Ankur Nagpal - Baremetrics

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

Get in touch with Ankur: teachable.com, @ankurnagpal