Our platform has been used by 50,000+ creators, who have gone on to teach 30 million students, and in the process have earned over half a billion dollars (!!).

Every single day, our creators reach 20,000+ new students and earn close to a million dollars.

But beyond the numbers, it’s been awe inspiring to see the actual impact of allowing people to earn a living from their passion.

Today, we are excited to announce that we are being acquired by Brazil-based Hotmart Technology. This new partnership will allow us further our mission and to empower even more creators — now, on a truly international scale.

The first question I imagine you have is why.

Our revenue and customer base is growing rapidly. The broader creator ecosystem is hitting escape velocity. There is no shortage of liquidity or capital available to high-growth technology companies.

The most concise answer is: this partnership will allow us to have the largest possible impact in the shortest period of time.

For those of you not in the know, Hotmart is analogous to the “Teachable of Brazil,” while operating profitably at a scale three times our size.

Over the last nine years, they have built an absolutely incredible business in Latin America and Europe empowering 60,000+ creators to sell 150,000+ digital products.

But more importantly, their mission is almost identical to ours — while we exist to “empower creators to transform their knowledge into income,” Hotmart enables people to “live from their passion” (translated).

So, when we were presented with an opportunity to combine forces with a business that shared our worldview and values, operating in a parallel geography and in the process establish one of the most valuable creator-focused companies in the world, it became a no-brainer.

This partnership will also allow us to invest dramatically more into our product — which should both accelerate the feature roadmap for our creators, as well as allow us to incorporate specific learnings and expertise from Hotmart’s experience.

Moreover, we will be able to take a substantial step toward becoming a more international business. Hotmart has a massive distribution advantage in Latin America and Europe and we will be spending time exploring how we can use this partnership to expose our creators to a global audience.

Ultimately, that’s what this partnership came down to — we realized that independently we were each perfectly poised in our respective geographies, but collectively we are ready to take on the world.

I’m sure you have a lot of questions and we will be answering them all in due course.

For now, a couple of quick ones:

What’s the plan for Teachable?

Everything stays exactly as it is — we continue to double down on our brand, product and mission, just with more resources. We have a slew of very exciting product releases coming soon and our big biannual summit in a couple of weeks.

Incidentally, this move means we do not need to fundraise anytime in the near future, so we can completely focus on serving our creators as best as we can.

What’s the plan for the Teachable team?

The Teachable team is incredible. Their commitment and passion to our creators is what makes our platform so valuable.

The entire team — all 130+ of us, will continue to operate autonomously building Teachable out of our offices in New York City, NY and Durham, NC. We remain laser focused on building the best online course platform for the North-American and English speaking market.

Shameless plug — we continue to hire aggressively. If you would like to be a part of one of the fastest growing companies powering the creator economy, we would love to have you join us.

What’s your plan?

My role stays exactly the same — I remain the founder and CEO of Teachable. While this is exciting for all parties involved, this is still only a small step in our much larger mission.

Additionally, I’m incredibly grateful to both JP and Mateus for offering me the opportunity to join as a cofounder in the global business. It’s been years since I have been part of a founding team, and personally, that remains one of the most valuable parts of this partnership.

My commitment to our team, our creators and our mission stays exactly the same, if not stronger than ever before.

Teachable is Joining Forces with Hotmart was originally published in Teachable on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On September 1st, I sent our 63rd monthly investor update. It was one of the better ones.

A little over five years after Teachable was incorporated, we were excited to sneak past the $2,000,000 in monthly revenue mark.

While we are proud of this–as we should be–this post is about the entirety of our journey over the last year and not just our highlight reel. (For that, there’s always my IG).

While I maintain that running this company is the most rewarding part of my life, I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t been a goddamn @!%*@% at times.

And then back to being incredibly rewarding–often hours later.

My goal in this article is to take you behind the scenes as to how the last 12 months have transpired.

I’ll share revenue numbers, specific fundraising details, my biggest operating mistake, and a whole lotta feelings.

Let’s dive in.

1 — Okay, doubling every year just got super hard

My post last year was about our journey to a $15M run rate.

At that point, we had roughly doubled in the last 12 months.

At the end of this month, we anticipate being at a $25M+ run rate.

That’s an addition of $10M in run rate in a year, or a 67% year-on-year growth rate.

My initial feelings about our growth mirrored my father’s reaction to our April 2018 investor update:

Even though a growth rate of close to 70% is “fast-growing” at our scale, it’s the first time we are growing at a rate materially under 2x annually.

Upon further inspection though, we’re pretty happy with where we are today.

Despite the slowing percentage of growth, the absolute numbers are growing rapidly.

The first $12m in run rate took us 4 years, while the next $12m has taken us under 18 months.

Beyond that, we’ve been able to do so while building a fundamentally good business™ and skirting the line around profitability.

Last year, we had an EBITDA loss of under $700,000, and this year we’ve had the occasional accidentally profitable month.

In the age of Ubers and WeWorks, this is something we’re more than happy to trade a few percentage points of growth for.

2 — Responsible Venture Capital (is that a thing?)

As a result of building a fundamentally good business™, we’ve always raised a lot less money than we potentially could have.

Consider this:

• Our last funding round–eighteen months ago, what would probably be considered our “Series A”–was a $4 million round on a $130 million valuation, or approximately 3% dilution to the business.
• We’ve raised a little over $13 million in total in venture capital for selling slightly more than 30% of the business across multiple funding rounds.
• We control 2 out of 3 board seats.
• We still have over $9 million in the bank.

At close to a $25M annual run rate, this makes us highly atypical relative to a traditional venture-backed business.

Will we forever retain this level of control? Almost certainly not. And it’s nothing we have ever over optimized for.

Yet, when:

• you run a business in a non capital-intensive way;
• your survival is not predicated on the next round of funding;
• you are truly building for the long-term

You get a LOT more leverage while fundraising.

This fundraising strategy does not make us a better business in any way and neither does it materially decrease our chances of failure.

It just means that even if we do not end up achieving the level of success we aspire to, it would be because of our own failures and shortcomings and not any necessitated by outside stakeholders.

That — and being able to run the business on our own terms — is pretty fucking great.

3 — Having more than one revenue stream is 🔥🔥🔥

The most impressive part of our growth in the last year has been the growth of our Payments business.

A year ago our Payments operation was responsible for approximately a quarter of our business.Today, it’s a third and growing:

This mirrors what Shopify has been able to do very, very successfully at a mere 50 times our volume.

When Shopify went public, their Merchant Solutions revenue was 36% of their overall revenue.In the most recent quarter completed, it had jumped all the way to 57%.

Over the coming years I expect us to get over 50%+ as well.

We have been able to move this considerably by doubling down on providing value in the otherwise complicated and painful world of payments.

We decided to absorb a lot of pain that would otherwise be the creators’ responsibility — fun topics like global taxes, fighting chargebacks and automating payouts — in return for processing payments on behalf of our creator.

This was a painstaking and largely unsexy process. It has taken years of investment in terms of time, headcount, and product roadmap. It continues to occupy a significant portion of all those resources and likely always will.

But… this was an opportunity to solve a real problem for our creators, all while staying true to our mission.

And in return, we got a powerful second revenue stream that will become increasingly significant as we march towards the coveted $1B in annual sales on the platform (GMV).

4 — Experience Matters. A Lot.

The biggest operating mistake I have made over the last five years is waiting too long before hiring experienced leaders.

There was a myriad of excuses along the way:recruiting taking too much time or being too expensive, deluding ourselves that we didn’t need executives who have been there before, and even misguided attempts at running departments myself.

And this hurt us repeatedly.

It led to losing employees that we may have otherwise retained. It led to some of the more stressful months and quarters of my life. It slowed down the development of the people that we had on our team.

And even when we did eventually find the right executive, it was a bigger hole for them to dig us out of.

This is something I have spent a long time fixing this year and I’m proud relieved to say for the first time in the history of the company, we have a complete executive team.

Aside from our VP Engineering, CTO, CFO and Head of People who were here a year ago, this year we brought on experienced leaders in the roles of VP Customer Success and Sales, VP Marketing, VP Compliance, and VP Product.

Aside from each function benefiting from having an experienced leader, I’ve been amazed at how much I have been able to learn simply from observing competent executives doing their job.

This is heightened in my personal case since not only have I never been an executive before, this is also my first full-time job 😬… but that’s a story for another time.

You hear this all the time, but it’s still going to amaze you watching how much a great leader raises everyone else’s game.

5 — The human stuff is the best and hardest part of it all.

Growth is hard. Building good software is hard. Recruiting amazing people is hard.

Yet, nothing is ever as hard as the tough things that happen on the human side.

This last year in particular was harder than usual.

We had a tough Q1 2019 where a number of team members that had been around for 2–4 years all moved on from Teachable for a variety of largely unrelated reasons in a compressed period of time.

In some cases, it was necessary and the right thing for both the individual and the business. It still hurt.

In other cases, it wasn’t. That hurt even more.

As a founder, you can’t help but take personal responsibility every time that happens and go down a rabbit hole of self-examination.

You wonder if you had done something differently, would the outcome have been any different?

You look around the room and realize it looks nothing like it was a few years ago.

And then you realize, it will probably always be that way.

People start companies for a lot of reasons.

I wanted to create something used by lots of people. I thought it was “better” than finding a job. I wanted my side-project to get more users and make more money. I wanted to leave a footprint on the world.

What I did not expect however, was how all the reasons I initially wanted to start a company, would ultimately pale in comparison to the meaning I would derive from building something as a team.

MRR and ARR are great and all, but the best part of the last five years has been working, learning, celebrating, and growing together.

I also did not expect the deep sense of fulfillment from serving creators and entrepreneurs.

The responsibility of tens of thousands of people trusting us with their livelihoods is incredibly motivating and continues to keep us going.

In the last year, we’ve grown from 75 people in one office to 115 people in two offices.

In the next year, our creators will earn over a million dollars every single day.

And yet, we’re only getting started.

If you want an e-mail the next time I write something, sign up for the occasional update.

If you are interested in becoming a part of Teachable, we’re always looking to bring on exceptional people.

If you are curious about becoming an online creator, launching your first course or earning a living sharing your expertise, grab a free ticket to our annual online conference, Teachable Live from September 24th-26th

Who is a Creator?

A creator is defined as someone who brings something into existence.

Traditionally, you could create art or music or photography. Or write something, record something or build something with your hands.

But today, creation takes many unconventional forms. There are literally thousands of ways you can be a creator in 2019.

You can stream video games on Twitch, design custom objects to be 3D-printed on Shapeways, create memes on social media, produce beats for artists on Splice or start a podcast.

The company I founded, Teachable for instance, has helped 25,000 people become a creator by teaching and sharing their expertise.

A 2016 study estimated 15 million people in America (2% of the entire population) earned money as a creator. That’s a whole lotta creating and this movement is only getting started.

Why Now is The Best Time to be a Creator

Traditionally, if you wanted to earn a living as a creator, you had to win the somewhat arbitrary approval of a gatekeeper.

Television networks, movie studios, record labels, universities, publishing houses, museums, magazines are all gatekeepers. These gatekeepers historically had an almost monopolistic control over distribution. Without their support, your creation would not be able to find an audience.

Today, we live in a brand new world. The Internet has democratized access to an audience and gatekeepers are now completely optional.

Writers no longer need publishers, teachers no longer need universities, musicians can get famous on Soundcloud and you can build an engaged viewership of millions on Youtube.

This is a fundamental paradigm shift.

The rise of social networks and marketplaces have further accelerated the impact. There now exist thousands of websites where your potential audience congregates that you can tap into.

The convergence of these trends, along with the fact that there are now lots of brand new ways of being a creator that never existed before make this the single best time in history to earn a living as a creator. And it’s only going to get better from here on.

Becoming a Full-Time Creator is Still Hard

That said, just because everyone now can earn a living as a creator doesn’t mean everyone successfully does. Becoming a full-time creator is still really, really hard.

Broadly speaking, there are three stages to earning a living as a creator:

1 — Creating.

Whether you write, teach, paint, sculpt, podcast, live stream, weave or design, the journey begins with the act of creating.

2 — Building an Audience

Unlike the old world of gatekeepers, to become a professional creator today, you need to build an audience of people that care about your work.

3 — Monetizing Your Audience

Once you have an audience of people supporting your work, you can now convert this into an income.

The most likely reason you will NOT succeed at becoming a full-time creator is because you will fail at the second stage. It turns out that building an audience is hard.

The act of creation is completely in your control. Ultimately, you have complete control over whether you launch that podcast, write that book, record that song or post that video. And if you do succeed at building an audience, you can follow a relatively straightforward playbook that we have seen thousands of Teachable creators employ to earn a living.

That leaves building an audience. It’s the hardest and least controllable of the three stages.

So How Do Creators Build an Audience?

Since building an audience is the trickiest stage of earning a living as a creator, I want to study how successful creators have done this.

I’m going to begin by collecting survey responses from at least 200 full-time creators i.e. people who earned a full-time living as a creator in 2018 covering these questions:

• Where did they start building an audience?
• How large an audience did it take to support a full-time living? How long did it take?
• How much did they earn from their audience in 2018?
• What specific channels did they use? What worked and what didn’t work?

My goal will be to collect as diverse a data set as possible — not just diversity of age, education level, ethnicity and geography of creators, but also as many different forms of creating as possible.

As I collect these responses, I’m going to identify trends and themes, dive deeper into a few individual stories and attempt to build a generalized framework that can be universally applied. I’ll then test this framework on a few brave volunteers and see if they too can cross the chasm into full-time creator territory.

While I’m not sure what the final form factor of this research will be, I intend to share the data, findings and experiments along the way. If you are interested in following along, please do sign up for email updates.

I’ll also be taking a meta approach and seeing if I can apply these learnings to build an audience from scratch myself. Presumably, if I can’t teach myself how to do this, I shouldn’t be teaching other people.

Aside from an academic fascination, there is a very strong level of self-interest here. Teachable is a very powerful tool to help creators monetize an audience. The more creators that build an audience, the greater the universe of successful Teachable creators.

I Need Your Help

If you are interested in getting involved, here are all the ways you can help:

• Do you think this is cool? Share this post.
• Are you a full-time creator? Email me, I’d love to send you the survey.
• Are there full-time creators you want me to survey? Let me know.
• Want to stay involved and receive the occasional email with updates and findings? Sign up here.

In that time, we’ve grown an enormous amount. We now power 25,000 creators who teach 20+ million people. All of our beautiful creators will sell over $300 million worth of knowledge this year alone! That’s close to an average of a million dollars in sales every single day this year.

But ultimately, as Uncle Ben told Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Today, I want to talk about that responsibility.

What responsibility?

• The responsibility that comes with supporting the livelihoods of thousands of people.
• The responsibility to serve our creators who have loyally stuck with us for years.
• The responsibility to always remember our raison d’etre — you.

Instead of shirking away from some of the more difficult questions posed in our community, I wanted to take this opportunity to answer them head on.

While some of the answers may not be specifically what you would like to hear, I’m optimistic you will appreciate the candor and our responsibility to build for the long-term.

Delayed Response Times

“It’s taking me longer to hear back when I have a question.”

We aim to get back to all customer enquiries within a single business hour. In the last few months, we have fallen substantially behind due to a myriad of reasons.

Our First Reply Time skyrocketed in January after a somewhat tumultuous November. We fell behind in hiring, our inbound ticket volume grew much faster than anticipated, and we expended a lot of energy preparing to open a second Customer Care location (more on that in a sec).

We know that this is not good enough. This is not the standard we set ourselves to. The first step towards fixing something is acknowledging the problem.

Instead of mere platitudes, I want to outline the specific actions we are taking to rectify this:

• Our team is committed to supporting our creators to the best of our ability, which is a very high, specific standard. We aim for a 1-hour First Response Time during business hours and a 95% Customer Satisfaction score. We were at those levels previously and we will be back there shortly.
• In addition to being able to submit a ticket, our Professional Plan customers have the ability to chat live with an agent — we intend to double down on this, and are looking into expanding coverage to make live support available to more people.
• We want to make it easier to contact Teachable — we’re looking at bringing more contextual help inside the application including being able to submit a ticket in-line from any screen inside the admin area.
• We’re reinvesting back into the business — we’re opening a new Customer Care office in Durham, North Carolina in the next month to support our core Customer Care operation in New York City, and we aim to grow our Customer Care team by almost 70% in 2019. (That’s 18 new full-time employees on Customer Care that will join Teachable in 2019!)
• Beyond simply supporting people when they have problems, we’re spending a lot of time thinking about what else can we do to proactively support our creators in growing your business. We have a world-class knowledge base and customer community. We’re investing a lot into recorded trainings and live workshops in our new school TeachableU to make Teachable the single best place to learn how to start a business online.

What is Teachable Investing In

“Teachable is spending all their time marketing to new users instead of developing features for existing users.”

If you haven’t heard, we host pretty awesome online events 1–2 times a year. We have 30+ speakers, tens of thousands of attendees, and absolutely incredible content in every session. Plus, it’s all free to attend, with a bonus for people who upgrade to a paid plan. Every time we host these events we get hundreds of emails from people who loved it.

We’re hosting a similar event in March — but when we emailed one of our top affiliates (who loves us), her advice stung:

“Your team hosts absolutely incredible summits like these — absolutely packed with value and I’m sure this one will be incredible too.

But at the same time, there is a community of existing customers who share common feedback, complaints and wishes for Teachable.

It’d be amazing to see Teachable invest as much energy and excitement into its existing customers as you do to new customers”

Even though these initiatives are independent of each other — for instance, if our Marketing team didn’t run an online conference, it would not enable our Product or Engineering team to ship a new sales page editor any faster — receiving this feedback still stung.

In 2019, we’re investing heavily in Product and Engineering. To give you context, we’re aiming to add 18 new people (from 26 to 44) on our Product and Engineering teams this year. That’s a 70% bump in headcount. For context, our Marketing team is slated to grow by only 4 people this year to 15.

In addition to the exciting slate of new features we’re working on (more on that shortly), we’re spending a lot of time talking to our creators, learning about all the annoying things that exist with the product as they stand and cleaning them up.

All this while hiring, training, and onboarding new employees with the goal of ending the year with 40+ engineers working full-time on making Teachable the best it can be.

What is Teachable Working On

“I have no idea what features Teachable is working on”

At Teachable, we tout transparency as a core internal cultural value. Internally, every employee can view our financials, our board meeting agendas, our revenue and sales numbers, and pretty much all information short of other employees private compensation information.

Yet externally, our community has not had the same experience. There are frequent calls for more transparency in terms of what Teachable is actually working on, which new features are being developed, which bugs are being worked on, and what to expect from Teachable in the coming year(s).

We’ve been hesitant to do so for a multitude of reasons. Plans change, and by externally sharing what we are working on, it makes things harder to walk back. Writing software can be incredibly challenging — initiatives that you think take a week, can take a month. We thought building the first version of Teachable would take a quarter, it (unsurprisingly) took over a year!

At the same time, I recognize we need to do better. Our creators rely on us to run their business, so we’re pushing to share as much as possible, starting with:

• We now have monthly blog posts with the goal of sharing exactly what changed in the product along with what to expect in the coming month. You should read it!
• You can join our beta program to get early access to features as soon as they are released.
• We are working on making our high-level roadmap available to our community. While we’re still not able to talk about features we intend to work on, we can certainly provide better visibility into features that are actively being worked on. Stay tuned for more.

And for a quick preview of what is to come on Teachable in the coming months:

• Course compliance is almost live! You can soon gate access to content based on a student actually completing content or passing a quiz.
• We hear you on how hard it it to build a sales page on Teachable, the team has been working really hard on a brand new WYSIWYG Page Editor that we’ll be slowly rolling out to creators. Sign up for our Beta program and you will be the first to know.

• With close to a million dollars processed per day via Teachable’s checkout product, we’re working on adding better statistics and instrumentation to the checkout process. Following that, we’ll be working on integrating Google Pay and Apple Pay since almost 50% of all Teachable purchases happen on a mobile phone! All of these features are designed to make you the most income from your course.
• We are spending a lot of time on UX cleanup! Our account creation and login flows could do with a refresh, and we’re working hard to eliminate common signup and login issues to make the entire experience as frictionless as possible.

While we have a lot more to come on all of this, the biggest takeaway is we owe you better visibility so you can always see what’s coming soon.

Thank you for reading this far.

While a lot of this post may not have made for particularly pretty reading, this is the open and transparent communication we owe our creators.

It holds us accountable, and will be something to collectively look back on from a position of strength in a few months.

Thank you all for trusting Teachable with your livelihood. This is not a responsibility we take on lightly.

A lot has evolved since then, so one year later I figured it’s time to update our narrative and chronicle where we are as a business today.

While it may be unusual for a private company to share such a close look at the important metrics behind the business, transparency is one of our core values at Teachable — and by doing this annually, we’re putting our money (our venture capital?) where our mouth is.

Business Metrics

In August 2018, Teachable earned over $1.2M+ in revenue.

Our revenue is primarily composed of two categories:

• Subscription Revenue — i.e. what our creators pay us every single month to be subscribed to the Teachable platform. Our Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is the leading indicator behind this number.
• Payments Revenue — i.e. transaction and credit card fees from processing course sales on behalf of our creators.

We ended August 2018 at an MRR of $920,500 and our Payments Revenue came in at $300,000+ on $15,000,000+ in monthly sales.

While this indicates a 75–25 split between the two revenue sources, we expect Payments Revenue to increasingly contribute a greater percentage as we look to double-down our focus on providing new and better payment services — similarly, we are debuting a new Payment Gateway shortly.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

Our subscription revenue is derived from our MRR earned from creators via a relatively standard SaaS fee. A few hiccups notwithstanding, our MRR continued its steady upward ascent at a relatively reliable clip. Our number of paying customers has grown steadily, while we’ve made nominal — but steady — gains in average monthly customer value ($57 in Aug 16, $66 in Aug 17, $71 in Aug 18).

Our MRR is up 1.7x from last year — which honestly isn’t as fast as we’d like it to be but with rapid payments growth, we still clock in at approximately 2x annually in overall revenue growth.

Payments Revenue

In August 2018, Teachable creators earned over $15 million in online course sales. That’s right! On an average day, Teachable creators sold approximately half a million dollars worth of courses on Teachable!!

On the $15 million, we earned roughly $300,000 in revenue across a combination of mechanisms, including: transaction fees from our free and lower tiers, credit card fees on our higher tier on our payment gateway, and our soon to be launched brand new payment gateway Teachable Payments (shhhh).

We’re investing a lot in streamlining payments for our course creators in the coming year — including filing and paying a myriad of taxes on their behalf, offering to pay out their authors, affiliates, and other stakeholders while issuing tax forms on their behalf along, [better tools for fighting chargebacks] — and with this, we hope our increased focus on payments will lead to Payments revenue growth outpacing Subscription growth in the coming year.

Other Business Metrics

Total Sales

With a large percentage of the year still left to go, we expect to come in between $160m and $190m in 2018.

If you look at the last 12 months (ending August 2018), we have helped course creators sell ~$138 million in course sales.

That an increase of more than 3x (!!) the 12 months preceding that where we helped course creators sell ~$44 million in total sales.

Number of “Successful” Creators

Arguably one of the most important metrics we look at on the platform is the unique number of creators making a sale every single month.

This graph has been incredibly predictable since Day 1 — during great months of growth, it was frustrating to see this graph grow at (almost) the same rate as always, while during months of stagnation, it was promising to see this graph continue to grow.

At the end of the day, this is the graph that truly indicates that even in the absence of hype, marketing, promotions and PR, we are onto something truly valuable helping more creators transform their knowledge into income every single month.

Students

This is worthy of only a quick mention, but there are now over 14,000,000 students using the Teachable platform with 20,000+ signing up every single day.

Breaking that down, in the last 12 months ending August 2018, there were 7.25 million students who’ve signed up to take a course, as compared with 4.6 million in the 12 months preceding.

Why is this only a quick mention?

Ultimately, Teachable is a platform that empowers creators to transform their knowledge into income. These are not students that belong to Teachable — rather they belong to our creator community.

So while it’s exciting to see these numbers rise rapidly (and it makes working on the product so much more fun!), it is ultimately a function of our creator’s success.

Five Questions We Want to Answer in the Next Year

I believe our answers to these five questions will determine how successful the next 12 months will be for us.

If we answer three or more of these successfully in the next year, it’s going to be a pretty, pretty good one (in Larry David voice).

Can we spend money to grow faster?

Lately, Teachable has been unintentionally skirting the line towards profitability. As a venture backed business with a relatively large amount of cash in the bank, this has not particularly been by design — but being responsible with money has always been an implicit part of our culture.

However, a less glamorous, large reason for that is we’re not particularly effective at deploying capital to grow faster. Our paid acquisition campaigns and programs thus far haven’t shown a ton of promise, which means if things are running slow on a particular month, we can’t use the money in the bank to go out and acquire more customers. We have plans to fix this but if we cannot, it will slow down new subscriber growth at a certain point.

How fast can we ramp up the Payments side of our business?

Strategically, we’ve identified Payments as a core focus for our business moving forward. We’ll process close to $200M in Payments this year — while dealing with a host of complexities so that our creators don’t have to including fraud, chargebacks, taxes, international currencies, affiliate and author payouts and so forth. Next year, we hope to more than double that number while taking on even more painful payments challenges ourselves.

Consequently, we also expect revenue growth from Payments to be faster than revenue growth from subscribers — particularly if we can enable each subscriber to sell more every single year.

Can we help people sell more than online courses?

Every time we chat with our creators, we find that most of them have businesses that span beyond online courses. They sell live training and coaching, conduct in-person events and workshops, have clients to whom they sell services directly, write books and own other downloadable assets and more.

Our long-term vision to empower creators to transform their expertise into income — no matter if their expertise looks like an “online course” — and in the coming 12 months, we want to be better at allowing our creators to monetize these other forms of expertise on our platform. By doing that, we not only increase the amount a creator can earn through our platform, but also make our platform more welcoming for creators just getting started out who may not have developed a full-fledged course yet.

Can we effectively train smart, motivated people to become successful content creators?

At Teachable, we believe everyone can teach and everything is Teachable. Sounds great as a corporate slogan, but a large determining factor in how big this business can be is how effectively we can train an enthusiastic, wannabe creator into someone consistently earning an income online. There is no shortage of smart, motivated people out there who want to be successful online creators, but haven’t gotten there yet.Training them effectively is one of our largest opportunities.

We are taking this challenge seriously in the coming year — starting by investing in our own online training program, TeachableU, and making it a core part of our paid offering. Previously, Teachable was simply software. Today, and in the future, Teachable is both training and software. We hope that creators that are earlier in the journey will see the value in maintaining a paid Teachable plan even if only just for the training.

Can we build, retain and scale an effective team?

This may be the most important question of all to answer — it’s the equivalent of asking a genie for unlimited wishes. If we succeed at this, we will eventually surmount all the other challenges.

Completely unrelated sidenote: Teachable is hiring. A lot. And we’d love for you to be a part of our journey.

The Next Journey of our Growth

While Teachable is hiring for many, many roles at the moment — with the ambitious goals of having approximately one new person start every week between now and the end of the year — I believe two roles have outsized importance in determining the success of our next year.

If you believe you may be a fit for either of these roles, or know someone that could be, do email me directly at firstname at teachable dot com:

VP Marketing

In addition to finding product-market fit early, one of the most significant reasons we have reached where we are today is by being incredibly growth-minded, especially relative to other product-first companies. With that said, at the moment we are at a crossroads and are looking for a Marketing leader to join our Leadership team and take us to the next level.

Some of the biggest challenges they will be responsible for solving:

1 — We’re pretty good at converting leads to paying customers and have gotten increasingly efficient at doing so with time. However, we need to work on growing the number of leads in our funnel much faster including running a successful paid acquisition program.

2 — For the first four years of our business, we ignored “brand”, “PR”, and other not directly measurable activities as a waste of time. We are no longer at this point and need to actively working on evangelizing this entire space of online creators, and need to work on better top-funnel visibility.

3 — Building, retaining and progressing an incredible marketing team under them. This role will ultimately largely come down to team-building so exceptional skills here are mandatory.

Chief Operating Officer (COO)

I am looking to hire a Chief Operating Officer (COO) to partner with and help me execute the broader vision for Teachable. This person will complement and operationalize the vision, while allowing me to retain focus on the product and market strategy.

While we have an amazing team and culture presently, we are lacking in the experience side — particularly someone that has been a part of a company scaling from $10M in revenue to $100M+ in revenue and beyond.

Here’s some of the responsibilities of the role:

1 — Running existing operational business areas (e.g. Customer Operations, People, Finance) and potentially building out new areas (e.g. Customer Success, Account Management, Sales).

2 — Organizational design, building and running the executive team, implementing leadership and company-wide processes for scale.

3 — Own goal-setting, compensation and performance-management frameworks across the organization.

4 — Other Sheryl Sandberg-ey type stuff (I kid, but only slightly)

Again, if you or someone you know would make a great fit, slide into the inbox.

Any thoughts, comments or questions about this post? Holla at your boi.

Scaling Teachable: Part 2 — Our Journey to a $15M Run Rate was originally published in Teachable on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Transparency is one of the four core internal values at Teachable. Outside of compensation information, we believe in making every single aspect of our business transparent internally.

What does that mean?

Everyone internally has access to our financials. Investor updates. Revenue dashboards. Board meeting agendas. Meeting notes from other teams. My personal Snapchat. Ok, maybe not the last one.

But today, we’re extending our internal transparency to apply externally. And in this post, I’m going to share with you some of our most sensitive metrics: our monthly recurring revenue, the dollar value of course sales on our platform and more.

This is terrifying.

For a multitude of reasons, publishing this post is scary af. Every single one of our competitors will read this (oh hai Jeff!). Every company considering entering this space will read this.

But at the end of the day, we believe the benefits far outweigh the downsides.

The benefit that reading this post will inspire more people that value transparency to join our team at Teachable.

The benefit that an inner look inside our business will build more trust and empathy with our customers that we aspire to treat like family.

The benefit that transparency dramatically reduces the cost of communication.

Finally, we believe transparency builds a better business. Transparency attracts and retains better team members and ultimately, the company with the strongest team wins.

Now, let’s dive into the good stuff.

Our Journey to $500k+ in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

Teachable as a business has three primary revenue channels — one of which far outweighs the other two.

Our primary revenue channel is our Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) — this is the fee that most of our teachers pay us monthly for access to the Teachable service and comprises almost 80% of our total revenue.

Our monthly recurring revenue right now is $555,500:

While that graph looks like a relatively smooth stairway to heaven, it masks some of the biggest challenges we have faced and will continue to face as look to grow this number almost 20x in the coming years to $10 million a month:

1. We need a different growth ‘playbook’ at every stage.

If we wanted to grow 10% monthly two years ago, I could single handedly do that by cold emailing a few potential customers and selling to them one at a time. If we wanted to grow 10% monthly a year ago, we could host a weekly webinar to a hundred people and get 25 to buy Teachable every week. Now if we need to grow 10% monthly, we need all of the above, along with paid acquisition to deliver results, our content program to bring in more leads than before and affiliates to drive meaningful traffic. A year from now? Let’s find out ;)

2. Growth is linear, churn is a percentage.

Churn a.k.a. the percentage of customers that cancel their subscription in any given month is measured as a percentage of the total. So if we are churning 5% a month at $100,000 in MRR, that’s $5,000 a month. At $500,000 in MRR that is $25,000 a month. On the other hand, added revenue grows linearly since it’s really, really hard to exponentially add new monthly recurring revenue for an extended period of time. As you can visualize by playing around with a MRR Forecast tool that unless we continue to decrease churn with time, we’ll run into flattening growth.

3. We are only as successful as our teachers.

Whenever we measure our customers by a specific “cohort” based on when they signed up for Teachable and track them over a period of time, we find that the revenue they contribute decreases with time due to churn. For example, the March 2016 cohort that was worth $10,000 in the first month might only be worth $5,000 a year later. To offset this loss, we need to generate expansion revenue from the customers that do stick around — and ideally enough expansion revenue to cancel out churn entirely. Interestingly, our biggest source of expansion revenue is transaction and credit card fees from our customers selling courses, which further reiterates that our future success as a business is dependent on our teacher’s success.

The single biggest inflection point for our growth trajectory was the decision to switch focus from transaction fees to recurring revenue. When we slashed transaction fees on our Pro plan to 0% (see if you can find out when by looking at the graph!), we overcame one of the biggest objections people had about joining Teachable while also increasing our average revenue per customer.

And while churn is something we continue to fight on a monthly basis, it sure is nice to start every month at ~95% of last month instead of $0 :)

Can Our Customers Sell a Billion Dollars of Courses?

Our mission is to build the single best payment and e-commerce system for information. The easiest way to measure that impact is the amount of money our customers are making on the platform.

In some regards, this number is more important than our MRR because it speaks to the impact our platform has on our customers’ lives.

In 2014, our customers made under $1 million. In 2015, it jumped to $6 million and in 2016, it grew 5x to almost $30 million generated on our platform:

In 2017, we are hoping to do over $120 million through the platform — with a bold target of over $1 billion in sales on Teachable in 2019.

Where is this growth coming from?

1) A massive increase in volume. We now have 80,000 published courses on Teachable (top) and over 7,000,000 students that have signed up to take a course (bottom).

2) An increase in every single instructor’s success rate. Growing volume isn’t enough, we need to continue increasing the average amount of sales for every single instructor — and in this regard, we’re still only scratching the surface of what is possible.

Our goal has always been that by using Teachable to sell information — you will end up making *more* money than any other solution — and enough more to offset the cost of a monthly plan.

So far, we have been doing that by:

a. Building features that directly increase monetization like 1-click upsells, bundled courses, monthly and annual memberships, an advanced couponing system, different pricing tiers for a specific product, an inbuilt affiliate program, the ability to charge in 100+ currencies and so forth.

b. Constantly testing and iterating on our checkout flow based on all the data we are collecting — for instance, we recently made the decision to move to a single-page checkout flow that has students enter their payment information first and only create an account after their purchase.

c. Harnessing the power of our network. By intelligently remembering payment and authentication information, we can make future purchases on the network much, much faster. In an ideal world, if someone has bought a course before on Teachable, they should be able to buy your course with a single click.

But as education and technology continue to evolve at such a rapid pace, we are only scratching the surface of what is eventually possible. And we still have not solved the biggest problem in our space: what can we do to help someone with amazing expertise without any marketing experience launch a successful business?

New technological advancements — whether it’s the known (virtual reality, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, machine learning) or the unknown — will have a dramatic effect on how information is bought and consumed and Teachable will be at the forefront.

Mo’ People, Mo’ Problems (not really though)

If you had told me three years ago, we would have over 60 people working at Teachable, I would have likely asked you for some of what you’d been smoking.

But as the years have progressed, our headcount has continued to approximately double every year. The business has grown at a faster rate — approximately 5x in 2015, 4x in 2016 and we are on track for between 2.5 and 3x in 2017:

At different times, different departments have led the charge on hiring. We started out as a group of engineers and product people. Our second big phase of growth was building out a growth and marketing team to sell the product we had been building. Lately, a lot of our growth has been operational to support our business both internally — and especially externally in providing the best Customer Care humanly possible.

Somewhat related, the number of grey hairs on my head has also grown linearly with headcount and is currently also on track to 3x in 2017.

The best part about this sustained growth is the novelty of experience — like a video game, every few months our jobs “level up” because of how much the company has evolved in that time period.

Consequently, the rate of learning in this environment is completely unparalleled which leads to an interesting phenomenon where a year working at Teachable is approximately the same as ~3–4 years of experience working in another environment.

We strive to have that reflect in the career trajectory of anyone that joins our team where a year of time working at Teachable can accelerate your professional career by 3–4 years.

And to be able to do all of that working on a product that makes a positive difference in the world?

That’s pretty special.

These graphs sure are sexy….

But this is just the first chapter of the Teachable story. And we want you to help us write the rest of the book.

Historically, if you wanted to be an entrepreneur, you sold stuff. Physical goods that you grew or manufactured or imported or bought or built.

But today, we live in a brand new world.

The easiest way to now start a business is by selling your expertise. By selling a product of your mind — by selling information, knowledge, services.

And this information revolution will create more businesses and entrepreneurs than ever before.

Teachable will be the platform to enable them. Will you join our journey?

Scaling Teachable: Our Journey to $500k+ in MRR was originally published in Teachable on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Three years ago, we created a small side project with a bold mission — to make it possible for anyone to make a living teaching what they know online.

As course creators ourselves, we hated the inelegance of every existing solution. We wanted a fresh start on a platform that didn’t control our students, and we built Teachable as a small side project for ourselves.

I remember the specific moment when we sent an email to our list inviting them to buy our course on our new platform. That feeling of “no one is ever going to buy this.” And then, approximately 32 minutes later, the exhilaration of getting our very first sale.

It was such a rush that I set my phone to ping me every time anyone on the platform had a sale. For anything.

As we saw random Internet people start to buy OUR course, we thought holy @#!$%^@ — if this solved a meaningful problem for us, other people will find this useful too. Cue our first customers.

By the spring of 2014, we were ready to start adulting and doing real business things, like incorporating and setting up a bank account.

We even had a stellar (yet cringeworthy-in-retrospect) marketing site featuring our only three customers at the time:

Over the next year, we grew from a handful of teachers to hundreds of active teachers. People were making real money selling courses on everything under the sun — from playing the handpan to preparing for bank exams in India, from cake decorating to intermediate blacksmithing to yoga specifically for bros.

By the start of 2016, our team grew to 15 people and we were on track to make $1m in revenue (!!!). Our course creators had made over $5 million selling courses in 2015 and things were getting good.

Turns out that was only the beginning — the last 12 months have exceeded all of our expectations. Over the course of last year, we have grown 5x to a $5million+ run rate. But more importantly, our teachers sold almost $30,000,000 in courses last year.

And this trickled all the way down: 1 person made over $1m last year, 5 people made over $750,000, 43 people made over $100,000, 420 people over $10,000 and 1414 people made over $1,000 last year.

We always believed this internally, but the data is now out there — making a living teaching courses online is officially a movement, and we are in at the ground floor.

With this momentum, we decided to raise a $4m Series A round of funding to truly double down on our vision and enable entrepreneurs and creators to make a living teaching online.

Mo’ Money, Fewer Problems (theoretically)

Outside of wild quarterly parties at Teachable HQ and custom tank tops in time for the New York summer situation, what are we gonna do with all this money?

We’re a product-driven company, and we believe the only way we can be successful in the long term is by making the strongest product in the market. No amount of sales and marketing will allow an inferior product to win in the long term.

Consequently, almost all the money will be invested back into hiring talented people and building the team that can carry our product forward in three important ways:

1) Platform: We want you to build on top of our technology.

We have spent a large amount of time in the last 24 months on the building blocks to enable developers to extend Teachable’s functionality beyond what the platform natively offers.

(Warning: Technical speak) We now have a robust webhook system allowing you to hook into third-party providers we don’t integrate with, a Liquid-enabled Power Editor that allows you to completely change up the front-end, and an API endpoint to let you enroll people in courses if you use a third-party payment provider.

The next step in our evolution is bringing a layer of simplicity to all this power in the engine. How can we make it absurdly simple for people without any technical background to leverage all this power?

We have solutions coming in that regard. The first step was a Zapier application to allow you a nicer frontend to play with our webhooks interface. And we’re planning a theme gallery that will allow you to point and click for deep customization of the frontend, and an app store that allows you to install “apps” to extend Teachable’s functionality.

2) Network: We want you to tap into our 3 million+ Teachable students.

Until 2017, the value of our product has been our technology. We have built an elegant and powerful platform for selling information online, and that’s worked out nicely for all involved.

Starting this year, we want to become more than just a technology — by enabling our instructors to tap into our network of 3 million students (and growing by almost 500k monthly) and make more money. We want to use the powerful data we will acquire by processing over $100m+ in course sales to make the experience better (and more profitable) for everyone.

The first step in this process was rolling out unified myTeachable accounts that allow potential students to sign up for an account on your school with only a single click. With 100,000+ accounts already created, the simplified process for enrolling new students is already paying off.

The next step is payments. If someone has paid for a course *anywhere* on Teachable, they will be able to buy a course on your website with a single click. With the network growing as fast as it is, that means hundreds of thousands of potential students can now buy from you in a matter of seconds.

The final step to tie it all together is using both the myTeachable network and our data to build a course purchase flow that has the highest conversion rates in the industry. Once we have the network in place for 1-click checkout, we intend to add more customizability to checkout pages including the ability to add trust signals and testimonials that we continually A/B test to ensure we build the most powerful checkout flow on the Internet. In other words, Teachable will be the most optimized platform for selling courses online.

At the end of the year when we have a few million people with myTeachable accounts, we will also experiment with driving you additional discovery from within the Teachable network, opening your course up to a brand new audience.

3) Customer Care and Community: The best product deserves the best customer care and community.

With the growth we experienced in 2016, scaling our Customer Care (CC) organization was undoubtedly our largest challenge of the year. Despite growing our customer base 5x, we ended the year with only twice as many people on the CC team — and that’s something we are looking to rectify in the coming year.

In addition to aggressively growing the size of Customer Care & Community teams (wanna join us?), we are investing in building powerful self-serve tools to solve a lot of frequent issues. Training and hiring amazing team members is as important as always with every representative being a part of our local office in New York.

Once we start getting this in place, we want to experiment with ways we can provide instructors with help not just reactively — but also proactively. While email support is great, we want to experiment with real-time channels to ensure you always have us to lean on.

And where we can’t be there, we’ll be looking at empowering our community (now over 10,000 strong!) to be a safe place for getting support and camaraderie from your peers, not just online, but also out in the real world. Stay tuned for more there!

Join the movement (I promise we’re not a cult)

We are looking to help our creators sell over $120 million in courses in 2017. That is four times as much as last year, and there is no way we are going to get there without your help.

Our team size will likely double as we look to grow from 30 to 60 people over the year… and we would love for you to be one of them.

There are a lot of reasons to work here:

The Trajectory: We are one of the fastest growing companies in New York right now. Nothing against subscription boxes for your chinchilla or machine learning to help people click more ads, but we’re working on a problem that matters. Allowing people to achieve freedom in their life by sharing their expertise is a cause we can all get behind.

The Culture: I could add pictures of our office space or talk about how we’re chill (af) and let people do their own thing as long as they get their work done. Or share pictures from our many internal parties, our retreat and our hackathon and all that good stuff. I could — and guess what? — I will:

But ultimately, none of that really matters. All of that pales in comparison to the single most valuable reason for working here:

The People.

We have built an incredibly smart and talented team here, people that have achieved great things before Teachable and people that will go on to start some of the biggest and most successful companies of the future.

Moreover, every single person that works here truly, deeply gives a 💩.

Nothing we can offer you in compensation and benefits could compare to the improvement in the quality of your life that you will derive from the people you will spend over a third of your waking hours with. We are not a remote company and intend to make full use of it.

Intrigued? Have a look at our open jobs — or even if nothing is a fit, subscribe to find out about future openings at Teachable.

I want to hear from you. We are humbled to have you along for our journey thus far. What can we be doing to serve you better in 2017? Leave a response in the comments below.

The pervasive Silicon Valley myth goes something like this: founder is passionate about solving a huge problem, raises millions driven by a powerful vision, and amidst much struggle finally changes the world.

Our story isn’t like that.

Fall 2013

Fedora started as a side project to scratch an itch.

I was teaching courses on Udemy with my partner Conrad. We were making some money, but it appeared unwise to market courses to students that we would have no direct access to.

So I locked myself in a room for three days and built an incredibly rudimentary website to sell my mobile marketing course directly to people.

A few days later, I convinced Conrad to use this tool on behalf of his agency and become our first paying customer. The week after, we signed our second and third paying customers as an unnamed side project.

A side project that was never built to be a startup. There was no bigger vision and I snarked at the “change the world” rhetoric that permeates technology startups.

This was a simple side project with a tiny bit of traction that needed a name. So, I picked a name out of a figurative hat and Fedora was born.

Summer 2014

We had tens of active customers that were not just using the product, but slowly shaping what the product was becoming.

We hired our first contractor and our first employee. Three weeks later, he brought in our second. Another friend showed up and worked for free until he became an entirely indispensable part of the company.

We hired our third employee. Then, my partner and first customer made the jump from advisor to become a full time co-founder.

Something amazing was happening.

Contractors became employees. Customers became investors. An advisor became a co-founder. Somewhere along the way, we became a team.

It wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies. My hastily hacked together technology sucked. Paying no heed to the second-system effect, we set out to rebuild the entire product from the ground up.

That would define who we were to become.

Instead of building a team around an existing product, we got the rare opportunity to build a brand new product as a team.

A product that belonged equally to all of us that we all put a little piece of us into — something that would always be ours no matter what we do in the future.

My side project grew up to become our company.

And our company began to need a name. A name that reflected our customers and our convictions. A name that reflected us all.

Fall 2015

It’s been two wild years. We have helped 5,000+ teachers launch 12K+ courses, teach 700K students and make over $3.5 million.

Somewhere down the line, we also started to believe in certain things.

Contrary to being founded on a specific vision, these convictions came slowly. They evolved organically as a result of daily interactions with our customers over multiple years.

The “change the world” rhetoric that I scoffed at? Guilty as charged.

Introducing… Teachable

Our Guiding Principles

1) Our teachers are our customers.

Unlike online education marketplaces catering to both students and teachers, we are laser focused on empowering our teachers to make a living teaching online.

2) We are expanding the scope of people that identify as teachers.

As anyone with a younger sibling can attest, teaching is the amongst the most primal and natural things in the world. We teach before we talk, we teach our friends, family and co-workers all the time, yet we are afraid to identify as teachers.

Whether you teach painting, programming, calligraphy or marketing, no matter if your medium is blog posts, Snapchat, Youtube videos or interpretative dance — if people learn from you, you are a teacher.

3) We believe the most successful teachers of the future will be entrepreneurs.

We believe the most motivated people in the world are entrepreneurs. The most successful teachers of the future will be entrepreneurs — and those entrepreneurs are who we are proud to call our customers.

We believe everyone can teach, and everything is teachable.

We are Teachable.

Ankur Nagpal on behalf of Allison Haag, Andrew Guttormsen, Ashley Hockney, Cameron Mattis, Chris Roth, Conrad Wadowski, Dustin Eichler, Jack Phelps, Jackson Riso, Justin Glazer, Michael Poage, Noah Pryor, Ryan Bonhardt, Sid Yadav, Tovah Payne

How a Side Project Grew Up to Become a Company was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

While hundreds of blog posts have covered Product Hunt launches in great detail, this post is a full year in review — what happened in the one year after we launched on Product Hunt on April 15 2014?

How It All Started

The vision behind Fedora was simple — building the easiest way for people to make money teaching online courses without having to go to a marketplace and give up ownership.

Six months in, we had attracted a small base of beta users, who were collectively processing a few thousand dollars in monthly transactions across ten different monetizing schools.

After stumbling on Product Hunt, it became clear that this would be a great place to “launch” — not just because of the traffic it would inevitably bring, but the fact that PH looked like the right channel to launch fast and ugly.

That’s a huge part of the Product Hunt effect — by virtue of an incredibly supportive community, it has become a safe space to launch quick and dirty.

So after getting an intro to Ryan, I was pretty stoked when this happened:

Boom, we were in business.

Launch Day

30 upvotes. 64 signups. 2 paying users.

Not bad, but a far cry from the other Product Hunt launches I had read about. Regardless, there were 64 brand new users that may have never heard about Fedora otherwise.

The 2 paying users was probably the coolest part though — not huge, but a massive victory at the time since I had only built the ability to pay for a Fedora account the day before ☺

We went on to become one of the first “single-person-in-a-room” products that launched publicly on Product Hunt that eventually become a full-fledged company with $2m in funding, a full-time team of 9 and even an office.

The Leverage

The funny thing I did not know at the time was that our relationship with Product Hunt was only beginning.

By virtue of being a platform that helps creators create their own product (in our case, online courses), that was to be the first of many Fedora Product Hunt launches.

Instead of being exposed to Product Hunt once on launch, every time one of our teachers had a launch, it got us in front of the PH community.

And launch they did.

In the last one year, I have tracked at least 16 different products launched by Fedora creators on Product Hunt.

So… just for funsies, I decided to run the numbers for source = producthunt on our internal analytics to see what the net effect across our entire network was:

Wow. Product Hunt had driven $207,152 in lifetime course sales and 26,447 students.

Analysis

1. Holy shit. Product Hunt is a great channel for acquiring both a high volume of users and most critically, users that are willing to pay for products. That’s huge since most other channels get you either quantity or quality.
2. Our creators built high-quality products. The average number of upvotes each of those courses received (246) is substantially above the Product Hunt average (~81). Also, since our teachers tend to eventually create multiple courses, a user derived from PH might eventually have multiple product purchases driving their LTV up.
3. Still an early adopter audience. Non-programming, marketing and design courses have not performed anywhere near as well on Product Hunt traffic in terms of number of upvotes, dollar value of sales, conversion rates or pretty much any other metric. Not to say this won’t change, but right now Product Hunt’s sweet spot is still programming, marketing and design — and by a long shot.
4. Product Hunt is a real, tangible business. That is no mean feat for a community-driven product (Digg, anyone?).

We should be paying Product Hunt

Considering these results were produced serendipitously, we would be willing to pay a serious amount of money if we could strategically invest in Product Hunt as an acquisition channel.

Off the top of my head, we’d love to collaborate with Product Hunt in at least three different ways:

• On-site Payments: PH could dramatically increase conversion by allowing their community to buy the course on their site and take a percentage. It’s a lot of work to become a payments company so it’s probably not immediately interesting but very high potential.
• Technology Licensing / Sub-hunts: Since we are a white-labeled platform for teachers, we do absolutely nothing for the people that come to us every day looking for the newest cool courses on our platform. If we could work with PH to set up some kind of “PH for Fedora Courses”, that’d be a unique way of handling course discovery . I’d also bet that it would increase the percentage of our teachers that complete creating the course they are working towards since they would have an audience to launch it to.
• Sponsored Products: This one is obvious and probably an intuitive next step — but the idea of a Sponsored Product. Looking at the numbers indicated above, I find it hard to imagine this wouldn’t be a positive-ROI ad spend for any high-quality online course in programming, marketing or design.

Until we can pay, we’re going to keep riding the free promo to $1m in Product Hunt sales ☺

Interested in teaching online? Use Fedora to create and sell online courses on your own site.

How We Acquired 26,447 Users and $207,152 in Sales on Product Hunt was originally published in ART + marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Everything we knew about education has now changed.

Never before in history has it been feasible for an individual to teach millions of people at scale.

Historically, people have always learned from local experts — your high school football coach, your community college professor, the pastor at your local church, the intensive coding bootcamp at the nearest city.

Chances are none of those teachers were truly exceptional. At least not compared to all the potential teachers for that specific topic in the entire world.

Have you heard the proverb: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”?

But now with a high speed Internet connection… the script has flipped. Why should you learn from anyone but the best anymore?

Why should you enroll in a social media course at a local community college when you can have Gary Vaynerchuk teaching you instead? Learn writing from a New York Times bestseller, screenwriting from an Academy Award nominee or running a record business straight from Jay-Z.

As a student, that’s pretty f***ing cool.

The Celebrity Teacher

Teaching is fundamental to what it means to be human.

As anyone with a younger sibling can attest, we spend our entire life teaching people around us — teaching makes us feel good.

Yet, a very small percentage of people ever end up doing it on a larger scale.

Historically, if you had a lucrative profession, the choice to become a teacher entailed a substantial financial tradeoff. You traded a large amount of potential income in return for the joy of teaching.

In economic terms, the opportunity cost of teaching was massive — leading to a lot of potential teachers being lost to other professions.

But now with a potential audience size in the millions, coupled with the ability to reach students without an institutional intermediary, the economics have irrevocably changed.

And this strongly ties in to a couple of core beliefs we have at Fedora:

1) It makes economic sense for the best in the world to teach.

If you are the best in the world at any given skill, it is now economically viable to teach.

Being best in the world brings with it a legion of followers that look up to you as a thought leader and would pay you money to learn directly from you. If you do not have the followers, being the best teacher of a specific topic is a great way to build that following.

Unless you operate in a zero-sum game like high-frequency trading, it almost does not make sense to spend at least part of your time teaching in some form.

And that’s the other cool thing about teaching online — unlike in the past, you can now choose to be a part-time teacher. Analogous to how you would spend a few weeks or months writing a book about your craft, you can now put aside a few weeks to record a course and reap the benefits in perpetuity.

2) There is going to be a rising class of “million dollar teachers”.

Now that there are fewer intermediaries — and an audience size several orders of magnitude higher, it follows that there is more money in teaching for a particularly talented individual than ever before.

How much more money? In line with the most lucrative professions in America, we believe top teachers will be earning millions of dollars annually.

After all, with such a massive reach, aren’t the best online teachers just celebrities with a better business model?

And interestingly, this phenomenon is already well under way.

The Wall Street Journal reports of an individual teachers in Korea making $4m a year teaching hundreds of thousands of students. Similar stories with English language teachers in Japan.

And now at Fedora, after raising money on the promise of the emergence of the storied million dollar teacher in America — we have our first school on track to cross that threshold in 2014.

Meet John and Eliot

Looking at their numbers, I knew this was a story worth telling.

John Azzi (26) and Eliot Arntz (27), founders of Bitfountain.io are on track to make over $1m teaching iPhone app development this year:

In the last year, they have gone from making a few hundred dollars teaching on weekends to having taught over a hundred thousand people how to build iPhone apps while traveling through Europe.

Two college graduates who were working their way up the corporate ladder that had never in their wildest dreams thought they would be professional teachers are the new celebrities in this wave of online education.

Two teachers with no formal training in their subject of expertise — teachers that were until recently students.

Two teachers that had no online marketing pedigree and absolutely no audience when they started.

These two teachers are going to be amongst the best compensated in America in 2014.

Welcome to the future.

- @ankurnagpal

Shameless plug: If you want to learn more about how John and Eliot built their business, Fedora has partnered with Bitfountain to teach a course (a meta-course perhaps?) on building an online education business. Predictably, this course is titled Million Dollar Instructor and accepting enrollments until Friday, December 19.