← The Futur with Chris Do
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- [00:01]
A
If you are in your business and you don't know why it's not working, you either are at the start or multi years into it and you feel really stuck because it's not growing. My guest today is going to share with you seven pivots that you can go through in a very logical, linear way to refine your business to hopefully have some success. They're the seven pivots and he starts off with what's the problem? What's the solution? Who's the customer? What's the price point? What's the funnel? What are the channels? And then lastly, what's the messaging? Makes perfect sense. And if you want to know more, you need to listen to this episode.
- [00:38]
B
My name is Randy Arora and you're listening to the future.
- [00:45]
A
My guest for today's name is Ranbir and I'm intrigued because he had told me about something about how he's able to scale up ads on Facebook, something we've not been able to do. But I don't want to start there. So, first of all, Ranbir, welcome to the show. For people who don't know who you are, can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your story?
- [01:01]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Pleasure to be here, Chris. So I'm Ranbir. I'm CEO and co founder at One Day. One Day is a platform that's trying to replace business schools. You may think of it as a university for entrepreneurs. Bit about me and a few bullet points. My family's originally Indian. We moved to the UK when I was about five years old. Classic immigrant type of story. Grew up in social housing. I wanted to be an entrepreneur from a very young age. When I turned 16, all of my friends were finding their paths in lives of how to which you need to go to to become doctors, lawyers, engineers. I tried finding where, where's my university that's going to help me become, become an entrepreneur and I couldn't find one. So I did possibly the most dangerous thing an Indian kid can tell his parents, which is, guys, I think I'm going to have to skip higher education altogether and just teach myself by starting businesses. That's what I started doing from the age of 16. Lots of failed projects between 16 and 19. When I was 19, I partnered with these two other older guys and launched this app that rewards you for health, for physical activity. It's a health and fitness app. We scaled after a few pivots in the early years, we managed to scale to over a hundred million users worldwide. The app's called Sweatcoin. If you've ever heard of it, top the app Store charts in about 66 countries around the world. That was lots of fun. I did that for six or seven years and after a while felt, you know, making people more active in the world is, is a good mission in life, but it's not my mission in life. It's not what makes me wake up in the morning and when I thought about with my co founder, what wakes us up actually in the morning, it's helping people get into a job that they love to do and enjoy their day to day life. I think much in the same direction as your channel. And we talked to our friends and family who were stuck in jobs that they didn't like. When we asked them all, do you want to do with your life? They mostly wanted to start businesses but they couldn't find education on how to do it, they couldn't find mentors, they tried DMing people on LinkedIn who didn't reply back and it much felt like my story that I had when I was 16. So we decided if the rest of the world isn't going to build university for entrepreneurs, let's roll up our sleeves. Let's group together as many cool entrepreneurs as we can find and let's build our own university for entrepreneurs.
- [03:16]
A
That sounds wonderful. What, what brought your family to the uk? Like why did they leave?
- [03:20]
B
My family had a previous business in India actually, but through some changes it wasn't going so well anymore. And my parents made a very brave decision. They said, well, it looks like there's more opportunity here in the uk. Let's try and move over there and let's start a new life. And that's where kind of my journey as a kid started.
- [03:42]
A
And growing up since you came over when you were really young, did you have any challenges with your own identity in terms of like, who am I? Who am I supposed to be? Why is my culture different?
- [03:51]
B
All I knew when I was five because I grew up in an area where there was no, not many other brown people or other ethnic minorities at the time. So all I knew was I was treated differently than everyone else. And I couldn't exactly pinpoint why that is until we went back on holiday to India when I was 16 years old and I realized like, I'm Indian, had no idea.
- [04:19]
A
You didn't know before then you were Indian?
- [04:21]
B
I had no idea, dude. Just people treated me differently.
- [04:25]
A
So you're away for like 11 years, you return home and tell me what that's like. Because some people never get to Experience that to return to the motherland and to be amongst people that look and sound just like you and share similar values and interests. What was that like for you?
- [04:41]
B
I guess it starts off with growing up not at home. Right. And I, although I felt British, it wasn't the feeling everyone gave me around me when I was growing up here. It was obvious to everyone else. I'm not British, it wasn't obvious to me. And when I went back to India for the first time as an adult and didn't have that feeling of being a stranger in a land, not that I felt like a stranger in the uk, other people made me feel like a stranger when I was a kid. Unfortunately, it was that feeling of not feeling like a stranger where I kind of just blended into the crowd for the first time ever.
- [05:21]
A
So my experience is a little bit different than yours because we fled as refugees from Vietnam to America and my parents didn't understand the culture, barely spoke the language, and there was a lot of cultural disconnect there. I didn't understand anything. And there were experiences that kids grew up with that I was experiencing for the very first time as a 10 or 11 year old. And it was just so foreign to me. And I was bullied, I was teased. There was a lot of things that had happened that I think in hindsight was very beneficial to my ability to be more resilient, to go inward instead of outward. So you're, you're not going to get a lot of external validation. So you have to go inside and get tough or you break and fall apart. And I had to learn how to fight and defend myself and stand up for myself. There was lots of that. There's a lot of racial slurs that are thrown at me as well. What about you?
- [06:09]
B
There was lots of bullying when I was a kid, or a fair amount, let me not say lots. There's a fair amount. Um, I'd say I very much back what you're saying. I think as a. I don't look back on it in a bad way. I think growing up with difficulties is perhaps one of the most to, to some extent it can be one of the most empowering things that, like, happens to you. When I look at, you know, other people that after getting to know them sounds like they had relatively smooth childhood. I think the level of grit or resilience is they now have to start building it up as an adult. Not, it's not impossible to do, but you have to start doing it as an adult. Whereas there's a lot of natural G. Grit and resistance you get as an immigrant, as you know, growing up in a difficult set of financial circumstances, that there's a lot of natural grit that gets built up that you don't really realize until you're a lot older. And when you look around you, some people have difficulty with. With certain challenges, and you're like, okay, that doesn't. That doesn't begin to, like, scrape at my level of resistance that I built up.
- [07:25]
A
There's an ex. There's like a phrase, and I'm not sure if this is the correct phrase, but the phrase is something like, hard times make strong men. Strong men create good times, and. And good times create weak men. And then the process goes again. And so there's something like that. And I'm just curious, are you married? Do you have children?
- [07:43]
B
Not married. No children yet. Okay, so that's all to come. I'm only 31 years old.
- [07:49]
A
No rush. I'm not your Indian uncle pressuring you to find somebody. But I want to ask this hypothetical question. Knowing what you know now, going through what you did, if you were to have children, how do you think you would raise them so that they get some of the benefits of what you've experienced without subjecting them to whatever conditions you grew up in?
- [08:12]
B
It's a really good question, Chris. I think about it a lot, actually, because on the one hand, you want to give your. Your kids some elements of comfort that kind of you liked in your childhood. On the other hand, you absolutely recognize that if they don't get a certain level of discomfort, they don't have a chance of building that resilience, which is you're stealing something from them in that case. So the way I've been roughly planning it in my head is how can I introduce difficulties and challenges for my eventual kids in a way that's progressive, doesn't create negative trauma for them, but creates positive challenges. Because really, I think humans are. Need a certain set of conditions to be happy. And those certain sets of conditions are climbing up a mountain that is slightly too difficult for them to climb. So you have to figure out how to do it. And people are happy as long as they're still striving and climbing that mountain. The moment you stop or the moment the mountain starts, you know, turning, turning the other way around, it becomes much more challenging to keep a lasting degree of happiness. So how do I start building with that with my kids? A lot of people do it through sports, getting their kids into competing for something from a young age. I love the idea of eventually, you know, by that, by the time I have kids, I'm sure AI tools launch businesses will be much better. So I have this beautiful kind of concept of getting my kids to start some kind of small business projects from a young age, introduce a reasonable level of discomfort to them from a young age.
- [09:50]
A
Okay, this is interesting because obviously you've thought about this. How do you view the university for entrepreneurs? Do you feel like the students, I mean, in a way, they need to be challenged, they need to be given a mountain to climb that's slightly too difficult for them to climb. What's your perspective on that?
- [10:07]
B
So, first of all, who, who are our students? Who comes to us? People who were promised the great American dream. They go through college or they go through university. They were told by their parents, by their teachers, if you be a good boy, be a good girl, go to college, pick a degree almost at random, right? Which 17 year old really has a good understanding of what they want to be when they're an adult. So they kind of pick it in a rush because they see their friends, you know, pick something. So like, oh, Jesus, I got to pick something, all right, like geography or something like this. They pick, eventually graduate, get a job again, getting that job isn't done in a thoughtful way. Usually by and large it's, you know, my friends are getting jobs, oh, quick, I got to pick something because I look silly compared to Jeffrey who's already, you know, got his internship somewhere. So I got to pick something quite a random. They get that thing turn and turn around by the time they're 27, 28, 29, and that great dream that they were promised, that if they do that thing, they'll be a happy adult. Well, guess what? They turn around at that age and they're not a happy adult. And they cannot see themselves doing that thing for the next 40 years of their life. So that's the typical profile of a student who comes to us. Now, these people have business ideas. If they really ask themselves, well, what did I originally want to do when I was a kid? They always imagined themselves owning their own fashion line or their own, their own restaurant chain or, you know, all of these beautiful ideas you have when, when you're, when you're full of ambition and that's the idea, those are the ideas they really still aspire to. More than ever now. It's easier to start a business than ever before. Having said that, they have no idea where to start. Really scared of failing. What's going to happen if I get this wrong? And really Constricted by the fear of I can't quit my job. Like if, if I take this big leap, what's going to happen to me? So what happens when they join? One day we tackle each one of these three things. First of all, they don't know what to do in order to combat this. They're matched with a seven figure entrepreneur who's built their type of business idea before. So we have a big range of about 120 active seven figure entrepreneurs now that have built something cool to over a million dollars in revenue, a million dollars fundraised or a million dollars in exit size of their business. And we will match you to one of those entrepreneurs who's built something similar to what you are trying to build. So if you're trying to build a fashion business, that's your dream. Well, you're matched to one of our seven figure entrepreneurs who's built a successful fashion business before across the next 18 months. They're not teaching you, they're building your idea with you. So you're learning by actually doing it with your hands. You're not sat there writing essays and stuff like this. You're not actually building a business. Second thing people are usually worried about, well, it's a big risk for me to quit my job. And we absolutely live by, you shouldn't quit your job when you're just getting the business starting. It's really risky. You're going to feel you're going to try and take shortcuts if you have a certain amount of Runway to get that business up and running. So don't take that risk. Start off slow, start off keeping your job and working after your, your, your 5:00pm kind of job finishes. And once that business is generating revenue, then you quit and start your business. Sorry. And then you, once the business is generating enough money, you quit your job and go into the business full time. And lastly, this big question of well, what happens if I fail? You know, you can't get a hundred percent of everyone who starts with us to be able to succeed with the revenue generating business. Where our numbers are roughly about 80% of everyone who graduates, graduates with a revenue generating business. But there's still 20% who don't manage to get there. And the answer to this is, well, what if you are earning a fully accredited MBA degree at the same time when you're building that business? So there's upside either way. If you graduate and you have a revenue generating business, fantastic, you hit your goal. If not, and you know that number will never be 100%, you'll always have 10%, 20%, 15% of people who don't unfortunately manage to get that business at the other end. Well, it's still a massive upside for them because they're graduating with a fully accredited MBA degree that will help them get their next job or pivot into a more fulfilling career or help them with their next business when they start.
- [14:26]
A
Just to be clear, the program that the university that you have one day, it is a degree program or. It is. And how did you do that?
- [14:36]
B
Fully accredited. So it's done in partnership with a university in the US in Missouri called William Jewell College. And we launched our MBA degree in combination with them. So we bring all of our expertise of entrepreneurship with a pool of over 120 mentors. We built the curriculum with all of those mentors. So it's 120 different millionaire entrepreneurs that have built this system together, built this curriculum. And William Jewell is our partner that helps us get the accreditation. They're, they're a fully regulated university based out of Kansas City. And in, in this joint partnership, we bring the kind of entrepreneurship side of it. They bring the institutional, traditional education angle of it and the accreditation, and that's what brings this beautiful product together.
- [15:29]
A
And when they're done with the program, they, they graduate with an mba.
- [15:33]
B
Exactly. Fully accredited MBA degree as in, you can take our MBA degree to Harvard as credits and they will accept it as an MBA degree. So it's full, fully kind of regulated, done through the Higher Learning Commission in the US and is the first of its kind in the world. So instead of a traditional MBA degree that's by and large, you know, trying to help people get into, quote, corporate jobs, break into finance, break into consulting, and by and large is teaching people through essays, exams, spreadsheets, these types of things. Our MBA degree is the first of its kind that's earned from starting a business. No essays are written at any point throughout the 18 months. And all you are ever doing is the right next step in building your business. And we use the artifacts that you're then creating. Not an essay about building marketing funnels, but your actual marketing funnel that you've built. Not essays about, you know, how to identify a good product, but taking the actual product that you end up building. We use those artifacts to then accredit the mba.
- [16:35]
A
Fascinating. So if I understand your story correctly, you stopped going to school around 16 and you started working, right?
- [16:41]
B
Well, I started trying to launch businesses and then having small part time jobs to try and find.
- [16:47]
A
Okay, so do you Have a college degree yourself?
- [16:49]
B
No, I don't have a bachelor's degree. And it's possibly my biggest claim to fame is I must be the only person in the world who can credibly own a university without having a bachelor's degree myself.
- [17:05]
A
Yeah, it's a little bit ironic. You're helping people get an mba, but you don't have a bachelor's or an mba. How. How does that go? How does that conversation go when people are asking about that?
- [17:16]
B
I don't think it's ironic. I think this is the product I wanted when I was 16 and I couldn't find it. This is exactly what I wanted, and it didn't exist at the time. So I went through this massive kind of curveball of my life for the next three years of trying stuff and failing, and eventually I, you know, when. When sweatcoin was somewhat of a success and now it was time for me to move on, I looked back and still no one had created this. And I'm like, how the hell is it possible that you have universities that you know are built for medicine, are built for the arts, are built for pretty much every single thing apart from entrepreneurship. How can it be the case and then decided to go and create the thing I wanted when I was 16?
- [18:03]
A
Let's. Let's draw a contrast here. I've got a Bachelor's of Fine Arts, so I don't know much about the school system myself. I tell people I barely got an education as it is. Mostly I understand how to design and solve problems that way, but not in the traditional sense. How does your program compare to, say, like a Harvard mba?
- [18:23]
B
Few key distinctions. First of all, is what is. What is actually being taught? Let's start with, first of all, what are the outcomes? So when a traditional MBA degree, the outcome that they are measured by every single cohort that graduates, they have to report internally to their board. What is the percentage of graduates that are placed within a specific job criteria within certain salary brackets within three months, six months, 18 months after graduation? And that's the number that they're trying to optimize by. If someone tries to start a business, even if they do it successfully at the end of that Harvard MBA degree, that is counted as a negative towards the outcome metrics that Harvard is aiming for, or pick whatever MBA in the world that they're aiming for. So this is why inherently those MBA degrees are not built to try and get entrepreneurs. It's like negative for their outcomes, what they are as a product. What is an MBA built to do. It's built to get people into jobs in consulting, finance and banking. And those are the, that's the way they've made the curriculum. They, that's the way that they are judged on success. That's the way everything is optimized for. It's not built for someone trying to start a business. Our outcome metric, we do not track what number of people are getting jobs at the end of our MBA degree. That's not what our users want. What our users want is to be able to have a revenue generating business at the other end of the 18 months. So that's the metric that we live and read by. How do we accomplish this? First of all, what are you doing around across that time period? You can either be learning how to use spreadsheets extremely well, how to do financial forecasting extremely well, which existing MBA degrees do extremely well. They are very good at this and they've had many decades to refine that approach and get good at this. Unfortunately, there's a limited amount of utility for that for people who are trying to start a business. What, what actually do you need to do when you need, when you want to start a business, you need to try and find a pain point that's really, really deep, that is unsolved in the world. So we spend the first two months of our 18 months doing this, making sure you're landing on the right deep pain point that you're building on. Second, once you've landed on that pain point with your mentor and the mentor says, based on my experience, yes, I'm going to, let's move forward on this, on this pain point next you go and try and validate that there's demand for this in the world. So before you build anything, before you even touch like building an MVP or prototype, we want to see, can you actually get demand here? Can you create a wait list? Can you build a landing page for this product? And once you push this landing page page out there in the world with the help of your mentor, can you get 15% of everyone who lands on this landing page to give you their email address and says when this product arrives, I need to get, I need to buy this. If you can't generate demand for this, it's good that we found this out really early because you're going to move on to your other ideas and we're going to spin through them. And if first time around you already land on an idea, that's good demand only then do we actually start building an MVP to see do people actually like this thing, as opposed to typically how people would do this in the outside world, is once you have an idea, the first thing someone usually starts doing is starting to build the product. So they use their savings of 30k, 40k dollars, go to an agency or try and find a CTO to then go and build this product, which is the lower odds way of doing this. And then once you've landed on something that's working, then you start working with your mentor on trying out a bunch of different growth channels one by one, seeing which one is working for you. So yeah, in the core way the program is designed from what, what are you actually doing across the 18 months, who are you working with through to what are the outcomes. It's all optimized towards entrepreneurship instead of getting a job in finance at the.
- [22:27]
A
Other end, it sounds to me like the program is a little bit of like a business accelerated for an 18 month period that you get to be paired up with someone who's been there before. Is that oversimplifying it?
- [22:39]
B
I think it's a very good analogy. It would be like kind of imagine if Y Combinator had a business school. It's a good analogy. Now a way to think about it would be why are business accelerators, why their batches so small? So if you look like internationally, all the graduates, sorry, all the people that are accepted into accelerators annually have a guess of what the number is, it's gonna be tiny. It's about 3,4000 people a year that go into an accelerator. Why? Because it's because of the funding model of accelerators. Typically they're taking a percentage in the company's upside and waiting to see can they get one out of 10 companies that they've taken a percentage of to exit for a good, sizable enough exit that they can make back their costs. Now we see this as the traditional model accelerators work on, as in the actual way they, they help you build businesses. It's very effective. Y Combinator does this extremely well. But the problem is it's only accessible to the top 0.1% of people trying to build the next Facebook. And if you look at U.S. census data of what are entrepreneurs actually trying to build, it's a very small amount of people trying to build the next Facebook or the next Uber or the next Airbnb. These types of products, by and large, what everyone is trying to do in entrepreneurship, building nice e commerce stores, brick and mortar businesses, local B2B services. These are the types of lifestyle businesses that are actually scalable in terms of the population of the U.S. however many people we can get to be entrepreneurs is going to come from these people, 99.9% of them. But the traditional Y combinator slash accelerator type of model doesn't work for everyone else. It only works for, you know, people trying to create vc, backable next Facebook, next unicorns. So we tried looking at what is a way we can give that level of entrepreneurship education, but to everyone, not just people trying to create the next unicorn. And the way to do that is to make it an actual accredited MBA degree because people, the market for MBA degrees is massive anyway. So roughly it's about 800,000 people annually are taking an MBA degree. And interestingly, 20% of everyone who takes an MBA degree actively says at the start of their degree, their ideal outcome at the other end is to have their own business. Now traditionally that's a really bad idea because that's not what MBA degrees are made for. They're built and they're not built to help create entrepreneurs. And so that's the slice of the market that we're looking at. It's that it's roughly about $10 billion a year in terms of market size of people who are looking for an MBA degree, but to help them start a business.
- [25:30]
A
I see. Okay, so if I understand this correctly, accelerators are great if you're looking to build the next billion dollar company, but if you're looking to build a ten or a hundred billion dollar company, maybe those people are not that interested in it because you're not going to scale in a way that they can get their money back. Right. So your school is great for somebody who wants to get a degree but wants to go out and start a business, not get a job. And, and it could be whatever size business they want, but it has to be something that obviously hits their own financial goals. Do I understand that correctly?
- [26:03]
B
Yeah, I think that's very succinctly put.
- [26:05]
A
Okay, I have this weird question to ask you and then I have like some serious questions to ask you. The weird question is this, would you accept 17 year old you into your own school and tell me why.
- [26:19]
B
First of all, we currently can't with US regulations, you need to have a bachelor's degree in order to do an MBA degree. So the direction of travel, as we lobby a little bit as we try and find a way to remove that criteria of needing a bachelor's degree, the direction of travel, absolutely, yes. But there's certain restraints we have to work in in terms of the accreditation system so far. But the Actual goal is our acceptance criteria. So everyone has to pass an actual call with one of our mentors who will interview you for half an hour. Understand your background, your reason for doing this, reason for wanting to start a business. What's your approach? Are you open to feedback? And the things we're grading our applicants on is not what traditional MBA programs are grading people on. We absolutely don't care if you come from an elite background, who your parents are, who you know, even what your grades were. This is not the thing that makes entrepreneurs. What makes entrepreneurs is what's your level of drive? Why are you doing this? Are you trying to get rich quick or are you willing to focus on this across the next 10, 15 years in order to get where you want to go? These are things our mentors are grading people on. So we don't, we don't care if Someone works at McDonald's but is extremely relentlessly focused. Is might be an immigrant move to move to the US is currently working in a, in a manual labor job to, to get by, but in the side is hustling and trying to start their own venture and has read all the right materials and run some tests online to try and get some, to try and get some sales all the way through to someone who, you know, might be from an elite background, but they don't want to rely on their parents kind of background. They want to build their own thing and hustle. This is, these are the types of people we look for. So 17 year old me would, if he had a bachelor's degree would have made it through and you know, our direction of travel is to broaden out the education system here and allow for eventually someone in the 17 year old version of you who didn't have a bachelor's degree to also be able to do this.
- [28:40]
A
So it sounds like two things would have had to happen in order for your life trajectory to be very different today. So where we've got the Time Stone or something in the Infinity Gauntlet, we're able to travel back in time. One thing would be you'd have to be aware of your own school of one day and say, okay, maybe I need to go get that bachelor's degree so that I can go to this program that sing, that sings or speaks to my heart. And then maybe that would change the trajectory, right? Because currently you can get into the program because it is required. I mean, I understand this. You have to have a bachelor's before you can get a master's, before you can get a PhD, I think or Something like that. You can't just jump the line.
- [29:19]
B
Correct? Correct. Well, our next product that we'll be launching in roughly two years down the line is our own bachelor's degree. Okay. Which would work in a similar way to the MBA degree would be a little bit longer, so three or four years instead of the 18 months, and has some other adjustments to match people of that age. So that would be the product for me that I'd join if I was 17.
- [29:40]
A
Out of curiosity, people are probably wondering, ask him, ask him. How much is the program?
- [29:46]
B
Yeah, it costs 29, 800, so roughly $30,000. It is title four eligible for student loans in the US so you can break down this payment across 15, 10 years if you wish at government subsidized interest rates. So it works out. We tried to get it to a price point that everyone can afford and is not prohibitive, while still being able to afford to attract the absolute best quality mentors that we can. These are actual, you know, seven figure entrepreneurs that have built really cool stuff. They are not doing this for the money, but we still have to pay them some reasonable amount of money to do this. They're by and large people who want to give back. They didn't have this type of help when they were building their businesses and they want to join us and build a university for people like them isn't what they wanted. But we hold these mentors to really high standards and high accounts and in order to do that you have to pay them money as well. And so we tried to strike that balance as fine as possible. And this is our code.
- [30:53]
A
Is this model scalable? Because I think you said you have 120 entrepreneurs who are teachers, who are guides or mentors helping each person. And this sounds like it's a time intensive thing to sit down and understand what each person's going through at the stage in which they're going through. And I just think like number one is, is there a rubric that you have everyone go through so that regardless of which mentor you have, you're going to walk away with a similar experience or the quality of education that you're going to get so somebody doesn't go rogue? How do you maintain the quality of education across these 120 entrepreneurs who are teachers?
- [31:28]
B
So this is the real secret sauce in our business. Let's first of all talk about scalability of the mentor side and then I'll talk about like in the inner working. So on the scalability of the mentor side, we have 120 active mentors now across, we have more than 500 active students starting their businesses with us. Each mentor can take up to 20 students at a time, depending on how many hours the mentor wants to work. So if the mentor. We're very flexible. We Demand minimum of 10 hours a week from our mentors, and maximum, some of our mentors are doing 40, 50, even 60 hours a week. So a lot of mentors start off with us part time. They might have just sold their business or something like this. They start off with us part time while they're traveling, and they enjoy their working with their first few founders so much that they say, guys, like, I want to do this full time now. Scale me up as much as you can. You know, fill up my 40, 50, 60 hours a week. So let's say a typical mentor can take up to 20 students. So in order to scale to about, let's say, 100 million in annual revenue, we only need about 250 active mentors on the platform. So extremely scalable. From the way we build the model, basically, each mentor is responsible for up to about half a million dollars portfolio revenue for us, which actually makes it a really scalable model. And we have unlimited amounts of mentors that want to join us. Like, we literally have a backlog of about 4,000 people that have applied to be a mentor with us that's just growing virally at this point. Like, existing mentors are telling their friends, hey, this is a cool thing to do and exist. There's a lot of goodwill from existing entrepreneurs. They really see the problem. They didn't have that mentorship when they were coming up, and they really would have appreciated it, and they want to be able to help the next generation, and we built the perfect platform to help them do so. Now, on the scalability side, every single call that happens between our mentors and our students happens through our platform, happens on our lms. Every single mentor gets, first of all, put through a rigorous training bootcamp before they join. When they join, they are matched with their first three to five students to get started with. And we monitor the traction levels of those five students, their engagement levels, their retention. Are they hitting their benchmarks correctly? Are they. Is their business proceeding as quickly as our benchmarks are? Only if the mentor is hitting those benchmarks with their first five students do we start scaling up that mentor and giving them more and more and more students. Next, every mentor is given a more senior mentor who's mentored above 50 students for us to then coach these mentors and their early five students. So all of Their calls are listened to by these senior mentors who then give feedback to these, to the mentors, help them adjust their approaches. And then our lms, our learning management system, does a big bulk of the heavy lifting. What I mean by this is what practically happens is you turn up to your weekly call with your mentor. The mentor listens to the progress you've made since the last time they talked. Did you do the actions that were discussed? What were the results if we decided you're going to go and launch your, your landing page to build a wait list? Well, what's the feedback you got on this landing page? The mentor listens actively, might even, you know, log into your portal with you to read all the comments or listen to some of the calls you had with users and helps you make the next macro level decision. The macro level decision might be, hey, I don't think we're on the right place. We need to pivot in this direction or might be actually, I think we landed on something here. We have, you know, 15% of everyone you talk to is actually registering, placed a pre order. Now it's time for us to run our next advertising campaign and they'll decide what's the right channel for you based on their experience. It Facebook, is it Google search, is it AdWords, is it, you know, Snapchat or something? And then assign to you on the platform the right next module to take with instructions on how to launch your Facebook campaign, guides on how to do it. User will go away, complete those actions and then come back and the mentor will next week assess how well did you run your Facebook ads? Did you get stuck anywhere? What were the initial results? Okay, based on my experience, this CAC is too high. I think we need to tweak this landing page this way. So by making it really smooth line for the mentor with our LMS and our tools, by being really rigorous with the onboarding of the mentor, training of them, and then being especially scientific with monitoring the retention, engagement, traction of all the founders that each mentor is working with, with, with their, with their coaches. We're managing to really scale this up. So just to give you an idea of scale there, Chris, we have 500 active MBA students at the moment, just above that number. And if you look at the biggest business schools in the world, how many active MBA students do they have at any point in time? We're in the top 30 already. Now the largest ones are Harvard Business School and Wharton, which roughly have about 2,000 active MBA students. And we're on track to exceed that Number in roughly middle of next year. So that's our current target to be largest business school on earth by active MBA student headcount by 2026.
- [37:09]
A
Fascinating. I'm curious about this and then I have some kind of rapid fire questions to ask you, but how does a guy who doesn't go to school develop a program for people to teach teachers how to teach at the master's level? I know, I, I'm, I'm just profoundly curious now because what you say tracks with me. There's a boot camp, there's a trial, there's a senior mentor who supervises you to make sure you're good. If you, if you're not good, give, make adjustments or send them on their way. That sounds like a pretty like that sounds like a person who's gone through a program like this before and says, let's do this more efficiently, let's do this on a global scale. How does one develop that without having been through a program like that yourself?
- [37:55]
B
I think there's a few key things that connect here. First of all is the core of our product is business building and being in love with the process of building a business in a lean way where you're mitigating all the key risks as early in the process as you can while you're building and doing it in a really systematic fashion. I'd say that part is my strength. Yeah, like having built a few businesses already and doing it starting off, doing it very badly and refining that approach over time through successive businesses. Okay. This is the original kind of core part of it that I bring in next is my colleagues and the team that you build around this. So our chief Product officer and also dean of One Day is Richard Jewell, who previously worked at the Key Group, which is a large education group in the UK that helps train up teachers, principals, heads of departments at all the large K12 schools in the UK. And he is really kind of the life of bringing this methodology into an academic structure. Third is our advisory board which features deans, ex deans, ex presidents of Howard, Columbia, Stanford. So we've built kind of all of this forward facing entrepreneurship curriculum, but also tying it in with roots and learnings from the most traditional and well sought for institutions who help kind of shape the pedagogy around it. And then of course is our academic partner, William Jewell College, who brings some more academic rigor to everything that we do around it. So I think we've tried to take the best from the kind of previous world in the traditional world of education. With a massive dose of entrepreneurship, which comes from an outsider myself in this scenario. You know, they say that if you want someone to shake up a system, it shouldn't be the person from the system. And I think, I mean, it wasn't my theory going into it, but it looks like it retrospectively. It's kind of funny to see that the most kind of the approach that's coming most at an angle to the existing system comes from someone who completely was outside of the existing system. And that somewhat makes sense in this situation.
- [40:38]
A
I think the short answer for what I'm getting is you're a thoroughbred entrepreneur, dyed in the wool, and you have ideas and like a lot of entrepreneurs, you don't have to have like vertical experience, like a niche level experience or expertise. You assemble teams and you, you put together a board of advisors and you have them say, like, how does this work? How does this fail? And you kind of keep designing for it. It seems like you've solved a lot of the problems. The accreditation that you talked about, the, what is it? Title four, so they can get loans for it, paying for the school. You found the mentors, you found the way to mentor the mentors. You, you worked this out. Okay, now what we're going to do in the remaining time, I'm going to ask you to keep your answers a little bit more succinct here because I want to get through some of the questions that are prepared here. So you mentioned that when somebody has a business idea, it's not always their first idea that works. And so they work with their mentors, they try to do different ideas until they find an idea that works. And you, I think you use the word the pivot. So how does one. What are the different pivots that I'm going to go through so that I can find the right fit for my product?
- [41:45]
B
Yeah, yeah, great question. Our methodology at one day, how we do this is there's seven classes of pivots that the user works through, depending on the severity of how far away we are from product. Market fit at the extremely early stages is pivots on the problem that you're trying to solve. And this is where actually most people initially turn out wrong. They think they're solving a deep problem for a user, but actually as you start trying to validate that, it turns out it's like a paper cut issue for the user. When you have a paper cut, it kind of hurts, but not enough for you to buy anything or spend any significant amount of money trying to solve it. What you actually want is like a broken leg level of pain, where if you have a broken leg, you will drop everything and spend, you know, whatever amount of money you have to fix that broken leg. Right? So you're trying to find a broken leg issue. If you're not there yet, you should pivot on that problem statement until you land on something that's an actual massive issue for that user. Uh, second, is then your solution that you're trying to offer to this user. Um, you should carry on. If, if you found a problem that's worth solving, it's not necessary that the first solution you come up with is going to be the one that actually gets traction from that user. The user might say, you know, you might come up with a product at the right wrong price point. You might be trying to make a product that's cheaper, but what the user wants is better. You might be trying to make a solution that's better, but actually what the user wants is something that's faster. So you should then pivot on that, on the solution that you're offering to the user. Next is the customer segment. If you are sure that you've landed on a problem that's working, it's deep and the solution users are like actually offering you money for. Next is the type of customer that you're trying to target, the target audience. You can try and sell that product to moms who are just trying to get back into a corporate role that might be one of the target audiences. You try it with them. If it doesn't work, you might need to pivot to a different customer segment, which might be, you know, I'm just going to make up something random here, Electric car owners, depending on what your idea is. So you pivot on exactly who you're targeting with the solution. Next is the price point that you're selling at. Are you going to the low end of the market, the high end of the market? If it's, again, what you're doing isn't working, you can play around with the price point. Fourth, you can play with the funnel that you're using. Is it a funnel that's getting sales through webinars, trying to convert people? Is it an application funnel? Is it an email funnel that you're trying to convert people through? Is it a free call funnel where you give them a free call and a free assessment and then try and convert them that way? So a bunch of different funnels. Last two channel pivot. Where are you plugging that funnel? If the funnel's working, but you're just plugged into the wrong place. Maybe you need to plug it out of Snapchat and plug it into Facebook ads. Maybe Facebook ads isn't working. You need to take the funnel out of Facebook ads and plug it into Google Search. There's a. There's a lot of different places you can try and plug that funnel. And lastly is pivots on your messaging. If everything else is working and your CAC is almost there, but maybe it's just like 10%, 20% away from allowing you to break even. Messaging can actually help a lot. Communicating this as a solution to stop you doing this, or a solution that helps you achieve this, or a solution that helps you prevent this loss. There's lots of different ways you can message those pivots. So that's all seven. And you should start depending on how far away you are from your business working, you should start with the most severe, which is pivoting on the problem 99% of the time. When someone. Their business isn't working, that's the issue. It's. You need to actually change the problem that you're trying to solve. However, the closer you are to your business working and it just needs some tweaks in order for the funnel to work. You, you, you go less severe and you go from it. It might be channel, funnel or, or messaging.
- [45:52]
A
Okay. So the business is not working at all. It's likely the first three problems that you. Or the first three pivots as it's working, you're fine. Like you're hitting a wall. It's probably the last three pivots or something like that. Okay. Yeah, it's wonderful. Okay.
- [46:06]
B
And there's litmus tests for each one of those cases. Like a doctor, you know, they put their stethoscope on your heart to hear you know, what's wrong, what's wrong. There's business versions of these litmus. Litmus tests to see where are you actually where. What's the diagnosis? Which one do you need to start with?
- [46:23]
A
Okay. All right. As you're going through this, how do you validate that you solve the right problem? There's this. There's this concept where you can't read the label when you're inside the jar. Every time I hear somebody with a business idea, I sit there and think. I think you're just solving your problem. I'm not laying awake at night thinking, like, that's a problem I have too. And I don't even know who else is imagining or thinking about that same problem. So how do you Validate the idea and especially does it cost money to do this?
- [46:53]
B
I think validating the problem is where most people are making the largest mistake. It's kind of like you mentioned, a lot of people, because they had the issue themselves, assume the problem already exists for everyone else and they assume it's to a large level of severity. My litmus test here is you need to be able to talk to five people of your demographics, of your target demographics, and without telling them what you're building just by talking to them about their life and that product area, they must mention that this is a problem for them that they're actively trying to solve. And they've actually either already spent money trying to solve it or considerable amounts of effort trying to solve this without you telling them that I'm building this business or I have this idea. And for any really severe problem as someone's having, for example, let's say I'm having a massive issue trying to find lactose free protein shakes. I'm making a random, random problems. This is close to home by the.
- [47:57]
A
Way, but keep going.
- [47:59]
B
Yeah. Yes. If, if I sit down and talk to someone without telling them, that's my idea that I'm trying to validate, I just go, hey Chris, like what are you up to? How was your day today? Are you into fitness? Oh, cool. Tell me about your fitness routine. Cool. What about your nutrition? How do you manage to keep, keep that going? Are you having any issues with, with your nutrition? And if at that point, if up until now you haven't said, you know, dude, I'm having a, I'm loving the gym, but I'm really having difficulty getting enough protein in my body and ask why? And you tell me the issue until that happens. And then I ask, what are you doing about it? And you tell me, dude, I've tried spending $200, tried everything I can find in the market. None of it's working for me. That's when the problem is validated. And most people, what they do is actually, Chris, I have a business idea. It's for lactose free protein shake. What do you think about it? And then you'll say, yeah, it's kind of a cool idea. And then I'll go back and I'll say, okay, right, my idea is good.
- [49:00]
A
I just want to thank you Render, for sharing your personal story and, and I think your discussion about how you want to change the way universities work, especially for entrepreneurs. We don't need to teach people more ways of finding a job. I, I'm a big believer in people who support and empower entrepreneurs to achieve their dreams. Mostly because they create more jobs for people and they move the economy forward. And you had said at their kind of earlier on in our conversation about everybody wants this American dream, but maybe the systems that we've designed don't really help you get any closer to that. It just gets you into the system. And to me that's kind. That's a sad thing for people who don't want that. I also appreciate you sharing the pivots and I think it's universal. There's ideas here that I think can apply to anybody. And I also just want to thank you for sharing some of the insights of how somebody spends so much money on ads from learning from the unicorn companies and then through your practical application of it. I'm impressed by you for a lot of different reasons. For number one, you're only 31 years old. You're. It sounds to me like you're a serial entrepreneur always looking for the big idea. And you're very articulate. So it's just.
- [50:11]
B
Do you.
- [50:12]
A
I have a just real quick question for you. Are you as smart as you are because of the education system you'd have or despite it?
- [50:20]
B
For me, smarts is not the important part of determinant of success in life. It's what we were talking about right at the start of the conversation. It's just resilience. Any results I have so far, I'm only kind of like actually 3% in life of where I want to be getting to that 3%. Anything that I owe to it is like more resilience. And you know, growing up in immigrant circumstances in a difficult place than smarts. I think smarts is really overrated. I think it's about setting a strong goal for yourself, enjoying the climb up that mountain and really digging your heels in the ground when the wind gets tough. That's what I think. All success anyone at Maya has ever achieved is just down to a greater resilience.