March 31, 2022

How to Validate an Idea | Moe Abbas, Founder of Acadium

How to Validate an Idea | Moe Abbas, Founder of Acadium

If you want to validate an idea, the conventional wisdom is to build an MVP. But even an MVP takes time to build. What if you could validate not only your idea but your entire funnel, without writing a single line of code?

That's what Moe did. He built a landing page, found ways to advertise and generate traffic, and went so far as to convert traffic to paying members- before having any product to sell! (Of course, he immediately refunded those early customers and added them to a waiting list.)

If you have an idea and want to know if there is real demand - this is the episode for you. 

Send me a message to let me know what you think!

01:22 - Original Idea

03:34 - First, Validate. Do not Build.

05:22 - To validate, you need a small team.

07:11 - To validate, get people to pay

13:24 - How to iterate your business model

18:14 - Retention is harder than conversion

19:47 - The rollercoaster never ends

22:54 - Recap

WEBVTT

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Your first inkling was, let's go validate this.

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Why did you think that was your first reaction?

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Because I had done it the other way, and it was a terrible way.

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I built the social media app that wasn't validated, and it was very costly and painful.

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I thought,"I'm not doing this again, that was a stupid way of doing things."

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Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada.

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I'm Pablo, I'm a founder turned VC.

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My goal is to help early-stage founders like you find product-market fit.

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Today we have Moe Abbas, co-founder and CEO of Acadium.

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It's a pleasure having you here.

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Thank you so much, Pablo, good to be here.

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Just a little bit of background on Acadium.

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Acadium is a community of marketers.

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Their main product is an apprenticeship marketplace with businesses on one side and students on the other.

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Businesses pay a monthly membership fee and in return, they get to access to marketing students who help them with all aspects of marketing, SEO, content ads, et cetera.

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The service is totally free for students and has helped hundreds, if not thousands of students launch their marketing careers.

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Acadium is based in Ottawa, Ontario, and for context, they have about 20 employees and are doing about$2 million in ARR.

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The topic of today's episode is how to validate an idea.

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For everybody listening, I've known him for many, many years now.

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I've shared the early, early days of Acadium.

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As I recall, you started working on this in late 2015, early 2016.

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Was the original idea an apprenticeship marketplace, or what were some of the early versions of the idea that turned into what Acadium is today?

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The form of this, where there's no technology, would be like an internship, very similar to an internship.

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So, I had been working with interns for a long time, so I had a good idea of how to work with them.

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And we wanted to build something in marketplace that allowed businesses to find affordable help, eventually focused on digital marketing from unpaid intern.

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But what we really wanted to do was focus on the job training aspect of the relationship, which, we thought, was incredibly valuable to the students.

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And in exchange for the job training, the businesses would get affordable help.

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So for us, the earliest version was our own company getting interns and working with them off different job boards.

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Perfect.

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So, you had done this internally and kind of had an inkling that there could be a lot of value here.

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I know today you're fully focused on marketing.

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Did you start with that?

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What led you to choose that as the main vertical?

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I guess the story started when we were actually hiring an intern for another project we were working on, and we had over a hundred applicants.

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Nobody had experience, and they needed experience, so they would come and volunteer to work with our company.

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And my co-founder, Richard, turned to me one day and said,"Hey, Moe, nobody has experience here.

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They're all willing to work for us, unpaid.

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Why are we building the social media app when we should be solving this problem?

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And I ignored him for a bit, but he turned out to be right.

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So, I independently, I said,"You know what?

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I don't know if this is the right path.

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I should try to validate this at the lowest cost possible.

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So, I started working on this idea independently, trying to validate it.

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Let me just ask you just something right there because a lot of founders love to build, and the first inkling is, here's an idea let's just start building product.

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And your first inkling was, let's go validate this.

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What do you think...

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Was it something about you or your team?

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Just the why of it.

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Why did you think that was your first reaction?

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Because I had done it the other way, and it was a terrible way.

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I built a social media app that wasn't validated, and it was very costly and painful.

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I thought," I'm not doing this again, that was a stupid way of doing things.

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I'm just going to do this myself." I had the full skill set.

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I could figure it all out.

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I had learned a lot in that first process.

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So, I just built a spreadsheet, in terms of are we ready to work for businesses.

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And I'd called businesses up, and I said," Do you want to get these people to help you?" It turned out to be that didn't work, actually.

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You had to build a product in our case.

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Why didn't it work?

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It was a tremendous amount of matching effort to actually get them matched with each other for something that is relatively low value and should be low touchpoint.

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So, it just wasn't worth the effort in a way because of the way we were doing it manually.

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But businesses were interested, we knew the students were interested, and that was the super early version.

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That gave me enough confidence to build out a landing page.

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Actually, around the same time, I built out the landing page where I used, I think it was Squarespace at the time, and I just built up the idea of,"Hey, you want to get work experience?

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Sign up, and we'll help you get work experience."

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And at this point, just for context, who is on the team and is this really just you doing it all or did you get a few different people involved?

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No, it was just me.

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So, why would I involve design and engineer to build a website when I don't even know if it's going to work, let me just do this myself using a template and if the conversions are not good, but they're decent, that's totally fine because you know you're going to improve conversions by building a better product and a better website and better marketing.

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If it converts with the shitty landing page, you know that you've done something well.

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So, I built this landing page.

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I h ad a great pitch.

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I sent traffic to it using a growth hack that I knew, and the traffic converted.

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Can you dive into that?

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Because I think the end of the day, especially today, it's a noisy environment, and building landing pages is fine.

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If you can't put push traffic to it, you're not testing anything.

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So, where did you get the traffic and how did you think to do that?

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I already know how to get interns.

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There's different ways you could do it off job boards.

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I just modified my messaging.

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We eventually got kicked off the job boards because you can't really do that.

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But earlier on, it was fine.

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I used job boards to funnel traffic into the early version of Acadium.

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For that, go to the job boards, do the messaging, get them to come to the Acadium, and check the conversions.

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The conversions were extremely healthy.

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In fact, they were better than anything I've seen atthat time.

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And this was conversion to what, the creating of a profile?

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Signup.

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Signup.

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We didn't have a profile.

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We didn't have a product.

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It was a landing page.

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There's nothing there.

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It was e-mail.

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It was all smoke and mirrors.

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E-mail capture really.

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Yeah, pretty much.

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And then I said, Squarespace a llowed you to connect a bank account.

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I said,"Well, maybe it's because it's so easy to sign up.

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That's why we're getting a good a conversion.

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I wonder if I put a pay wall, if they would still sign up." So, I put a p ay w all and people still signed up.

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And this is, just to confirm, this is the student's side of the business.

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Correct, yes.

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So, at first you were, you were seeing if they would pay on the student side, got it.

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I wanted to see how much, how willing they are to gain work experience.

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And they were very willing, they were willing enough to pay us at the end of the day.

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At the same time I also- one of the interns I brought on, I even pitched this to her and a payment- I said,"You're going to pay for this experience.

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Five-hundred bucks a month, it's going to cost you for three months." And she agreed to it.

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After the first month, I said,"You don't have to pay us, you're working unpaid.

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It's unfair", And she was super happy about that.

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So, there were multiple things we were doing at the same time at that point, but all very low cost at that point, we said,"There's obviously a good demand here." Then you started digging into the problem.

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Well, what is the problem?

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What could this really be?

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And we actually laid out a whole bunch of other ideas at the same time, and we didn't quite do this.

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They didn't really pass the mental experiment.

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So, you want to just create a mental experiment in your head and be like,"Well, if you built it, how would it work?

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Who would use it?

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Is there a demand, something you want to do?" We had a whole matrix, a whole bunch of ideas.

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None of them really past that.

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This one did, and it entered the phase where I was starting to build out the landing page.

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And that went really well.

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And then at that point I said,"Okay.

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What does this look like in the future?" When we imagine a future where businesses provide job training, we knew that on the job training was the most effective way to get trained for the job market.

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So, we said,"Hey, if we could enable businesses to do this on scale, this could be something really meaningful." And then strategically you can then own the talent because you trained them, and they would be there from your talent pool first.

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If you own the talent, and you can go to the demand side and be like,"Hey, you need the supply, we have the supply here." So, strategically, it made sense.

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It was also something we were proud to work on.

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It was a mission-driven organization.

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And that's what we did.

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We said,"This is the vision.

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Laid that out early.

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It's still pretty much the same vision." We ironed out a lot of the details along the way and really flushed it out and clarified it and simplified it.

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But that's the high-level vision.

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It's the same as it was back then.

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A lot of things have changed since then, including the product and what we offer, but the vision was very much the same.

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And from there, the landing page is great, but we knew we needed more liquidity on the student side, and we needed them around, and we needed to give them some kind of training and more value.

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So, we built out a whole bunch of coursework.

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That was kind of our MVP, it was solving the chicken and egg problem.

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And we built these courses ourselves.

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The first version of that was garbage.

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It was unusable.

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Marketplaces are notoriously hard to launch, especially because of that chicken and egg problem that you mentioned.

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Do I have the right understanding that you did this kind of single-player mode?

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And you started with students and build this, you first have this landing page to test the value prop, but then you just started building out features.

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So, that it'd be useful for students without anybody on the other side.

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Was that kind of the first model?

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First you validate, then you build the vision, and then you build the MVP ultimately.

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And this was even pre-MVP.

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This is how do you get one side of the marketplace?

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And we actually probably spent too much time on the courses.

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The funny thing is we built these courses, and we iterated them, that went through a whole product journey.

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We started with scripts and videos and moved to micro lessons.

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And once we landed on micro lessons, and people loved it, it was really easy for us to create this content.

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We paid someone 5 or 10 K to create all the courses for us.

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We haven't changed them.

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We haven't updated that technology at all.

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And people, thousands of people a month still use it.

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But we knew we needed to actually fulfill the promise of work experience.

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We then had to build another product, which is the actual marketplace.

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That was challenging.

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At first, it was so terrible, we couldn't give it away for free.

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We just launched it, got businesses, tried to get them to sign up for free, and they would, but the liquidity wasn't that great.

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There's a lot of things you learn along the way, so you got to launch very quickly.

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You learn these things like liquidity, didn't really know how important that is until you launch.

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And that's what you actually need, liquidity.

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Now, did you go through a similar...

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Like, you had validated these students with this no product landing page, get them to come in, test conversions, put a paywall, test conversions on paid.

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Did you do the same thing with businesses or did you just go ahead, at that point, and launch a full product?

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I didn't know, not on the business because I was the business.

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Right.

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So, I was the client.

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I knew what they were willing and not willing to do.

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I talked to so many other businesses.

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I talked to a lot of businesses as well.

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Customer discovery, but not reflect validation.

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I was the client, I was the business.

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I had a good idea of what they were looking for.

00:12:43.179 --> 00:12:45.850
So, that one was more of a leap of faith at that point.

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But it also came from my own experience.

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It was informed.

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It was informed, correct.

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And I'd already talked to so many businesses who were interested as well, but they didn't have trust, frankly.

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Lack of trust because of some random guy calling them, asking them if they want somebody to work unpaid for them.

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That was challenging.

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Trust is a big deal in marketplaces.

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Then we started building a brand and build a product, an actual significant product.

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That's what we did.

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We had our first product.

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It was pretty garbage, it didn't really work well, there's no profiles.

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It was like a crappy job board.

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And it just wasn't that good.

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And then we started iterating very quickly.

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It was just a small team at the time, which I found, if you are looking for product-market fit, you need to have a small team.

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And for us, this was so important because it was me and my co-founders, one is a designer, one's an engineer.

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We would literally ship code every single day and just see what happens.

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I would send traffic to the product.

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And once it got to the point where we were reasonably confident, we said,"We've got to start making money." Also, the money makes people more serious as well.

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So, we introduced a small price point.

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We were also running out of cash.

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We had maybe a couple of weeks to a month of cash left.

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Then we were like,"We have this product, but we don't really make any money.

00:14:19.090 --> 00:14:21.610
We have to put a business model in place.

00:14:22.120 --> 00:14:30.309
Let's charge a membership fee, and sell the product." But actually, one of your earlier questions is why did you focus on digital marketing?

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I found that it was very challenging to sell businesses cross-category.

00:14:35.470 --> 00:14:38.649
When I was talking to them, it was very, very challenging.

00:14:38.950 --> 00:14:40.809
And it was hard to get liquidity.

00:14:40.899 --> 00:14:44.799
It's hard to get students who were interested in multiple things.

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Liquidity was a problem and focus was a problem.

00:14:48.279 --> 00:14:53.840
So, we said,"We should probably focus on one vertical to start with, one niche.

00:14:53.929 --> 00:14:56.120
And digital marketing is something that I knew really well.

00:14:56.120 --> 00:14:57.679
I knew what the students really wanted to do.

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I knew every business need digital marketing.

00:15:00.590 --> 00:15:09.470
So, we said,"This is a good place to start and school's doing a really bad job of training this." So, for those reasons, we picked digital marketing, and that was a good decision.

00:15:09.919 --> 00:15:12.529
How important is focus, especially in those early days?

00:15:12.530 --> 00:15:16.399
If I think about it, you first focused just on students.

00:15:16.701 --> 00:15:18.679
You got just students, you got a value prop delivered there.

00:15:18.681 --> 00:15:28.009
Then you added businesses, and then you ultimately refocused just on digital marketing where many others would have said,"If I have the business and I have the students, I might as well do it all.

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How important is focus in the earliest days, especially?

00:15:32.120 --> 00:15:35.360
It was super focused because you need to prove one thing at a time.

00:15:35.811 --> 00:15:41.840
When you are able to get more resources, and you're able to move multiple things at the same time, then sure, you could do that.

00:15:41.841 --> 00:15:44.299
You should also be able to take more multiple shots.

00:15:44.720 --> 00:15:50.870
It's a balancing act between taking an accurate shot and then taking a lot of shots.

00:15:51.140 --> 00:15:56.629
You want to focus on one thing, but you should take as many shots as you can at the same time.

00:15:56.809 --> 00:15:59.330
Yes, focus is important.

00:15:59.331 --> 00:16:06.470
It's a bit overrated in a way, but not, there are some things you absolutely need to focus on.

00:16:06.500 --> 00:16:18.019
One vertical made a lot of sense, but focusing on multiple product iterations, that could also really work for you because it can unlock success quicker for you.

00:16:18.801 --> 00:16:22.639
I think there's a balance between focus and taking a lot of shots.

00:16:23.779 --> 00:16:31.039
It's this kind of strong opinion, loosely held concept, where you're focusing, but you're also willing to move away and try something new.

00:16:31.639 --> 00:16:33.320
It seems like what you're getting at.

00:16:33.470 --> 00:16:33.649
Exactly.

00:16:34.100 --> 00:16:35.240
So, it's like,"You know what?

00:16:35.240 --> 00:16:37.490
We're going to do this, and we're going to do it excellently.

00:16:37.490 --> 00:16:39.950
And we're going to focus our attention on this.

00:16:39.951 --> 00:16:41.629
But as soon as this works or doesn't work...

00:16:41.571 --> 00:16:45.950
if it doesn't work, you learn, you iterate, If it works, you double down.

00:16:45.951 --> 00:16:48.110
I move fast and break things.

00:16:48.110 --> 00:16:51.350
That's the motto I have right now on growth, and it works.

00:16:51.350 --> 00:16:56.600
And I want to see people focus on, let's say, Instagram prospecting.

00:16:56.600 --> 00:17:01.519
And the only thing that matters is Instagram prospecting.

00:17:01.520 --> 00:17:08.720
But I have one team doing that, one person doing that, but then I have somebody else doing LinkedIn prospecting and somebody else doing email prospecting.

00:17:08.721 --> 00:17:15.859
So, when you have more resources, you could spend multiple wheels, but those individuals need to focus.

00:17:16.009 --> 00:17:21.019
And my focus is assisted call bookings, and then I need to maximize call bookings.

00:17:22.400 --> 00:17:32.990
But then I action each one of my BDRs, business development reps, to focus on their specific niche.

00:17:32.990 --> 00:17:35.599
So, focus, you need to focus.

00:17:36.049 --> 00:17:39.259
What's your top priority?, But it doesn't mean you got to do one thing.

00:17:39.680 --> 00:17:40.099
Right.

00:17:39.680 --> 00:17:43.430
So, you can do multiple things that all are related to one focus.

00:17:43.579 --> 00:17:56.759
Sometimes these validation efforts can be false positives in the sense that there's a reason that not all pre-order campaigns that are successful turn into hugely successful products, for a bunch of different reasons.

00:17:57.121 --> 00:18:02.549
So, the validation, in a sense, kind of never stops as you move through this, especially in this early phase.

00:18:02.550 --> 00:18:10.710
Once you have these pieces in place, and you validated, more or less, conversion rates and the payment stuff, what were you looking to validate now?

00:18:10.711 --> 00:18:15.569
What were some of the key metrics that you were looking at to say,"Yes, we're onto something.

00:18:15.570 --> 00:18:20.309
There's a real full business here, or we need to pivot or, as you say, iterate"?

00:18:20.849 --> 00:18:23.910
Yes, conversion efficiencies and retention.

00:18:25.440 --> 00:18:27.960
How efficient can you convert someone?

00:18:28.560 --> 00:18:32.640
When I talk to someone, out of a hundred people, how many are willing to buy?

00:18:33.180 --> 00:18:33.480
Got it.

00:18:33.779 --> 00:18:39.119
That gives you a good idea of the demand.

00:18:39.121 --> 00:18:41.130
And from there, how many stick around.

00:18:41.131 --> 00:18:43.019
Is it another one?

00:18:43.020 --> 00:18:48.150
Which is much more challenging than the former because that takes time.

00:18:48.151 --> 00:18:51.359
There's a lot of variables.

00:18:51.361 --> 00:19:03.750
When you're selling something, you're selling the idea of something, and the idea could be what the other person imagines it to be, and then the expectations of something.

00:19:03.750 --> 00:19:06.690
And the reality could be a little bit different.

00:19:06.691 --> 00:19:17.279
So, the reality is much more challenging, retention is a much more difficult thing to solve than growth.

00:19:17.461 --> 00:19:24.359
Because growth is all up front, you get the data right away, you can figure that out and move, pivot, or persevere.

00:19:24.361 --> 00:19:32.549
With retention, there's a lot of reasons why people may not retain, and it takes time to figure that out.

00:19:32.550 --> 00:19:36.569
You have to dig a lot deeper because you already have their money.

00:19:36.570 --> 00:19:41.549
So, it's a lot more of a proactive thing.

00:19:41.550 --> 00:19:43.319
That became a focus a little bit later on...

00:19:43.890 --> 00:19:44.369
Right.

00:19:43.890 --> 00:19:46.740
...as we got a little bit more success on the growth engine.

00:19:47.519 --> 00:20:01.980
My final question is, at what point did you feel you went from this validating, do we have a business here, what does it look like, to yes, there's something real here and there's a full business to be built out?

00:20:01.980 --> 00:20:03.809
What were some of the things that got you there?

00:20:04.799 --> 00:20:06.960
I think that changes.

00:20:06.961 --> 00:20:20.339
One day I'm like,"Holy shit, this thing is going to explode like a rocket ship" but I'm like,"Oh my God, it's just going to explode, not like a rocket ship".

00:20:20.340 --> 00:20:29.220
Some days, we had a hundred members sign up and other days you'd go days without a single member sign up, convert to paying member.

00:20:29.221 --> 00:20:45.569
It really was this big variable and I think there were sometimes early on when our growth engine was running at full steam, the demand is incredible, and we are unstoppable.

00:20:45.570 --> 00:20:55.420
But then, you make a few hiring mistakes, you start questioning yourself, you look at your retention, you're like,“Retention is not that great”.

00:20:55.421 --> 00:21:00.910
And then you start doubting yourself, and you think it's because your product is a problem, and it could be the product.

00:21:01.329 --> 00:21:10.750
But in our case, a lot of the problem was related to the actual structure of the business itself for retention.

00:21:10.750 --> 00:21:16.390
The expectations of what we can achieve in that model, we were actually doing pretty good.

00:21:16.391 --> 00:21:33.160
But we thought we weren't doing so good on retention, so we slowed everything down, and that became a problem in itself, which is another thing to dig into.

00:21:32.111 --> 00:21:44.319
But if you stay focused, and you're tenacious, and you have a good core team, like your co-founders, then you just keep moving, you keep iterating, and you keep moving forward.

00:21:44.320 --> 00:21:47.799
And then you rediscover, you discover what it is that people truly love about your business.

00:21:47.800 --> 00:21:53.259
For us, it was, when you talk to our customers, there are certain segments that absolutely loved it.

00:21:53.260 --> 00:21:54.220
So, we started doubling down on them.

00:21:55.119 --> 00:22:04.150
We also realized that this is actually a good entryway to a larger market.

00:22:04.151 --> 00:22:13.930
Apprenticeships and work experience allowed us to build a wedge and a brand in finding marketing talent and launching a marketing career.

00:22:13.931 --> 00:22:24.220
But, we can now sell businesses on any kind of marketing talent because we have this amazing brand that is the number one in the space for marketing help.

00:22:24.221 --> 00:22:33.970
And we now are able to attract, not just students, but experienced freelancers and marketers who want to build a career, and match them with businesses.

00:22:33.971 --> 00:22:37.509
Because we've established ourselves in this space, in this vertical, in this niche.

00:22:37.510 --> 00:22:44.019
And now we're starting to expand more upstream into bigger clients, more money, more revenue, ultimately more retention.

00:22:44.020 --> 00:22:49.420
That's going to take a little while, but it's all a stepping stone process.

00:22:49.691 --> 00:22:51.940
The journey where you start and where you end.

00:22:51.790 --> 00:22:54.369
There's a lot of small pivots that happened along the way.

00:22:54.910 --> 00:22:57.700
All right, I'm going to cap it off there.

00:22:57.910 --> 00:22:59.500
Thanks a lot Moe for sharing your story.

00:22:59.500 --> 00:23:03.700
It's been an absolute pleasure having you here.

00:23:03.759 --> 00:23:16.809
Maybe, just to recap, you had this idea that you got from personal experience around the value of unpaid interns for businesses, and the desire of interns to learn hands-on real-world experience.

00:23:16.810 --> 00:23:26.140
You tested it out with this kind of single-player mode, starting with students, you got to businesses, you focused in on marketing, and now you've built this community of marketers.

00:23:26.141 --> 00:23:36.430
You've changed the lives I assume of many, many students who are now professionals in digital marketing, and of course helped many businesses grow along the way.

00:23:36.460 --> 00:23:42.759
All starting with this very lean approach to validation, which I think a lot of people can learn from.

00:23:42.760 --> 00:23:43.329
So, thanks a lot.

00:23:43.211 --> 00:23:43.329
It's been amazing.

00:23:43.329 --> 00:23:44.559
Thank you so much Pablo.

00:23:45.460 --> 00:23:46.450
Thanks so much for listening.

00:23:46.779 --> 00:23:49.450
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