Most people in the world have taken an online course with video instructors. Yet it wasn’t always so easy to find a course that teaches exactly what you want to learn. In the early days, finding a tutorial on anything wasn’t easy. However, one enterprising individual realized that video courses were the wave of the future. When Ankur Nagpal came up with the idea for Teachable—a platform for sharing educational content—in 2013, the online course industry wasn’t even a consideration.
People Learn What They Want To
Nagpal inherited his entrepreneurial spirit from his dad. He states that his father always told him that the reason he could take so many risks was because his father had worked hard to afford for him to do so. However, Nagpal hadn’t always been interested in being his own entrepreneur.
When he started working, he interned at Amazon, trying out the typical working life everyone else considered the norm. He quickly realized that this wasn’t the life he wanted for himself. Nagpal and his team were responsible for a single page and a single dashboard in all of Amazon, and he hated feeling like an insignificant cog in a vast machine.
Building a Place For Others To Succeed
Nagpal’s idea for Teachable wasn’t even something he was sure would succeed. In 2013, he created a teaching platform named Fedora, joking that the name was because the idea might have been pulled out of a hat. Yet this simple idea grew and expanded. Before too long, he realized he had a hit idea on his hands and went back to the Bay Area to secure funding to expand his business idea.
His first seed funding round raised approximately $1 million, leading to an $8 million valuation later. When he realized the company would stick around and maybe become successful, he changed the company name to Teachable. That name resonated with what he wanted his company to stand for – making tasks teachable.
Focusing On One Thing
Teachable is one of the most successful course-hosting companies worldwide. However, Nagpal attributes this success to doing one thing exceptionally well. According to him, the client is their number one focus, enabling them to address any issues any individual customer might have.
Nagpal knows that Teachable is a creator-first platform, and continuing that trajectory is key to attracting more customers. He’s been toying with the idea of expanding his business but is wary of going too far for the same reason of losing focus. The more things the company has to pay attention to, the less likely it is to do any of those things well. The expansion is coming, Nagpal notes, but he’s waiting for a critical inflection point to dive in.
Find What Customers Care About
As someone trained in software engineering, Nagpal initially thought that the software that drove Teachable would be the core reason people jumped onto the platform. However, as time passed, he came to a startling realization. No one really cared about the software running in the background. It was a revelation that changed how he did business and promoted teachable.
Nagpal learned something Apple learned very early in its lifetime – people don’t know or care about the technology; they want stuff that works. Based on this information, Nagpal pivoted his company to align with two metrics: how fast a new user managed their first sale and the number of users who made their first sale.
Coaching Alongside A Robust Tech Stack
Having coaching hosted on a teaching site was revolutionary. When Nagpal and his crew started offering training courses to help new creators dive headfirst into the creator economy, his conversion rates went through the roof. Together, education and software make Teachable the place to be if you’re offering a course on anything.
Recently, the company went one step further, not even requiring the user to have a complete course but offering a Zoom call. This Zoom call would function as the product, and the fulfillment would occur after the sale happened. This positive feedback loop of customers who are happy to deliver on their promise to their customers keeps creating more satisfied clients.
Not Splurging Like Most Other Tech Startups
Typically, when tech startups get their funding, they spend it lavishly. Between office rentals, fancy advertising firms, and a slew of other expenses, many tech startups burn through their venture capital funding in record time, leading them to source additional funding to get their businesses off the ground. Nagpal wanted to avoid this eventuality and decided to go the opposite route.
To begin with, he saw funding as a means to an end. He would never raise more than $4 million per funding round with such an approach. He admits he’s not sure whether it’s his Indian parents’ upbringing or just the conscious business part of him at fault. Still, he was never comfortable spending investor money without something to show for it. As such, Teachable kept its burn rate slow.
After six successful funding rounds, Teachable seems like something many venture capitalists would love to get in on. Except Nagpal is very selective about who he takes investment from. With such a small base for investment, it’s an exclusive club to belong to. He’s expecting more Silicon Valley founders to ditch the lavish splurges and adopt more viable, slow-burn approaches to their business growth and development.
What’s He Up To Now?
In 2020, Nagpal sold Teachable and stated that he was burned out, but that didn’t stop him from forming a new startup. Like most entrepreneurs, he didn’t feel comfortable sitting around doing nothing. He started Ocho Wealth (publicly called Carry), a vehicle to help entrepreneurs and freelancers grow their wealth through financial services and educational products.
Nagpal took the lessons he learned from Teachable and put them into developing Carry. He wanted to make financial knowledge a core part of everyone’s life but realized only the families with wealth understood how wealth worked. By democratizing financial information, Carry hopes to help more people attain and maintain their wealth.
Teachable might no longer be what Nagpal’s doing, but he just can’t give up teaching others what he knows.
