:05Right? Like, if I'm doing a model, like a math model, like, I'm gonna do that by hand, and I'm gonna check every cell, like, in the in the spreadsheet.
1:13:13Right? Like, every formula. Like because I I don't want just some
1:13:18random answer. I wanna check every step. Do you know do you know what I mean?
1:13:22Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
1:13:23If you're a business owner who has appointment setters or an outbound sales team, you're gonna wanna hear what I have to say for a second. So a multiple 8 figure business owner texted me the other day, and when he started using dollar.io for the first time, his pickup rates went from 9% to 20%.
1:13:38So imagine doubling your pickup rates and ultimately the throughput of what your outbound salespeople and centers are gonna get. How does that impact your business? The answer is a lot.
1:13:46So if you wanna check out Dialogue for a phone sales outbound system, just click the link in the description or just go to Dialogue. Now back to the podcast. So now with where school's at, how does your day to day look in terms of what you're working on within the company?
1:14:02Yeah. It's I can basically bucket it into a few categories. Like, there's the road map.
1:14:07I basically own the road map.
1:14:09And that's like, what are we going to build next, and what are we building now? Right? We've got different teams, so there's many things being built in parallel.
1:14:19And we also need to be one or two steps ahead from engineering because you wanna think about what you need to make and then design it and then spec it and then even test it with users in conceptual phase to make sure it is something that they want before the engineers are ready to start working on it.
1:14:38Right? Mhmm. So you wanna stay a few steps ahead with that.
1:14:42So I'm thinking what should we do next? What does the road map look like? And which things should we give to what team?
1:14:50And then also the designs for it, the specs for it, and the validation from the users in the conceptual stage. I'm doing that, but at the same time, I'm also working with the engineers on the things they're building right now, because they've got questions live as they build it.
1:15:08Because things, details come up when you're writing code that you can't possibly think about in conceptual stage. Also, you know, they make it, and I gotta try it because it looked one way in the design, but when you use it, you feel what it's like to use.
1:15:22And the two are different. And sometimes when you use it, it's it's off. And so you've gotta iterate it a bit live before it's gonna go out.
1:15:31Right? All of that, testing it. So it's like working ahead of them, but also working on the things that they're working on.
1:15:38And then some changes when we ship them, you gotta monitor what happens after you ship it. Mhmm. Because things could go all over the place.
1:15:46So once you ship it, you've got to see what the users think of it. You've got to see if they're adopting it. You've got to see what it did to the data.
1:15:53Right? And there's many sides to school. Like, could have unforeseen consequences in in random places.
1:16:01Or you might ship it, and immediately, something's off, and you need to iterate it many times before it's right.
1:16:10And so that's what I mean about not planning too far ahead, because if you ship something and it needs iteration live, what they were gonna work on next gets pushed out until that thing is is ready to sit, and then you move on to the next one. But by the time you have shipped something and iterated it around and looked at the data, what's most important to do next might not be what you had originally planned.
1:16:33Which is why you only go out thirty days, partially? Yeah.
1:16:37Well, even though we're, like, thirty days out in terms of design, specs, validation, everything, that plan will change even within thirty days.
1:16:47Yeah. Because when you ship it, you don't know what's gonna happen. Right?
1:16:51Mhmm. So then that might not be your thirty day plan anymore. Because things change when you when you change something, things change.
1:16:59Right? And that changes your plan. Like, the general direction is still the same.
1:17:04Right? Like, we're building a community platform.
1:17:08It's a network. It's a marketplace. You know, we wanna get a billion users.
1:17:13That's all the same, but it's these little details. And also, like, there's a saying, like, the time you're best equipped to, like, solve a problem when you're, like, closest to it.
1:17:28The best time to solve a problem is when you're close to it. Mhmm. When a problem's far away and you're strategizing a solution, it's not a good time to do it.
1:17:35You might think you're being efficient by planning ahead, but by the time that that problem actually is a priority now, everything's changed.
1:17:44Right? So just leave the problem. Like, leave it alone.
1:17:48Like, you just focusing on that is is good because otherwise, if you force your plan just because it was your plan, that's kinda silly.
1:18:00Right? Yeah. Yeah.
1:18:03So I spend a lot of my time doing that, and that involves using the product. Like, I use the shit out of school, and I learn a lot from using it.
1:18:13Personal frustration. Right? Then I talk to people that use it a lot.
1:18:17Right? And then I also look at the data a lot. And then I talk to the team.
1:18:24And so that's a huge amount of it. Right?
1:18:28What else do I do? Do a lot of math, like about growth, earn, capital.
1:18:36You know, there's a bunch of math. But it's pretty straightforward. Then what else am I doing?
1:18:46I that's probably most of it. And then but there's also just if if there's a fire, I gotta put it out, and there's always some fucking fires.
1:18:55Right? Like, oh, we're getting attacked or, oh, like
1:19:01Can you talk at all about the attacks?
1:19:03Yeah. When you make social platform, like, there's a lot of bad actors that wanna, you know, participate.
1:19:11And especially these days with AI and bots and and all of that, it's pretty wild. Like, to have an open platform on the Internet is crazy these days. And so, yeah, you've got people trying to do fraud, spam, scam, bots, you know, like, everything you can kind of imagine.
1:19:33And what you don't realize until you do this is that there's an entire industry that's one of the fastest growing industries in the world that is scamming. And it's not the scamming that most people probably think, which is like a coarse person scamming.
1:19:48It's like Phishing. Yeah. It's it's like Nigeria's biggest industry.
1:19:55Oh my god. Yeah. And the government matches their scammings.
1:20:02The government what? Like, contribute like, matches their earnings. It's their national industry.
1:20:09Wow. Yeah. This is what you learn when you get into it, and then there's, like it's it's like a professional industry.
1:20:14And you said there's a tax on school almost every hour. Well, then then there's something else, which is just cybersecurity, which is, like, people trying to DDoS, people trying to, you know, people trying to I don't even know why some people are trying to do some shit.
1:20:26And, you know, it could just be some kid in some bedroom that just made something weird, or it could be some organized effort to, like, degrade a service or something.
1:20:38Either way, it's always coming at you, and you've gotta defend against it. Because, you know, if you bring school offline, like, it's that that really cripples us.
1:20:46Right. And everyone on school. Right?
1:20:49Like, you go to do your live call, and it's just not there.
1:20:52It can't be down. You know? So when you mentioned you you have multiple development teams, these teams are all full stack.
1:20:59Well, most teams are like
1:21:02probably like back end engineers, front end engineers, but typically front end engineers also work on some back end, but our back end engineers tend to only work on back end.
1:21:12They're like hardcore. And then like a QA person, quality assurance engineer, and a PM who's like the product manager slash leader of the team, and maybe a designer.
1:21:23So that these teams are about five to seven people. And between them all, they can do things end to end. Right?
1:21:29Right. And we have, like how many product teams do we have?
1:21:34I don't know. Five or something? Five.
1:21:35And they all report to Daniel?
1:21:39The teams? Yeah. Or did they report to you?
1:21:42Well, like, design and product is me, but the code because each thing is different.
1:21:48Like, when it comes to, like, what should we make and how it looks and feels, that's me. Yeah. But when it comes to how we should structure the code and whether it passes our checks to ship it into production, that's more like Daniel.
1:21:59Right? So, yeah, there's like two sides to it. Right?
1:22:02So there's a little bit of a crossover.
1:22:04There's a lot because it's the same thing essentially. Right? Like Have you thought all, you know, the big shift in, like, Silicon Valley right now is going from these hierarchical bureaucratic organizations to, like, founder mode, which is, you know, Brian Chesky's talked about it from Airbnb and Jensen Huang, and then Elon Musk runs his companies this way to where it's more flat.
1:22:25Have you thought about I mean, right now, school's in a place where you probably are pretty flat in terms of an organization. You know, when I heard Phantomode, was like, oh, damn.
1:22:32Now everyone's gonna use my strategy.
1:22:35That was my reaction. Was pissed. I was like, I wish you guys just keep going in that other direction.
1:22:39Yeah. Well, could you talk more about okay. So you've been thinking about that for a while, and you're like, okay.
1:22:42Clearly, that's the way to go. Can you talk more about that? It was honestly more just validation that my way was
1:22:48legit, because I had been fighting the opposite. Because, you know, you hear all of these sayings like good leaders hire good people and get out of their way.
1:22:58Right? And delegate, delegate, delegate. And it really sounds true and right because every business leader and expert and whatever says it, and then it becomes a thing that everyone repeats.
1:23:11So I even thought I was doing things wrong. Right? And then my team was even pressuring me a bit to do it that other way.
1:23:18But I had tried sometimes I'd tried some things, and I didn't really like how it went, and so I was very cautious about it. And I would I thought I was wrong, but I wasn't willing to do it, and I thought that made me extra wrong, because I was wrong and not willing to change. Yeah.
1:23:34Right? Which is the worst. I thought I was just like yeah.
1:23:40But then when I started to see that happening, I was like, oh, damn.
1:23:44Maybe this is the right way. Yeah. And then that gave me huge amount of confidence to just lean into it and not worry about it again.
1:23:51And what's interesting too, if you study the way Jensen Huang's done it, the the TLDR is basically, if you hire good enough people who are truly like like how you were describing Daniel. Mhmm. If you hire good enough people, you don't need this massive hierarchical organization because they can essentially self manage.
1:24:10And the amount of communication
1:24:11essentially, like, bandwidth that it takes between person to person isn't very high because they just know how to do the thing and self manage, and they're very, very talented. Yeah. That was interesting.
1:24:20I listened to his Joe Rogan one, or maybe it was Lix Freeman where he explained how many direct reports he had and and all that. Yeah. And that again gave me more validation because I have a ton of people that are supposed to report to me, but I don't do any one on ones.
1:24:34I used to because that's what business leaders said. I gave them up long ago and man, my life got better. Yeah.
1:24:41Like, was so much better, and I was kind of joking how much of a bad manager I am because I don't do one on ones. But then when I saw that, I was like, shit.
1:24:50There's even something to that. Yeah. You're just continuously getting more validated.
1:24:55Yeah. Because I was just instinctually, I'm like staring another person on Zoom.
1:24:59I'm like, how are going? And they're like, good. I'm like, okay.
1:25:03Got twenty eight more minutes left. Like and then I gotta do another one.
1:25:10Fuck. I just wanna build something. Like and I did that for, like, two or three years I went through that pain.
1:25:20Yeah. But then I was just like, fuck it. I'm not doing one on ones anymore.
1:25:23And I the thing is is I actually talk to the the people more because I talk to people when I need to talk to them.
1:25:32Yeah. Like, if I'm working on something, I'll get in a a a Slack cuddle with someone.
1:25:38It's not scheduled. It's not on the calendar. It might go for one minute.
1:25:42It might go for four hours. Just whatever needs to be done. Yep.
1:25:48And that just is in the moment kind of morphing around. It it trying to schedule and plan, like putting meetings on calendars, it it kills the the process.
1:26:00You need some things on the calendar. Like, we have a stand up for each team. Right.
1:26:03Like a stand up meeting. That's a nice, consistent for for the team. We have an all hands once a week.
1:26:09So every team has a stand up, which can be, like, sometimes four minutes, sometimes an hour, depends what what there is to discuss. And the whole company has one all hands, which is, like, thirty minutes once a week.
1:26:21Those are the only things that are, like, scheduled. Those are the only things on my calendar.
1:26:28Everything else is open space for whatever needs to be done, which might be talking to a user. It might be
1:26:37designing, building, talking to an engineer. Like yeah. Yeah.
1:26:40I find that one on ones can be an excuse to just not talk to your employees for six days of the week. And one of the things I encourage my managers to do is just pick up the phone and call people. And so, like, even even David Dre, like, one thing that he does do really well is he just calls his sales reps every single day.
1:26:57Now what do they talk about sometimes? I don't I mean, they were talking about, you know, Call of Duty or who knows. Right?
1:27:03Or he's dusting them off after they had a bad day, but it's that frequent. It could just be a five minute call. But if I think about the people I'm most in sync with in my company, it's the people who I'm always just like, I'm not even gonna type out of Slack.
1:27:16I just pick up the phone, and I have a three minute conversation. Done. Yeah.
1:27:21Yeah. And I think you gotta be careful too with all the advice. I'm not trying to give any advice here, but I don't do one on ones.
1:27:30But if every manager in our company didn't do one on ones, it wouldn't work. Yeah. Yeah.
1:27:33So we have managers, and they do do one on ones, and that is extremely important for functioning of the, like, of the organization.
1:27:43Right? Though we do have an interesting thing we do with managers. So, like, we only hire, like, individual contributors to people that do it.
1:27:54We don't like people that don't do it. Mhmm. So the only people we've made a product manager are people who have been software engineers and then got into engineering management.
1:28:07So, like, those are the only people we let do it because they can still actually write code, and they thoroughly understand it. And then they're only managing the people that are on their team, so it's in context of what's being built.
1:28:23Right? So if we do it like that, it's it works really well.
1:28:28But if you just have a manager whose sole job is to show up to one on ones, they don't
1:28:34and they don't know what their manage their report does. Yeah. But that's where management gets all Well, I would say that I I would say that that is not even just tech.
1:28:44That's just what management should be across every single position. I mean, if you think about sale, how are you gonna coach a salesperson when you don't know how to sell?
1:28:52Right? Or if you have a client success manager, how are you gonna coach that person if you were never done the role? But there is some interesting ones, like,
1:29:00did that guy who taught the bulls, did he ever play basketball?
1:29:05Phil Jackson? Yeah. Was he?
1:29:07No. He played. It just he was nowhere near as obviously good as the people play, though.
1:29:11I'm almost positive he played, but he where it's coming from is he was a bet far better coach
1:29:19than he was a player, I think. I could be totally wrong. But that's what I'm get that's what I'm trying to get at about advice.
1:29:25I don't want anyone to think that any one thing I'm saying is, like, the way. Because you can find I find that almost everything I I find is, like, a counter to it that proves that it's not even true.
1:29:38Right. I think almost anything can work, and everyone's gotta find their own style. You know?
1:29:42Yeah. Because if it works, who gives a shit what anyone says?
1:29:48Yeah. You know? Well, in a lot of the most successful companies are just very direct reflections of the founder.
1:29:54Yeah. I think that's true.
1:29:56I think the good stuff comes when you when you let it naturally form. Like, be what happened with Jensen and a lot of these people, it's it's just he, you know, he probably had tried the other ways, but then just gave up and then just went with his gut or something, and it turned out to be better.
1:30:16It it is to, like, naturally evolve versus trying to just copy some playbook.
1:30:21Do do you know what mean? Yeah. Yeah.
1:30:23Well, people want to not think, which is why they like AI a lot. And so, you know, I think Dan Kennedy, he has this saying that people's , and they're just trying to go plug it in somewhere.
1:30:36You know, it's almost like people in the course industry, it's it's like they're always looking for the next course to tell them exactly how to get to that next level. I've talked to Amozi about this a little bit. It's like when you it's the difference between first party and third party data.
1:30:50Mhmm. Right?
1:30:51When you're not doing anything, you have no first party data. So you can't use it. Right?
1:30:57So all you can really work off is third party data from other people's experience. Right? So you read books and whatever, and you learn from them, and there's definitely a lot to be learned there.
1:31:08Like, if you can learn something without having to go through it, that's great. Right?
1:31:12You you can that's how evolution got really good.
1:31:17It's when we could learn from other people's experience. Right.
1:31:21And so that's how I think people start in the game and info, and there's definitely a period where you're mostly consuming and learning and and all of that. But once you get going and people should as I say this, I realized that people should just get going right away anyway and get that first party done Yeah.
1:31:38Yeah. Real quick. But and then maybe they don't need to go through that whole journey.
1:31:42But once you're doing it, you can see what's working and what's not, and that's that's the most important data versus what someone is saying.
1:31:53Right? Because I was doing I was doing it and realizing I didn't like one on ones, and I liked the style. But if I was looking at what the third party data said, was to delegate, get out of people's way.
1:32:05Right? It can be very confusing when you're you don't have a lot of confidence in your style and stuff, Because these two are often, like, at opposite ends.
1:32:18Do do you get what I'm saying? Yeah. Well and it goes back to what you're saying about intuition because the way I think about intuition, if you wanna make it more science y, is it it's essentially information stored in your body about your first party data and your real world experience.
1:32:33And so we can't, like, analyze all that information at once, but you're kind of think con you think it's local then? Yes. I think it's kind of like your gut feeling it's local.
1:32:44You think it's something that I think you tune to it. Oh, like it's something that, uh, like a frequency. Yeah.
1:32:51Yeah. Yeah. Mhmm.
1:32:52Like a like a radio wave. Yeah. Interesting.
1:32:55And there's some interesting if you wanna talk about the science of it, there's
1:33:00this thing you can look up. It's called the Global Consciousness Project. It's run by Princeton.
1:33:04It's been running for, I don't know, twenty years or something. They get these random number generators, truly random, like prop and entropy.
1:33:13They put it they put them all around the world in different locations. They're all independent. But they generate their datas, their random numbers here, every few seconds, and they send it back to a central server.
1:33:24And then they analyze the data sets to see if there's correlation, and most of the time, there's not, which shows you that randomness is random, right? But there's these moments moments where it spikes, and there's insane correlations.
1:33:40And it the biggest one there's been was nine eleven. The second biggest one was the most televised Olympics. Interesting.
1:33:49Yeah. And so there was a spike
1:33:51during those moments? Where the data sets were too closely matching for it not to be random. And what what's the represent the data sets are what exactly again?
1:34:00Random numbers. Random numbers. Like, you know, like, you can use a random number generator and generate truly random numbers.
1:34:08Right? And it should there should be no correlation between them, and there isn't most of the time.
1:34:16But when a lot of people observe or tune into the same thing, it tends to change Yeah.
1:34:24Probability.
1:34:25Is that because of, like, that quantum entanglement? Or how would you explain that from
1:34:30Fuck. I don't know how quantum physics quantum scientists.
1:34:34But, like Well, I don't know. I mean, that would that that that was out of left field, that was pretty interesting.
1:34:39Maybe I thought you knew. No. I because, know, people talk about intuition and stuff, but this
1:34:44and then there's that, which is very scientific. And they're not saying this is what it is. It's just this is what they're observing, and it it's real, and you can go see it.
1:34:52It's it's all on the Internet.
1:34:56But I think it's that I think what it is is that conscious attention on something changes the probability of it.
1:35:11Yeah. Right? Reflexivity.
1:35:12There's like an observer effect, and there and I think that is you know, there's all of these, like, inventions that happen where people seem to have the ideas at the same time kind of thing.
1:35:28Right? Yeah. And when you listen to, like, musicians talk about how they write songs or whatever, whenever they ever bang it, it, like, it seems to, like they say it, like, comes through them.
1:35:41Yes. They don't it's like they're just It's what I say when I have a great sales call. Yeah.
1:35:47Yeah. Even though that's not as cool as writing, like, a Beyonce song or whatever. Yeah.
1:35:51And sometimes I'm just like, oh my god. It's all coming at me right now. And it's just like just just all coming.
1:35:58And it's and I don't know where from. Like, I don't know how to explain it, but there's definitely something there.
1:36:06Like, that there's something there, and I think that's where intuition comes from. It also comes from experience.
1:36:14Experience. Right? But that's the more, like, practical part of it.
1:36:18But how do you explain the things where there wasn't experience? Right? And I love listening to, like, psychic phenomenon scientists and and how they've done all of these experiments and stuff, like precognition, like, you know, how does, like, a dog know that their owner is coming down the street kind of things.
1:36:39Or, like, even with there's a lot of this with animals. They just they have a lot of good instinct. Right?
1:36:44Humans definitely have really good instincts when when they're Tuned. Yeah.
1:36:51Or when they're not ruined, more like it. Like Yeah. I think the have beats it down.
1:36:57Yes. Children have them for sure. And and so, like, I don't think I think it's something you can, like, tune into and that it's not all local.
1:37:09I've also noticed this because when I went back to New Zealand during COVID, I would have certain thoughts, but then those thoughts started to fade, and I had these new kinds of thoughts.
1:37:23And the thoughts that I was having that were new were like what everyone else was talking about and thinking about in that country. So it was almost like I was losing my connection to to the market and was getting pulled into another one, which I thought was interesting.
1:37:40It could've just been because I was there or whatever, but it felt like I was losing my sense of it, like the market, and I needed to get back. Yeah.
1:37:49Right? This is getting pretty, like,
1:37:52I don't know, weird, I guess. I I think it's pretty cool, though. You wanna hear something also weird.
1:37:57We we, uh, we're talking about this on the way here or no. Maybe, uh, yesterday when we were driving. But, you know, the George Soros' principle of reflexivity about the markets and observing the market actually changes the and it even changes the markets.
1:38:11Read that book? Uh, I read the first chapter. Which one?
1:38:14Alchemy and finance? Yes. Okay.
1:38:15And then I was like, okay. It's reflexivity, observer of the market. Am I a trader?
1:38:19No. Okay. I'm gonna read something else.
1:38:21Well, know what's interesting is that, first of all, it's called alchemy of finance. Right.
1:38:26Those two words don't usually go together. And then the name of his fund, Quantum Fund. Right?
1:38:32Yeah. There's clues like that the way this dude's thinking about financial markets is very different. Yeah.
1:38:39Yeah. And, also, if you kinda, like, trace back modern economics, it kinda comes from from Newton.
1:38:47Like, it it works a lot like physics. Right? It does.
1:38:50Yes. Yeah. And that's because it at one point, the UK government or something got Newton to help fix the economy, and a lot of modern economic theory comes from Newtonian physics.
1:39:04But the markets it's it's like we're using physics to apply to something that isn't physical. It doesn't map properly, actually.
1:39:13There's many you know, like, one clue in economics is
1:39:18these assumptions that participants are perfectly rational and have perfect information like Yeah. Which is like a well, that's also the the whole, uh, Daniel Kahneman, I think, is about what's the book? Predictably Irrational.
1:39:32Right? Where
1:39:33that basically debunked all of that. And the sense your two assumptions, like, I mean, that was pretty easy to validate that those are wrong.
1:39:42Yeah. Perfect information and rationality. Come on.
1:39:45And so Soros' whole view of this was exploiting it.
1:39:52Because it was based on Newtonian physics, he would take a quantum view on it. Right?
1:39:58Yeah. Which is he he found the flaws in the theory, and that's like he shorted the Bank of England and broke the pound.
1:40:07Know, he he done he's done some crazy shit. And when you read, like, how he does it too, like, he said his biggest trades often manifested as a pain in his lower back.
1:40:20Like, very, like not how you would expect one of the greatest traders to talk about trades.
1:40:29It was feeling and instinct, for, like, betting on it, but then you quickly find out if you're right or not, right?
1:40:39But everyone who's at the highest level, there's an extreme amount of instinct and intuition.
1:40:46Intuition. Yeah. I mean, even Newton, if you go back with that.
1:40:50Right? Uh-huh. Yeah.
1:40:51I've looked at the stuff I find kinda interesting. I haven't looked at the stuff for a while, though. Yeah.
1:40:57Do you find
1:40:58like, you know, Jay Abraham says when you take an idea from a different industry and combine it in the industry that you're in, you can create an explosion, right, in a good way?
1:41:08Do you find that looking in different places like physics, biology, art, for instance,
1:41:18does practically help you with business? You're it's like if you're a painter. Right?
1:41:22I just think of myself. I'm like a painter. I got a canvas and a brush, and what do I have in my palette?
1:41:29Right? Like, what what have I got to use? And that gives you a lot of different colors.
1:41:37Right? Like, if I can pull from economics or Newton or Soros or Global Consciousness Project or, you know, Google's evolution, YouTube's early Internet, you know, like, this is a lot of good stuff, right, that you can pull in to make whatever you're making.
1:41:58And so, yeah, 100%. Like, you a lot of people, I think, are just too one dimensional.
1:42:04They only know about one thing, and what they know about that one thing is what everyone else sees about that one thing. Well, I mean, you're gonna be able to make something that is the same.
1:42:14Right? Yeah. And so if you look at the greatest inventions, they tend to come from outsiders.
1:42:22Like like Elon With SpaceX.
1:42:26Yeah. Yeah. Made rockets.
1:42:27He got into cars. Right? And then you there's a there's a an advantage to being an outsider where you don't have all the dogma on you, and you're, like, naive, and you find these new ways.
1:42:42Right? But also cross pollinating ideas between industries is huge. Yeah.
1:42:48Like, you know, I saw that with info. I was like, I thought, what if I applied platform tech with like info?
1:42:59Like that, that's never been done. Right? Like, the tech in here is pretty pretty average.
1:43:06Like, if I bought the best? And then what if I networked it? Like, that's that's interesting.
1:43:12Right? And what if I bought the best talent to the problem too? Because, you know, you you usually weren't getting like, we've got engineers from, like, SpaceX, Coinbase, Meta, like, some of the best.
1:43:27Info hasn't had those people working on their shit. No. No.
1:43:31So, like, I thought this will be interesting if I bring these things together. Right? The thing I will say, though, is when I was exploring those different things, I wasn't intentionally doing it because I thought I would later use it to do something.
1:43:45It's just I follow my my interests.
1:43:50Yeah. Like, sometimes if something's pulling me in a direction, I'll I'll let it carry me a little bit, like wandering, exploring.
1:43:58Well, that's what I do with my reading is my only rule of reading and why I read so much is not because I'm, like, super disciplined. I just only try to read what I'm most interested in in the moment. And what's interesting is, like, that I went through a whole phase where he knows.
1:44:14Where I was, uh, you know, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington. I was reading the Oxford history of The United States, which is about the dry but for whatever reason, I was just into it.
1:44:25Now I'm into, um,
1:44:27you know, physics, and I was talking earlier about series of men who built America?
1:44:32I I have it. I know what you're talking about. I have not seen it.
1:44:35The best bang of that one. That's good? Oh, yeah.
1:44:37It's like early America before, like,
1:44:41titan dudes like Carnegie, Rockefeller. Before them.
1:44:45It starts before them. You see the rise up of the first one. I I forget who came first, if it was Carnegie.
1:44:51I think it was Carnegie. Yeah. Like, it's showing you the evolution of America from because it's a network.
1:44:58Right? Yeah. It needs rails, literally.
1:45:03So the the the evolution of the railroads, the evolution of oil, and the oil uses the railroads, and the refining, and and, you know, the how basically America came to be, and some of the most, like, badass business people.
1:45:21Right? Yeah. I learned a ton from that, and it was highly entertaining because it's a TV series.
1:45:27Yeah. Yeah. But that was just I was actually having entertainment, but also learning.
1:45:33But going there's, you know, there's not many people that have done really great things when you think about it. There's not a ton. And I think if you learn from them, those are that's all I really learn from.
1:45:45Like, I wanna learn from people who have done x like, the outlier people, and I hear about what they did, even if I don't know how it's relevant to me, because I find later, there's little pieces that I can just pull from.
1:45:56And I think when you when you look at enough of it, you realize it's all the same. Yeah. One thing about those that group of people is the one thing they all had in common.
1:46:04So Carnegie, Jay Gold, Rockefeller, and, uh, there's one more I'm missing, is they knew the numbers and the financials of their business better than everybody else, which at that time was a very new concept.
1:46:19So, like, for instance, Carnegie, in the steel industry, nobody was actually, like, running their steel factory or whatever it was with, you know, the theory of constraints and an idea about production and, um, really, like, making sure that they were limiting costs. You know?
1:46:35And then they also that's where really the economies of scale Yeah. And then all the conglomerations first came up.
1:46:41But the interesting parallel to today is if you think about who are the top people in every industry, you know, if you think about Hermozzi, like, he can basically break down your business into a couple of numbers and then know exactly what's going on in your business. Right?
1:46:55Same thing with, like, I, uh, listened to a lot of interviews with this guy, Tommy Mello. He happens to be like my neighbor. But he's, like, the top guy in the think about Hormozi for the home service industry.
1:47:05So he's, like, the top guy. And the way he just, like, you can tell he knows numbers of that business better than anybody in his industry does.
1:47:16And I think back when I hear that stuff to kinda how, you know, Rockefeller, Carnegie, all those guys were. Yeah.
1:47:22They're definitely, like, special people and very talented. But I I what I find most interesting, I think, is the the actual story and how they navigated the journey.
1:47:35Yeah. Right? Like, from when he was a kid to, like, owning global oil.
1:47:40Okay? Like, there's many steps in that process, and how did he evolve through it?
1:47:45I almost learned more from the journey than, like, the specific points. Yeah.
1:47:51Well, you learn more about you know, it's even like Napoleon. Like, what I really got from Napoleon and reading about him was just his stance towards life and I mean, how how much he valued speed, which sounds like such a he valued speed.
1:48:07But if you really read about it, I mean, just the stories are ridiculous to where, like, as soon as he would figure out somebody was mounting a force, like, he would just basically cut all the supply lines, not not barricade down any of the cities and just go surround the forest before they even had time to mount.
1:48:24Mhmm. And that was, like, very unheard of at that time. But it's like a stance Yeah.
1:48:27Towards
1:48:28it's always the way. But it's also kinda hard because Orthodox is Orthodox for a reason. Yes.
1:48:35It it is probably the current best known tactic. Well, but that that means it's hard to improve upon, but it also means that if you can,
1:48:48you will change things. What was part of when you were talking about the info industry being fragmented and trying to add the platform to the industry to be able to raise up the industry, I didn't say it at the time, but what I was thinking about is that is how Rockefeller thought of of the oil industry.
1:49:05So, you know, there was, like, this fragmentation. And, you know, he's a very interesting guy because he was also not I mean, he was very money driven, but it was also he felt like similar to Napoleon that he had a divine right Yeah.
1:49:19To own that industry. Other thing you'll find. Yeah.
1:49:21And that's very common. After a train near train crash. Yeah.
1:49:25Yeah. And, um, the fragmentation of the oil industry, like, gutted him to his core.
1:49:32He hated it. He thought it was disorderly. He thought it was like he almost thought it was against his religion in some ways.
1:49:38Like, it was undivine. And that was you know, because he had some tactics that obviously are suspect in terms of how he consolidated the entire industry basically into one company.
1:49:49But the reason he justified it was because of, you know, he thought it was undivine. He didn't like the disorder, etcetera.
1:49:56So I'm not saying you're doing that with our industry, but I'm curious if you took some you're you're doing it the ethical way, but I'm curious if you took some inspiration, uh, from that. Or maybe you just noticed it was kind of similar.
1:50:06Well, of course. Yeah.
1:50:08Like, that's what I mean about the the thing might be different, but the evolution or the the shape or the pattern of it maps.
1:50:19So that's a lot of the time what I'm trying to do is I'm like, this is the situation. What can I map it to? And I'm like scanning, and it's like something random that's that isn't the same, but it it has a similar shape or pattern to it.
1:50:33Right? Yeah. Yeah.
1:50:34Whereas I think a lot of people just look at it very much like one to one. Like, here's the situation. Who has had this exact situation?
1:50:42Right? Which is kinda limiting.
1:50:45But sometimes that's all you need. But sometimes do you get what I'm trying to say?
1:50:51Yeah. You have to take the inspiration.
1:50:53It it's a lot of it, I think, of too is if you just spend time thinking about, let's say, their journey or what have you. Sometimes I'm reading a book and like the book about Napoleon, look, I'm not going to go conquer, you know, all of Europe. Okay?
1:51:07Mhmm. But I was reading that book and I would get ideas about my business that kind of don't really have to do with the book.
1:51:15But I think when you're feeding in really high quality information, sometimes you just get really high quality stuff out, and there's kinda no rhyme or reason to it. Exactly.
1:51:24I think a lot of the time, it comes easier from a totally irrelevant place.
1:51:27Like, so long as that person is at the absolute top by a mile Yes. The there's there's information there that's extremely useful that's probably unknown in your space.
1:51:39Right? Like, remember, I I don't even watch basketball. I don't think I've ever seen a game.
1:51:44Right? Got no interest. But I do know that Michael Jordan was, like, the best.
1:51:49Yeah. And so I watched every documentary. And this one shocked me because I heard about how, like, savage Michael Jordan was and everything.
1:51:57I was like, this this guy is probably, like, dark and, like, cold and calculated and all of this shit. The first thing he says in a super loving way in this this is in the the movie Michael Jordan to the Max.
1:52:12Okay. I've not seen it. It's probably my favorite one.
1:52:14It's an old school one. Yeah. He's playing basketball with some children, and he says, the thing everyone always asks me is what's the secret to being the best basketball player in the world?
1:52:25And he said, the key is to fall in love with the game. That was it. And then you see him playing with these kids, and he's enjoying it, and you can tell that, oh, this guy just loves basketball, and it's all he wants to do.
1:52:37And that is there was emotion and love at the core of the greatest, most savage person ever, like, in basketball.
1:52:48Do you know what I mean? Yeah. That that shocked me.
1:52:50I was like, woah.
1:52:53And that made me think about my industry, and if I had that, and I didn't. And so I thought, well, what do I have that for?
1:53:04Right? Mhmm. You see, it it I got a lot from that, and that's why passion, I thought, was really at the core of this.
1:53:13And now it's actually being proven with what's popping naturally in the market. Yes. It's this.
1:53:19Yeah. Like, the everyone popping is, like, passionate, and you can tell they're not doing it for, like,
1:53:27just for the money. They are making money, but there's something there. It's the difference between Apple and all the other tech companies.
1:53:34Like, Apple is a company that genuinely like, sometimes if we think about Facebook, you know, granted I run a lot of Facebook ads, it made my life better.
1:53:42But I think, like, to the average person, if they think about Facebook, they're probably like, yeah. I I use it.
1:53:48I don't want it to go away, but they kinda know TikTok's a great example. Even the people who use it, I think there's a study that's like 80% of the people use it think it makes their life worse or something along those lines. And Apple's, you know, one of the only products I think in that era that almost everybody genuinely is like, this made my life better.
1:54:07Mhmm. And I think a part of it is like the intentionality that was put behind the products and how Steve Jobs, you know, the culture he ran that it wasn't just all about money.
1:54:17And it was about the passion of creating great products, and they always started with design first and engineering second, not the other way around, which at that time was unorthodox.
1:54:27Well, that's what you know, because I started learning business from business people, And when you learn business from business people, it's very much about business, right?
1:54:35Which is like money, profit, blah blah blah, accounting. But then I thought, well, let's see what, like, the best guys ever do.
1:54:44And I was expecting a more extreme version of that, but it's something very different. And I'm like, woah. So you mean, like, the greatest of all time weren't even businessmen?
1:54:54They they have a business, but they didn't want to be in business. Right. It was just the structure they needed to do what they wanted to do.
1:55:02Yeah. Like, Elon's an engineer. Yeah.
1:55:04You know? He wants to make things and do things, and businesses are structures. Right?
1:55:09And and you need resources. Right? It's like if you're playing Warcraft, you need to chop wood.
1:55:15Right? Like, no shit. You need some fucking wood chopping back in the day.
1:55:19You need some fucking money Yeah. To to feed everyone and to build.
1:55:25Yeah. That's all I see it is. It's just like my guys chopping wood and getting gold, like, so that we can do shit.
1:55:34It's the same thing. That's very cool.
1:55:38What do you think is next for school? I know that you are in a place where I think you're kinda not shipping anything
1:55:45for a while. Oh, we're shipping a lot, but it's not features. The the school's changed now in that, like, a lot of the the things are there.
1:55:53Right? What now people want growth.
1:55:57People want members. That's and putting growth into the product, it there's a lot going on, but it's it doesn't appear as a feature to you.
1:56:06It's all hidden. Right? But we're shipping changes to that many times a day.
1:56:15That's how we order the search results. Right? Algorithms there, how we show the trending on the homepage, algorithms there, how we run the ads and optimize the ads.
1:56:25So, like, it's all we're working on it, but it's not things that show up as features. Right?
1:56:32You get it? The other thing is is just internationalization. Like, school's extremely international.
1:56:39Our fastest growing markets are, like, you know, not they're, like, all very international, and, like, payments don't really work in in international markets.
1:56:50This is something you don't know until later, but, like you know, Germany doesn't really use credit cards. They like PayPal.
1:56:57And Asia likes WePay and stuff. And in Latin America and shit, like, they have their own things, and their cards don't even work on a US merchant.
1:57:10Like, there's a lot of this, and you learn some fascinating rules, like in Africa, parts of it, that the maximum amount that citizens are allowed to spend out of their country is $10 a year, and they save it for their summer vacation.
1:57:24And so, like, there's a whole lot of shit there to make to connect to truly bring the whole world onto school.
1:57:34You need the payment methods to all work. You need the payouts to work too.
1:57:40Like, we need to pay money out. We need to get money in. And when that money goes out, it needs to be fast and reliable.
1:57:46Right now, it can take up to ten days in some countries. So we're, like, trying to get payouts to every country and really fast, pay ins in every payment method, and because then you can open up buying and selling, like, globally.
1:58:01Mhmm. That's an enormous project that we're working on. The other one is languages.
1:58:07Right? So we're working on that right now. And then there's currencies.
1:58:15I wouldn't necessarily call these features. Right? Right.
1:58:18But they're absolutely things. They're massive engineering.
1:58:22It's accessibility. Yeah. That's how I think of it.
1:58:25You know, you've got core features, a utility, then these things are accessibility. And then the other one, growth, is more like an optimization thing.
1:58:34But we're doing all of that right now so that soon enough, when you visit school, you would see a discovery that's fully in Spanish, that the UI is in Spanish, but the content's in Spanish.
1:58:49And you see the ads in Spanish, right? And it's like there's this whole world of school. And this already exists right now, by the way.
1:58:55It's just the UI is not in Spanish. Mhmm. But there's a Spanish discovery that's vast.
1:59:02Yeah. Like, there's a whole economy on school that's just in Spanish. So, like, soon enough, when you visit school, it'll be in your language, the UI and the content, and in your currency, and work with your payment method just dynamically without you doing anything.
1:59:17So it's like, no matter where anyone in the world is, your one landing page just adapts to, like, everything.
1:59:25Do you do you know what I mean? Oh, so even if you're let's say, I have a sales community or what have you. Right?
1:59:31That all can go into the span like, the Spanish market with Spanish payments, etcetera, even if I'm English. I was almost thinking you were talking about if you if I was somebody trying to create a community in Spanish, that I would have more accessibility that ways.
1:59:46I mean, I know that's true, but Yeah. So
1:59:50at least say someone in Latin America wants to buy your shit on school, like, it's hard right now. I mean, it can work, but it's Latin America is very hard for payments.
2:00:02Um, it's why a lot of it took companies like Amazon and stuff a long time to understand the market. Not everyone uses cards, and every market's different. Um, and so it's quite hard for someone there to pay you right now.
2:00:16And even if you're a creator, are trying to get money out as hard from like as a payout. Right? So, you know, that they would that'll be frictionless soon.
2:00:30Like they would see their like, let's say your price is a grand USD. They would see it in their currency and with their payment method. So it feels natural to them and it's frictionless.
2:00:41Right? Mhmm. And then if they spoke Spanish, the the UI might be Spanish, but your content would still be English.
2:00:48Right?
2:00:51Does that make sense? Like Makes sense. Yeah.
2:00:53It it removes a huge amount of friction. Like, because people in in Europe are used to seeing euros and paying with different payment methods.
2:01:03When they see dollars in a credit card form, it's not that's friction. And so if we can if we can make it so that the whole world sees what they're most familiar with, but it all works, then we can truly open up like global trade in this industry.
2:01:21I I know it doesn't exist right now for sure. It's highly fragmented. And that's why there's these massive players in these different regions.
2:01:29They've figured out a region, and they have almost a monopoly there, but they haven't got this other region. No one's connected at all, really.
2:01:37What's interesting is all the there do you know in almost
2:01:41a lot of these different languages, there's a person, a business who has my exact same offer. Yeah.
2:01:48I was getting through my program.
2:01:51And I'm like, I mean, because I can't access that market. So I'm like, well, you speak English. Right now, you can do it on school.
2:01:56You go to discovery. You change your see what's number one in English. It might be something about Claude.
2:02:01Change to German, Claude. Spanish, Claude. Very cool.
2:02:05Well, it just shows you that Claude is trending not just in English. It's an and and often someone will see someone who's making something work in English, and they will create a version of it in Chinese or whatever.
2:02:18That's just how the world's always worked. Right? And I guess you don't really care because if someone can't speak English, you can't really serve them.
2:02:25Right. Yeah. Yeah.
2:02:27But it's really cool to see that happening. Just connecting the whole world and, oh, like, I think of it like a global financial system.
2:02:38Like, how can everyone trade properly on on here, and how can we surface quality? Yeah.
2:02:46Right? And how can we get how can we make sure that because really what people are looking for is quality, and it's right now, it's hard to find.
2:02:53You've got to use all of these heuristics and proxies and things, and you've to go through a minefield to find the truth. I just wanna, like, surface it so it's just there. Yeah.
2:03:03And then I think when people see that that's what works here, more people will do that, and that will just make the industry better. Right?
2:03:12Because it it's making everyone, like, optimized for truth instead of, like, other things. Yeah.
2:03:20Yeah. It's interesting because
2:03:22similar to what we were talking about earlier with the railroads, it's almost like you've identified all of the nodes, and you're trying to construct all the rails, so to speak, you know, to essentially be able to have, like you said, everything be able to interact globally, dynamically.
2:03:40Did you ever hear about Bretton Woods?
2:03:43The, uh, the gold or when they went The creation of the, like, modern financial system. Yeah. Yes.
2:03:51Was think I always was think so Bretton Woods was when they pegged it to the gold dollar after World War also when they agreed on global trade. Yes. And they said all the payment whales, swift, and all that stuff, which gave The US the ability to mapped the project to.
2:04:04Really? So you read all about that. I read all about Bretton Woods and how it happened.
2:04:07Because I was like, this is kind of what's going on here. There's all these countries, and they can't bloody trade with each other. Yeah.
2:04:14And then I'm trying to figure this shit out, and this happened before at a much larger scale than school.
2:04:21It was the whole world economy. But Yeah. You know, it was still just a bunch of people working with concepts, trying to find a system that would allow people to integrate together in work and trade.
2:04:34Right? And that's the system that we've used since, what, nineteen forty something? '19, I think, '45 and then until '19 either '71 or '73.
2:04:43And then since then, it's been pure chaos. But, also, there hasn't been a Great Depression since then.
2:04:51That was their main idea. Like, let's not make let's make sure that it doesn't happen again, and it and it's kind of succeeded in that, honestly. It has been kind of all over the place, but it it hasn't been that bad.
2:05:07You know? Yeah. So when you think because, obviously, you could probably go into a bunch of detail of that.
2:05:12But if you had to think about what was the number one insight then you took from Brenton Woods that
2:05:18you've used in school? It's probably more just like you realize that there's all of these things that you just you take for granted, but like, you know, just time, for example.
2:05:33But when you really think about it, someone invented a concept. Like, what even is time? It's not there.
2:05:39It isn't something. Mhmm. It's a concept.
2:05:42Right? Time. But you everyone's using it, and, you know, and then to make it work, they have to invent time zones and daylight savings and all kinds of other things.
2:05:54But it's just a concept. Right? And these concepts layer on top of each other.
2:06:01Even languages, conceptual math, you know, all of these things.
2:06:07But, like, even the financial system is, again, concepts, like currencies, exchange rates, all of this, and global trade.
2:06:21And when you realize that I and when you realize it was just made by, like, some people in a room, it's it's kinda interesting. I don't think most people realize that, that these are just things made by some people.
2:06:37And so learning it when I realized that, was like, woah. This is similar to, like, what I'm doing, but obviously not the same. And some of the problems they were trying to solve were kind of the same.
2:06:49Most the most interesting thing was the the exchange rates.
2:06:55Like, how do you consolidate all of that together? Right? Especially with what we do, which is subscription.
2:07:01Because if you if it's one time, it's it's simple. You do a live FX quote. Boom.
2:07:06Done. But when it's subscription, what happens the second month? Because the creator expects the same amount, the member expects to pay the same, but these things are moving all the That is wild.
2:07:18I didn't even thought I never even thought about that. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't wanna, like,
2:07:24share all of my
2:07:27How you're overcoming it. Right? Because this is obviously relevant to to so many people.
2:07:31No. I think it's very interesting. But interesting for sure, but also just not super relevant to understand.
2:07:38But that problem has fascinated me for, like, a couple years. It's also why we haven't touched currencies because I haven't known how to best approach it.
2:07:50And that's what they were trying to figure out then. Right? And their solution was to peg it to USD and and all of this.
2:07:57And that is kinda interesting with what I'm doing now. Again, it's like you see what I'm trying to say?
2:08:02It's like having this broad understanding of things, which was never my strategy.
2:08:10I just always followed my interests and thought I was kinda weird and just looked at weird shit. But you have a good library to draw on when you get to these different things. Instead of going to Claude and being like, who Claude?
2:08:23How do I do this? Like, come on.
2:08:25Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sometimes Claude can give you a pretty good a pretty good answer, so, like, why not give it a go?
2:08:32But, like, it's not gonna make you great. Yeah. You know?
2:08:35Well, and you also have to not just you have to question
2:08:39the answer. You know? Or even the question.
2:08:42You know? Yeah. Yeah.
2:08:43So Sam Ovens, we're at the school HQ. Thank you. That's the pod.
2:08:49If you enjoyed this podcast, you're also probably gonna like this podcast I also did recently that you can check out by clicking the screen right here.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Cole Gordon opens not with a highlight reel but with a dinner memory — the night Sam Ovens told him he was betting Skool against the entire industry. What follows is two hours of the actual reasoning: why less product beat more, why one engineer took a year to find, and why the founder of a billion-dollar platform still checks his spreadsheets by hand.
How they asked for the click.
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