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This week I talk with Ankur Nagpal, Founder of Teachable! In this episode we talk about living in the Middle East, moving to America at 17, starting a Facebook apps business making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, building on platforms vs creating platforms, reverse engineering growth and a lot more!
Show Notes
- 1:00- Weirdest course on teachable
- 1:50- Backstory
- 3:09- Playing Cricket
- 3:40- Starting a business as a kid
- 5:16- Parents thoughts on building stuff on the web
- 6:22- Fostering an entrepreneurial spirit
- 8:00- Moving to America
- 9:25- Learning to code and working for Facebook
- 10:19- Branching into more frivolous applications
- 12:20- Interning at Amazon and going to school
- 13:48- Being “all-in” on the Facebook stuff
- 14:13- “The bottom fell out multiple times”
- 17:15- Spending time figuring out Facebook’s algorithms
- 18:48- Consulting and new business ideas
- 20:32- Stumbling upon the idea for Teachable
- 21:46- Building the first version
- 22:40- Hacking together existing tools to pull it together
- 23:33- Direct sales
- 25:30- Self-perpetuating momentum and building too many features
- 28:48- Learning valuable skills from the fundraising process
- 30:00- Fundraising when you don’t need the money
- 31:00- Rebuilding the foundation and making the numbers grow
- 33:08- Accidental email
- 34:15- Growth- deconstructing and working backwards
- 36:03- Changing the name from Fedora to Teachable
- 38:44- The mission and people owning their own stuff
- 39:55- Traditional education versus learning online
- 41:15- Being a creator, building an audience, and monetizing that audience
- 42:23- The next year at Teachable
- 43:23- Being excited to have other executives
