#882: Why Kids Can Learn 10x Faster Than We Think — Niels Hoven of Mentava (Tim Coaching Session)

Introduction to Mentava

0:00At this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.

0:25Niels, nice to see you. Thanks for making the time. Looking forward to this. Thanks so much. I appreciate the chance to be here. Absolutely. And it was fun for me to take a trip down memory lane in a sense because I remember exactly where I was when we first had our very initial long conversation about Mintaba and I got super amped. I was in British Columbia walking around a friend's cabin. I remember exactly right next to a river, freezing cold outside, snow on the ground, and digging back into the website, looking at the

1:00testimonials, watching some of the videos of kids. I was like, yes, I remember very clearly why I invested so long ago. It feels like ages ago. It was quite a while back. And we will get to the bio. I actually want to use part of this working session to go through the bio as I have it here intended for me to read because I think the wordsmithing may apply to other places, including the website, including potentially paid acquisition. But before we get to that, let's hear it from your mouth.

1:32What is Mintaba? What is the latest draft of your quick explanation of what Mintaba is?

What Mintava does

1:38The latest draft is that Mintaba is software that is designed to let kids learn as fast as they're capable of learning instead of just at the pace assigned to their age. And the first product we have is our early literacy software, which is designed for kids, preschoolers, as young as generally two, three to get to a second grade reading level. And what is a second grade reading level? Let's just say I'm a first time parent. I have no idea what that means. What is an eager to learn? Reasonably smart second grader doing what they're reading by the end of second grade?

2:10Our finish line is basically able to read easy reader books on your own. So think Green Eggs and Ham, Hop on Pop, the Elephant and Piggy series. I'm still reading those. The conscious competence level of being able to read. Okay, got it. And what are some stories? And I recognize these are not RCTs, right? So for the people out there who are going to try to needle everything, a lot of these are anecdotal, of course, but I mean, you also have data in terms of performance on the app, right? It's not just a subjective measurement. But could you just give some stories related to kids learning to read

2:48faster than one might expect? We had a set of two-year-old twins who were reading Hop on Pop, Green Eggs and Ham, these early reader books before their third birthday. That's the video that I saw where they're standing. Oh yeah, they just retweeted that video. Yeah, the parents were projecting the game onto some large screen. And the two twins were basically just playing and competing with each other to read while held. They were so excited to be doing it. It is really adorable. It's funny, there's so much fear around, but if I give my kid these academic

3:22opportunities when they're so young, are they going to stress out? Are they going to freak out? But no, it's actually fun. Kids are these little sponges. They want to learn everything.

Origin story and design

3:30Why don't you tell one or two more stories and then I want to hear how Mentava came to be, but not the Iliad version, like the abbreviated version. But maybe you can give a few more examples, right? Because people might say, well, okay, fine. You got the Wonder Twins, but we need more than the Wonder Twins. What else have you seen? We had a three-year-old who learned to read in about three months. We had a kindergartner who was behind and his mom asked us, can we use this software to help him catch up? And she came back to

4:01me a little later and said, yeah, he's reading now. The teacher says she's never seen a kid catch up so fast. The teacher didn't actually say this, but I could read between the lines. I could tell that the teacher really wanted to say your kid was just a terrible reader. The teacher didn't say that the parent was like, but I could read between the lines. I knew what she wanted to say. And the teacher said she'd never seen anyone catch up that fast. And the thing that actually really stuck with me from that one was the mom was saying the kid used to come to her and tell her, hey mom, there's this kid in my class who's so smart. He's able to read and do all these things. And then she said,

4:34he came back to me the other day and said, mom, I can read like he can read now. That's so cool. That was just really neat. I was watching the two-minute, maybe three-minute demo. I'm not sure it's pretty short. I don't think you guys publicize or use it much, but the demo video that you sent over. It's a terrible demo, but it's out there. It's terrible, except there is one slide, let's call it, right? It's text that is a testimonial that is kind of below the fold on laptop on your love letters section with all

5:07these parents sharing their experiences, which is roughly more progress in one week with my daughter than in roughly six months of kindergarten. And that's bananas, but it's not so bananas as to be outside of the realm of possibility. And you've become somewhat of an adept in the sport of sparring with critics on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter. And when we may chat about that, right, to what extent it's helpful to engage in or even provoke the culture

5:41wars? But I have seen a few. I think there's one notable. You're good at responding to the critics in a way that gets people to sign up for Bentava. And there was someone who said, like, the learning process, I have a four-year degree that was earned because learning is complex and you cannot simplify it. And we're not focused on outcomes. We're focused on all this hand-wavy stuff. This was an educator who said something like, you know, you will never convince me that results are the driver of education. You will never convince me that efficacy is supposed

6:13to be one of our goals. It's like, then what is the goal? Yeah. People can watch the documentary Waiting for Superman if they want to see the part of the sorry state of things. But I was introduced to you. How was I introduced to you? It was Eric Ries, I believe. Yeah. Of the lean startup. Also one of our investors. Also one of your investors. Because I think he knew or intuited that I'm very much on the same page. You can learn things. You, meaning adults, but also humans, broadly speaking, can learn things

6:44much, much, much more quickly than conventional wisdom would suggest. And I could go off on this long list of things. But how do you do it? How do you do it, right? How did Bentava, come to be? Short version. And how and why does it work? Short version of how it came to be and how it started during the pandemic. At the time, my wife and I, we had three little kids. We both have full-time jobs. We're locked down in this 600 square foot, one bedroom apartment. My kids want to learn, right? They're young kids.

7:17They're these little sponges. They want to learn to read. They want to do math. But I have a full-time job. I don't have time to teach them and be their teacher every step of the way. What I really want is I want them to be able to teach themselves, which aside from just being practical in that situation is just this life skill that I feel is really, really important. So I started looking around for software or apps that could support my kids as they're learning. And there just wasn't very much out there. I found a couple of things that were okay and we made it work. And it was honestly surprising how well they were able to learn despite using software that really wasn't designed

7:53for having kids teach themselves. And so other parents noticed what I was doing. They asked me questions about it. I pointed them to the same software. And some of them had some success and some of them didn't. And really what I realized as all of this was going on was that the problem was in the design of the software. No one is designing software for three and four-year-olds to be learning on their own. It's not that it's impossible. It's just that it's really, really hard. But my background is in games. I spent a long time designing games and designing tutorials. And it's just design problems all the way down. And I felt like this is a problem that I could solve, that I wanted to

8:26solve for myself, that I wanted to solve for other people. And that's where Mentava came from. And what's the magic sauce? Why does it work? Why is it better than the 12 other things that I've seen you rate from a scale of, I think, one to 10 in different ways and giving you reasons?

Curriculum and motivation

8:43The key things that Mentava brings to the table is an extremely optimized curriculum and a lot of really good motivation design. The curriculum advantage should not be as much of an advantage as it is because reading and math are both basically solved problems. We know how to teach reading. You teach kids letter sounds and then you teach them to blend them together. And honestly, for $15, you can get a book off of Amazon that will let you do that. You have to be the teacher. It's a lot of heavy lifting from the parent's side, but it will get the job done. It's kind of unconscionable that this has been a debate in education for a generation,

9:16but this is very much a solved problem. So we take phonics, we optimize it, we teach it really nicely. We make really good UX. We make it really easy for two and two, three and four-year-olds to use. And this is on an iPad, typically a tablet? Yeah. On an iPad, you know, just as an anecdote is where the bars hang in terms of low hang design in one of the apps that I was using before we built Mentava to have my kids learn. If you have a two-year-old, if you have a three-year-old and they're using an iPad, they kind of brace it on their belly and they hold it there while

9:47they're tapping away at it. And a very common situation that happens is their little tubby toddler belly hangs over the edge of the iPad and you get all these extraneous touches at the bottom of the iPad. And in one of the apps that we were using, every time that happened, the app would crash. It was just a tap. And so you have this two-year-old constantly crashing the app. And so we take into account all these little things where you have a kid who doesn't know how to read trying to use these educational apps. The other piece that we really bring to the table is motivation. I think there's a lot of people who really don't understand how sophisticated

10:22motivation design is. But if you look at video games, if you walk into a casino and you walk through the slot machine aisles, human motivation is kind of a solved problem. We know how to get people to do the things that we want them to do over and over and kind of... I'm not sure exactly how to say that. You mean like variable reward or how does the slot machine example map to motivation design? The slot machine example is probably the crudest example. It's the easiest way to motivate someone because the metaphor for motivation that I like to use is it's like trying

10:54to get someone to jump through a hoop. And so you can either increase the size of the reward on the other side or you can lower the hoop. So slot machines are kind of the purest example of this where they dangle the biggest reward you could possibly imagine, which is like a million dollar jackpot. And they've moved the hoop as low as you possibly can, which is just press this button over and over again. And so for that specific use case, it has been solved. And so our goal with Mintava is, okay, the hoop we want kids to jump through is learning all of these phonic sounds and learning to blend

11:26them together. So how through really good user experience design, can we lower that hoop as low as we possibly can? And then what can we dangle on the other side of that hoop to make kids want to come back and do this every single day? And for that, we use a lot of insights and design principles from game design about helping kids feel motivation, about visualizing the progress that they've made, about twiddling the right reward centers in the brain in just the right way that we celebrate their intrinsic motivation rather than trying to replace it extrinsically.

Reviewing the founder bio

11:53Niels, let's move next to your bio. And if you could indulge me, which what might end up seeming like a very pedantic exercise, I'm just going to go through and tell you how I would change certain words because I think we're going to talk a lot about these magical things that allow us to produce images in brains at a distance. All right. How do you pronounce your last name correctly? Remind me. Hoven. Hoven. All right. Niels Hoven.

12:23OnX, if you want to see the front lines of the culture wars, at Niels Hoven. It's the founder and CEO of Mentava, a company building software to support unusually fast learners. This phrasing, unusually fast learners, I would actually just scrap unusually and go straight to fast learners. Part of the reason for that is that when I saw this on the website, I was like, well, what is unusually fast? Like, even if I consider my kid fast, maybe unusually fast is what? One out of a hundred? One out of a thousand?

12:53And I stumbled. So I made note of things that I read twice or that I stumbled over. And this is a subjective take, but since I'm in the midst of having just recently cut an 870 page book to 350 and now I'm doing all of the fine tuning, this is how my brain is calibrated at the moment. Okay. So software to support unusually fast learners or support fast learners. High achieving kids are dramatically underserved by today's education system. I would also, I think high

13:25achieving for me at least, I think about pegging to letter grades and high school or college. I might just replace that. Or you could scrap high achieving, like when in doubt, take it out as another writing. Kids, high achieving kids, eager kids, maybe. Oh yeah. Okay. Eager kids are dramatically underserved by today's education system. And again, I recognize this might be a little laborious for a second, but it's going to tie into things that come up later. Okay. Niels created Mentava to allow

13:57top performing students to achieve their potential. I think we can scrap top performing also students to achieve their potential. I would actually scrap this entire second paragraph, which I'll explain in a moment. But while most education companies focus on raising the floor, Mentava's mission is to remove the ceiling. I have very strong opinions about this. I know it's on the website. I get the turn of phrase and I understand why there's a degree of clever wordsmithing here. I don't like this as a positioning for you. Because what I ended up stumbling over here, I was, I was like raising the

14:30floor, remove the ceiling, remove the ceiling. I guess that's as high as the best performing students are raising the floor. Does that mean accommodating and helping the lowest performing students? I ended up dissecting it and just spending a lot of time thinking about it. I've read that line a lot, but let's move on. Is my understanding of that, am I actually understanding that sense as it's intended? Basically you are. I think one of the challenges we are struggling with is how we kind of target what we see as more of a niche audience that is like deeply values education,

15:05is willing to pay for it and has kids that are like being unsupported academically. So we've been playing with different turns of phrases to try and speak to these people, but I agree. I don't think we've found the right one yet. I would also say, I think it's a big niche, frankly, which you may have already concluded, but their early literacy software, meaning Mentava's early literacy software for preschoolers is used and trusted by some of the most influential people in the world. Don't love that. We can come back to that just because it's something that anyone could claim unless you have things to point to, right? And maybe you do. We can come back to that. Mentava blends

15:38careful curriculum design with best in class motivation design. I think for instance, we are not that far from the beginning of the new year. I think doubling down on motivation design, if you're going to do more X posts around January would actually be very interesting and that you could do some very interesting things there that would drive conversions, but developed through years of experience building mobile. And I'm guessing the way you pronounce this is AAA games. I don't actually know what AAA games are, but that sounds like a good thing. And I have heard it before.

16:11This is, I think the money shot in some respects prior to Mentava, Niels worked at Cloudflare, Class Dojo and Pocket Gems, where he ran the highest grossing mobile game in the world in 2011. That says, you know what you're doing very, very clearly. So I would be inclined to scrap that whole second paragraph and then move up the third. And then it goes to mentava.com and it has all the links and everything else. So M-E-N-T-A-V-A if people are wondering. But I don't want to belabor

16:41the intro, but we are going to spend a lot of time on messaging. And you very kindly sent a skeleton framework that we could use for going into the conversation. I think we already checked off kids can learn much faster than people think. Problem two, I think, is maybe not immediately obvious to folks. The problem, right? And if you don't mind, I'll just read it. We waste the low pressure elementary school years and then pour on pressure in high school. And it's like, okay,

17:15maybe. I agree with that. Okay. Waste low pressure. How should we capitalize on low pressure? And are we accidentally turning it into high pressure if we add something like this? I mean, looking at the kids playing it, at least the videos I've seen, it wouldn't seem that way. I know I'm kind of spoiling the delivery by offering the punchline, but if you don't mind. Yeah, go for it. So you had two, right? You had two sub bullets under that. Schools actively slow down fast learners. Yes, 100% agree. They wouldn't let my son learn algebra, et cetera. Is that your son? Your actual son? My son, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Early acceleration means less pressure later. That I think is super, super, super interesting

17:50as a point that could be really used. Maybe not in exactly that form. And then number three, solution, Mentava lets kids accelerate without requiring parents to become teachers or taskmasters. And that's through, as you pointed out, like the very finely tuned curriculum and motivation design. And I would agree that schools are surprisingly bad at both. I've easily worked with 100 plus founders and entrepreneurs over the last 20 years, and I've seen some massive wins, some huge companies built, and some failures and zombies.

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Current business challenges

21:08So what are some of the current challenges? How would you lay out the hierarchy of problems to solve, opportunities to capitalize on, however you would like to phrase it or list it out? Where should we go next? Zooming way out, we've built a product that we are really proud of, that when our customers use it, they rave about it and they tell their friends about it. We have not figured out, we're really good at product design and we are not so good at marketing. We are trying to explain a problem that

21:40a lot of parents don't realize that they have, that their kids could be doing so much more, that their kids are going to be held back when they get to elementary school. By the time parents realize that they have this problem, that their kids are bored and not achieving their potential, it's kind of too late. Or the biggest opportunities to do something about it are now behind them. And then for even the parents who are looking for a product in this space that can help support their kids learning, they're not experts. And what differentiates our software from a lot of the other stuff out there is really nuanced. And so how do we differentiate what we feel is

22:15a premium product when the differentiation is really nuanced and in kind of thousands of small decisions that customers can't look at themselves? It's kind of like trying to explain what makes this video game better than this other video game. It's a very hard thing to explain, or has been for us. Right. I mean, it's a thousand decisions that add up to a very distinct feeling, maybe on some level. We found a lot of the parents who came to us immediately sort of already feel this problem intensely because sometimes it's immigrants who come to the US and

22:47then are just shocked at how much worse the education system is here than what they experienced. So they just see this immediately and they're like, I am not going to have any part of this. I need to start addressing this right away. Or it's people who already care about motivation and just recognize that their kid is capable of doing more than they're doing. We have a lot of parents who are in Montessori who send their kids to Montessori school because they love the values there. But they're like, but Montessori school doesn't focus on academics. My kids could be learned to read and they refuse to give them any phonics. So I want to do it at home.

23:17Yeah. Okay. So let me just say what's top of mind. And then we can go in a lot of different directions because I think that the fixes in a way are going to be a lot like your product design. I don't think there's one thing. I think there are probably myriad things that when moved five degrees in the right direction might reach this breakthrough or like step function distinction where suddenly you have better retention, more referrals, et cetera. That's just

23:51my intuition looking at everything in front of me and the website and so on. But let's start with what came to mind for me, which is related to something that you have, I think is kind of like one of your pain points, which is like, how do we sell a problem before the customer knows it exists? And a way to rephrase that would be like, how do we educate people about the problem? And there's a framework. You may have heard it. It was actually introduced to me. I met a doula the

24:21other day and someone who is somewhat like a midwife, right? Helps the birthing process. And she was talking about this acronym brain and it was benefits, risks, alternatives. What does your intuition say? And then N is nothing. Like what if we did nothing? What if we didn't do anything about this? And so I've been applying that to more things and I'm like, well, what if you didn't do any education? Rephrasing that, like what if that were not the problem? And the reason that comes up for me is when I imagine I want to have kids at some point, it's like, okay,

24:56I would hope my kids are eager learners and curious and maybe have a little embedded software that gives them an advantage. And it's like, okay, I don't know if you've run into this, but like my hesitancy, if I had any, I don't think I would have a ton. I think I would just pay the price and use Mentaba, but is I want my kids to be socially intelligent. I want them to be in school with other kids. I'm not going to have like child Nero taught by private tutors or whatever.

25:26I mean, hopefully not child Nero, but that's a whole separate conversation. The point of that being, I want them to be kit and to have time socially. But if I push them three, four years ahead, is school going to be even worse for them? Because now they're just sitting there staring at the clock, waiting for school to be over. And if so, how do I check the box of maximizing intellectual development while also allowing for kids to be kids plus the social development?

26:00Anyway, has that come up at all? This has come up. Because for me, I'm like, fuck yeah. Let's pour gasoline on this eagerness to learn. And these kids want to go, go, go. And they're being held back. They're these thoroughbred racehorses locked in the gate. They're just not being let out to run. It's like, sure, I want that kid to run. But then what? What form does school take if I give them such a headstart? How do you think about that? So a big reason, a big part of the reason we've designed Metapa the way we did is because of

26:30exactly this. So when I was in third grade, I was ahead of my class in math and my school only went up to third grade. So before third grade, in second grade, I would go to the next, I would go to the third grade class for math and then I would come back to my classroom. But in third grade, there was no classroom for me to go to. So I started doing independent study in third grade. During math class, I would go to the back of the room. I would study out of a math book for the hour of math class. And then I would come back and join my class for the rest of the day. And I did that for the next four years, all the way up until I rejoined classes in seventh grade

27:01for pre-calculus. And then I took calculus in eighth grade. And so those four years of being able to learn on my own, at my own pace, allowed me, I didn't have any homework. I got to go as fast as I wanted. It was really incredible. It also built this skill of teaching myself that I depend on today. And that's why I think you look at a lot of the other sort of alternative schooling startups that are happening where they're trying to develop an entire schooling ecosystem that would run parallel with public schools. And I actually really believe in the institution of public schools.

27:34I went to public schools. My children go to public schools. I just want them to be supported and allowed to learn at their own pace there. So to me, really the ideal case is let's let our kids go to public school with their peers from their neighborhood. And then, you know, for like an hour a day during math class, they study Mentava. They do math Mentava for an hour. They get to go at their own pace and then they rejoin their same age peers for the rest of the day and have a good time. I feel like, am I wrong as an Austinite? I feel like it may not be exactly this, but Alpha School

28:05uses sort of adaptive software on tablets for a portion of the day. I think I'm getting that right. But you would also want something that scales that people can use now as opposed to moving to a city that has Alpha School, which is going to be great, but also very expensive and limited capacity, et cetera, et cetera. Alpha School's big insight is essentially the same as ours, that if you allow kids to learn at their own pace, you can pack the entire school day into a very

28:35small amount of time. When my own son was in third grade, after a lot of back and forth, we finally got permission from one amazing teacher for him to do independent study during math class from an app during the school day. And he finished eighth grade math while he was in third grade. And that's just the pace of what kids are allowed to do, capable of doing. Let's hop into it because I love what you're doing. I have since the beginning. It works. I've seen plenty of videos and enough testimonials. And the design, this is going to sound maybe arrogant because

29:12I'm certainly not an educator. I'm not a computer scientist. I'm not a UX designer, but I look at it. And I'm like, yeah, from a micro progression, logical sequencing perspective, it's like, it just makes sense. It's very hard to make. And when you see it, you're like, oh yeah, that makes sense. Like many things. So I want to be as maximally helpful as possible here. Let's hop into a real customer. And I'm going to give you an example of a real, well, prospective customer, because as chance would have it, it's such a small world. It's crazy. So we're doing this

29:43kind of live workshop on this podcast episode. I've only done two of these. You are number two. Number one, I don't think you'd mind me mentioning, is Jake B. Craft of Strand Therapeutics. He's developing mRNA as a programmable layer in medicine and doing all this crazy stuff that's amazing with cancer. And Jake is very, very smart. So not shockingly, his kid is also pretty smart. And he reached out to me because he saw me as an investor on the website. He's like, of course, you're an investor in Mentava. He's like, all right, well, now I want to ask you about it.

30:16And I encouraged him to try it and then never heard back. And so I reached out to him and I was like, whatever happened? Did you try Mentava? And then I just want to read his feedback. And we're going to just take a bite of the apple from a bunch of different directions. Because again, I don't think there's like one, as much as I wish this were the case, like, okay, we're going to change unusually fast learners to fast learners and boom, I'll automatically conversion and everything like quadruples. Like, I don't think that's going to happen. But here's what he said. I, yes, I did.

30:46So they have a 14 day trial period and also try to see if your kid is ready. He put that in quotation marks. A few thoughts. Number one, I won't give his kid's name, but let's call his kid Rob. Rob was super young, like two years and two months, but he taught himself the whole alphabet at 17 months. So he figured, why not try? Two, there's a quote unquote sequencing milestone that they explain is important. Rob was likely not fully there. Three, their curriculum sort of made the sequencing tests more difficult than I think they need to be. And then pushed him to easier

31:16curriculum, which I couldn't figure out how to override. That was one sort of annoying part, but it makes sense to make sure people fail fast and don't pay before the kid is ready. Four,

Trial periods and readiness

31:25we ended up pausing at the end of the trial with the plan to restart in three months, which will be soon. Five, he still points to the iPad. This is the most important part of the whole thing, by the way. Well, I think there's a lot in all of these bullets, but here's the last one. He still, this is his son, Rob, still points to the iPad and says he wants to play the letter game. So clearly Mentava had some pull for him. So like the kid wants to use it. But one question I had, I guess there are two things that hopped to mind. Well, before we get to the suggestions,

31:55can you explain the 14 day trial period and the sequencing just for folks? So they have an idea of what this looks like. People go to the website, they're like, oh my God, totally want to try this. And so they click on the 14 day trial period, what happens and what is the sequencing? I think there's not a question about the user flow, which we know is bad and more about a question of sort of the experience that they're having as they engage with the software. Is that what you're asking? Yep. So the point of the 14 day free trial is that we know we are not good at explaining

32:28what differentiates our software. We think what works best is just get it in the hands of the customer and let them try. So I think within 14 days, we think that's enough time that a customer can figure out if this is going to be a good fit for their family or not. A very common problem is exactly what happened with Jake, where he has a kid who is probably not developmentally ready to learn to read. And so we want the parents to recognize that during the free trial. What a lot of people don't realize is that the developmental milestones, kids are able to learn

32:58letters and letter sounds quite a bit earlier than actually being able to blend those sounds together and be able to read. So very common that you could have a kid who's a year and a half, two years old, knows all of their letter sounds, but they are not actually capable of learning to read because they can't blend those into words. We figured out that there's a test that we can give the kids to see if they can understand the concept of left to right reading order. Basically, the idea that directionality is important. So what we do is we show them a couple emojis. We show them dogfish and we show them fish dog. And we say, this one is dogfish. This one is fish dog. And then we ask

33:33them, now we just told you, which one of these is dogfish and which one of these is fish dog? And what we found is that for older kids, this is an obvious question. Of course, you just go this way. This one is dogfish and this one is fish dog. But for younger kids whose brains haven't connected those neurons or whatever, this is a nearly impossible question. And so in the Mentava experience, fairly early on, you kind of purposely hit this wall where we're asking your kid, do you understand dogfish, fish dog? And if they can't, we boot them over to kind of, we'll just teach you letter sounds.

34:05And we send the parents an email explaining, you know, this developmental readiness. I think we send the parents an email. We might not. I hope we send the parents an email explaining this developmental readiness issue and ask them to try again in three to six months. Okay. So that was going to be, you know, one of the questions I wanted to hit on. I've got plenty, so don't worry, folks who are listening. We're getting into the weeds quickly, but the weeds are where we kind of, we have to play this game. What share of failed trials come back like a Jake? And are they prompted three months later, or are they just told when the kid doesn't

34:40pass the hurdle, try coming back in three months? I guess like how proactive is the outreach? There's zero proactive outreach. So I'm going to hit something that is going to be related to all of this, which ultimately is going to fold into mock-ups and redesigns of the website as well. But let me give you just a brain dump of some things that I think might be helpful. And I'll prompt some of them with questions. Is Mintava free for schools or in some capacity free for teachers? Is there any free

35:13option? Is there anyone who can use Mintava for free? We have pilot programs running with schools right now. We're not charging the schools who are in the pilot program. I would like to give Mintava to schools for free. Kind of our philosophy is that if you want to use us as essentially a private tutor to accelerate your kid, that's going to be expensive. But if you're a school just using us as a tool to support your teacher, we'd like that to be cheap or free. We are in the process of getting, may actually have just gone live, of having self-serve signups for teachers so that they can get

35:44it for their classroom. The main issue we have there, unfortunately, is just fraud. You know, what prevents just a random parent from saying, I'm a teacher. Let me sign up and get this for free. And so that's why we haven't really scaled that or pushed it aggressively. I would say a few things. The first is, if in fact, you end up offering it at very low cost or for free to schools, even if it's in some limited fashion and people need to check a bunch of boxes, that could be a useful flak jacket for offsetting the premium cost of the product. Which is what

36:17right now? What is the cost? This is a $500 a month product, which I think many people are shocked when they first hear. But also we have a lot of customers who are like, oh, we let go of our tutor. We don't need our private tutor anymore because we've replaced it with your software. You guys should be charging more. This is great. So I don't think the cost is a problem personally. And we can come back to that. But I do think the kind of free for schools and teachers is interesting. The other thing I would say is that I probably shouldn't mention him specifically, but I know someone who has created a spectacularly successful app and it's pretty expensive. I mean,

36:53on an annual basis for an adult, it's going to be in the hundreds of dollars and it's very, very successful. And he set a policy very early on, which was, if you can't afford it, send an email to this email address, explain why, and chances are you'll get it for free. And the fraud has been unbelievably low. Like people do email and I'm sure some of them are fraudulent, but on the margin, it is so unimportant. It's so trivial. And the cost of delivering the

37:31product to a handful of fraudulent customers who are unethically kind of abusing things is so low that maybe it doesn't matter. At the very least, it could be worth the test. I don't want to belabor this particular point because I don't think it's the most important of those we have to talk about, but it might not matter. I think I know exactly the app you're talking about. And I, yeah, I do know that is a, it's a great program. It's a great app. I'll just give another example. Long ago, when I started my first, let's call it real business, I offered a 110% money back guarantee if the product didn't work

38:03and never questioned it, just kind of did it unflinchingly because frankly, the time that it would take me to police it would be so much more expensive than a certain degree of fraud. Even if it's like 10%, 20% even of the people who requested it were fraudulent. Also, I should say in this case, this is a hard product being shipped via regular mail and they would be able to just keep the products, having them ship it back and paying for shipping. It just wasn't worth it given the cost of goods. People were much better behaved than I expected.

38:38We really didn't cause a problem, assuming the product is good, right? This isn't a returns situation. So, I mean, you could offer something like that. Frankly, I think that the like 110% back is really underutilized. We have something along those lines, but not exactly. Sometimes people do the free trial and then they write into us and say, essentially, we love the free trial, but we just can't afford it. Do you have any scholarship programs or anything like that? And what we've been going to right now is, Mentava costs $500 a month. But if you tried the free trial and you loved it and you really want to keep using it and you're motivated enough

39:09to write us, we'll tell you, you can have Mentava for $100 a month. But we would like you to send us a video of your kid every week using Mentava, enjoying Mentava that we can use in social media, in marketing. Because we want to run those ads, but we want to make sure that we have signed releases for any kids that we put into advertising or social media. And we don't police that aggressively. I would say not everybody participating in that program has been sending us all the videos we would like them to send us. But like you said, a lot, mostly people are pretty good about it. We'll see you next time.

39:43We'll see you next time.

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40:46isn't a bank. Base APY as of January 30th, 2026 and subject to change. Details in the episode

Pricing and parent relief

40:53description.

Pricing and parent relief

40:54Where would you like to go next? I mean, I can pull up lots of things. We can look at the website. I want to come back to the readiness check. Is there any reason to have people sign up and then do the readiness check as opposed to do an abbreviated readiness check, kind of a two-minute, like, is your kid ready type of quiz? I like that idea a lot of, we've been talking to that for a long time, just put the readiness check directly on the website. Yeah. Because if you had like, is your kid ready? Take the two-minute quiz. You could still

41:27accomplish the data capture of email address and so on and verification so that you can communicate with those people. And I think that's reflected in some of the mock-ups that I sent over. On the price, I don't know if you guys have approached this. I really think that selling the parents' relief, not just the kid's speed is a big deal. That you don't have to be the teacher because the $500 can be angered in a few different ways. $500 a month, all right? Is it the same or is it less than a tutor? Well, let's just say it's the same, okay? And let's say they're equally

42:03effective, but there's one difference. And one is like you're giving a kid a fish, right? Meaning the teacher is motivating the kid versus you're teaching the kid to fish, meaning the kid is becoming a self-motivated, self-directed learner. Then Mantava still wins, even if they're equally effective. And then furthermore, it's like if you have all these other tools and let's just say they're, as you mentioned, you can get books, 10 bucks, 20 bucks, 30 bucks, who knows? And then you're

42:35going to put in that time. It doesn't mean you're going to be an absent parent. There are plenty of ways you can spend time with your kids, but if you want to create a self-directed learner and you also put a value on your time, if you can afford $500 a month, it's also kind of a no-brainer. I think that's very true. I think we need to lean into that more because we've had people, people I know personally who could absolutely afford Mantava. Usually they are parents of only one child. This is their first child. And they say, I tried Mantava, it works, but I really wanted to be the one to teach my kid to read. And so they opt in with another product

43:10where they get to be the teacher. They actually want to be the teacher. But for a lot of parents who are busier, who have multiple kids, see that value immediately. They cannot be the teacher for every single one of their kids. They want their kids to learn on their own and we're the product for that. I love teaching. It's one of my favorite things in the world. I absolutely love teaching, but the selling point for me, if I were the stand-in parent would be extrinsic reward slash pressure, teacher making the kid study versus kid becoming self-directed and excited about learning.

43:44I'm like, well, that's a very easy choice for me. They're going to have plenty of time with teachers. They're going to have plenty of time with me coaching them or teaching them or going out and being curious about things in the real world. But it's like how many minutes a day or per week, how much time do you suggest? 15 to 30 minutes a day, depending on age. Yeah. So, okay, look, you got all day with your kids from when they wake up to when they go to bed, depending on the day and schooling and so on. But it's like 15, 30 minutes is just getting them closer to being stoked about learning and able to actually take that stoke and put it into practice.

44:17It's like, okay, is that worth $500 a month? Yeah. I mean, for a lot of people that I think the answer is yes. Do you mind if I just brain dump? Then I want you to steer the ship a little bit. Okay. So the two minute, you know, is your kid ready quiz right up front, I think would be an amazing email capture tool, but it would also be in service of the parents who are running at light speed with a million different things. Exactly the kind of people who are probably considering something like this. I think it's the type of thing that might also get shared.

44:49So in a sense, you have user-generated marketing, lead gen, and a filter all at once. The selling the parents relief, not just the kid's speed, as I mentioned, like the, you don't have to be a teacher. You know, how much is your time worth? Maybe there's something there. One of your lines that I think this is from the website, tell me, but like, we don't push kids, we stop making them wait. I think that's an amazing line. Other words I'd be a little more careful with. So like the unusually fast learner, the gifted,

45:21any IQ elite top 1% kind of stuff, I think artificially constrains your market in a way that is unhelpful to Mentava and unhelpful to parents. Does that make sense? Yeah, I agree. Because like the kid doesn't need to be a super genius to use Mentava and benefit from it. So I really like the idea of paying attention to that language. So you aren't accidentally excluding a lot of parents whose kids would benefit from the product. The free to school story,

45:52if that ends up being tenable, I think is, it's a decent adjunct to other things you're doing, but it's also an example of playing defense instead of offense in a way. Does that make sense? Right. That doesn't make sense. Yeah. It's like, if people say this is just for rich kids, it's like, okay, fine. This is not what you're doing. But like, if you just focused on people who make 500K a year or more, that's a huge market. Like you're fine at $500 a month. Like, you know, it's like you don't, it isn't just for rich kids. But I think that given the fact, if I say anything, I'm not supposed

46:25to say publicly, stop me, but you guys have four full-time employees. I'm sure you have other contractors. You guys are going to be spinning a lot of plates, wearing a lot of hats. If you have a lot of unqualified leads, emailing you, asking questions, requesting special treatment, that time is incredibly expensive for you guys internally. So if I were talking to someone, I had two glasses of wine, right? So I'm a little loose, playing a little loose. And someone's like $500 a month, you know, I'd be like, well,

46:57do you want something that really works and makes your kid not just stoked, but capable of learning faster? Or do you want a video game that is disguised as education that's going to do nothing for them? If you want that, sure, there are a thousand other options. If you actually want something that works with people who understand product, then suck it up. How much did you spend on your kid's pants last month? How much does your stroller cost? Really? You're not going to spend... I was like, come on. So that's how I would sort of hopefully productively bust their balls. I mean, that's how I would do it. I'd be like, yeah, if you want

47:31something that works and you want something that the kid is going to request, as opposed to something that kind of works, that requires you to be a nag and police that the kid might push back on, it's like, how much is removing all that brain damage worth to you? And I understand that's probably not the text you put on the homepage, but let's see. So on the online, you have done a good job of using X specifically, right? I would say. And the two examples you sent me of social media that had converted was basically a response, if I'm remembering correctly, like two examples of

48:07responding to people. Like someone called basically where you're doing snake oil and you're like, well, here's a video of snake oil. And it was the twins, right? And the like two-year-olds or two-and-a-half-year-olds reading. And then there was the other one with the educator. Those are good examples. I wouldn't have any critique around those. I would say that jumping into the culture war, even if it gets a lot of views, in a sense, forces readers to pick a side instead of picturing their own child, which is why I think the video of the two twins works so well.

48:40So that's just a kind of a side note. And I know you have math coming so that you can move from the perception of reading app to like learning for kids who are ready to move faster or something like that. I think we can leave that alone for a moment. We can come back to that, but I don't want to spend too much time on it because I think you get it and that's, you know, you're branching out and it makes sense. The pricing against tutors, I had two different coaches this week for rock climbing. I am a connoisseur of teachers and coaches and tutors, right? Like I've used probably a hundred

49:13plus coaches of various types and getting a tutor, managing a tutor, scheduling with the tutor, none of that is free. Even if the hourly cost of that tutor is commensurate with the cost of Mentava. However, there are other ways to make the price case, but this is one of those examples of like, what if you did nothing coming back to that brain acronym that I love so much. It was the first acronym. Like I've heard all these like SWOT acronyms, right? Like strengths, weaknesses,

49:44opportunities, threats, like all this stuff. But this was the first one where one of the prompts was, what if you did nothing? And I was like, that is such a good question. What if you didn't justify the price? And you were just like, let's just find, and look, this is going to be very unappetizing, maybe a turnoff for some people listening, but this is how Uber started. This is how a lot of companies start is like, go after the easy customers, the people who have plenty of budget. Later, you can use the initial cohort of wealthy people to subsidize product development.

50:17Then you get economies of scale. You have more employees, blah, blah, blah, dot, dot, dot. And then you have more offerings at lower cost. But rather than trying to convince the edge cases, it's like, maybe you just talk about the efficacy and take a different tact. I think it's tack as in the sailing to get that done. Look, I could give you six different examples of how you could, could justify the price, but let me keep going. This is coming back to the parent's role because

50:47the parent's buying it, not the kid, right? Not to overly state the obvious, but the, you don't have to teach, you don't have to nag. Now you don't have to teach might accidentally elicit a sense of guilt in parents because they're like, oh, I'm just trying to foist the responsibility of education onto an app. Like I'm a terrible parent. What's wrong with me? But if it's, you don't have to nag, you don't have to police, you don't have to reward, you don't have to give cookies because the

51:18kid's just going to want to play this game, period, full stop. That's what we spend our time on. That's a huge one. I love teaching. I want to teach a lot. So if the selling point to me where you don't have to teach, I'd be like, oh, does that make me a bad parent? I actually do like teaching. Does that mean I'm not engaged with my kid? But like nagging and policing, nobody wants to do that. So choosing things that are an easy hell yes for parents, I think makes a difference. And that's where the words matter. And that you don't have to teach, you don't have to nag beats the book

51:51that beats the life tutor. It beats all that stuff. It's not like, ah, I don't want to take the piano lesson with teacher X. It's like when you have Jake's kid being like, I want to play the letter game. I want to play the letter game. And he's like, man, we just have to wait a few more months and then, okay, then you can play the letter game. I kind of want to hop on this because I, maybe this is my pathological honesty, because like, I do believe we've built a really delightful product that kids will want to use most of the time. But absolutely, sometimes you do have to push a nag way less than anything else. But I'm kind of reluctant to say like, you won't have to push

52:23a nag. Well, I think that that is where you finesse. I'm coming in as, I'm not blind because I'm familiar with the product and I've looked at the website and everything else, but I'm not a parent with a kid who has used the product. So instead of saying that you can say, parents don't want to nag. They don't want to police. They want a kid who can learn at their own speed. Even if that means fast, you can say that that's a truthful statement. I'll give you a bit of trivia that not many people know. So my name in Chinese is, well, it was fei ting cheng. Now it's fei yu

52:58cheng. And the reason I have that name is because fei is for Ferris, right? So there's some alliteration, but ting cheng is very honest because I would just blurt things out that were clear or honest to me. And so my teacher was like, good God, you are a pain in my ass. Okay. Your name is like Ferris too honest, basically. And, you know, I was talking to, I can't mention which, but talking to another startup I'm involved with and they're about to have a huge launch. And

53:29I was like, exaggeration is death. Do not exaggerate. I was like, because if one statement can be falsified and it's a casual statement, it's going to call into question every other claim you make and your competitors are going to fuck you. They're going to, and they should, if you're exaggerating and inflating your claims, like, Hey, you're going to reap what you sell. So I am on the same page. I think there are ways to word it where it is a completely truthful statement and it may not be nagging police. It may be something else. No one wants to force their kid to learn. What would

54:02it be like if your kid wanted to learn? You get the idea and you could come up with 10 of these and just split test it with an optimizely or whatever. You'd probably have something homegrown that does a better job, but you get the idea. All right. Feel free to stop me. Is there a way to get an indication of how many sessions are initiated coming back to like, yeah, sometimes you have to push a little bit or prod or prompt? Maybe that's a nice delicate word to use your kids.

54:32But do you have any idea of how many sessions, like what percentage of sessions are initiated by a child versus a parent? I don't know how you would have that, but I think they're probably a hundred percent parent initiated. We're talking mostly like three and four year olds here. Yeah. Right. Right. And running around like chickens with their head cut off. And it's like, yeah, it's the sort of, I think it's the sort of thing where it's just like the parent is responsible for saying, oh, you know, it's that time. Let's do our mintava again. And rather than it being a battle, then your kid is like, oh, okay, I guess I'll put down my Legos and do mintava.

55:05So I've noticed in the investor update emails, and I'll add my personal preference here, but I will, I think, speak for a lot of investors. So I have a lot of portfolio companies and I don't invest all the time, but they add up. Like if a company is going to be successful, mega successful, it usually takes 10 to 12 years in my experience. Right. So that means if you're investing every year, you start to gather portfolio companies. The reason I mentioned that is that I get probably 10 to 20 investor updates a month. And some of them are super long. Yours are not super long,

55:42but if you have investor asks, I would put them at the very top. I would skip all the updates. I would skip all of the numbers. I would skip the runway. I would skip the new hires. I shouldn't say skip. I would defer. I would put it lower down. But if the intent, because most of the people who are getting that, like outside of your major investors, if you've got board members, like, sure. Okay. Like give them the nitty gritty, but the vast majority, like I don't have voting rights. So the only way that I can really impart influence is by trying to be helpful, but I'm also am in an

56:17inbox with a million other things. So having the asks at the very top will get more help. I know that that seems self-evident, but almost no founders do it. So that's just a quick suggestion. But the reason I brought up the investor updates also is that I feel like I've seen in a number of the investor updates, something along the lines of, we just need to figure out how to drive more conversions through, I want to say paid advertising and maybe a misremembering, but that leads me to a question,

Acquisition channels and growth

56:52which is what channels actually convert and retain? TikTok X, referrals, search, paid advertising. What is actually working best for you guys, which might not be working well, but like what is of the available options? What is working best for you guys at not just conversion, right? Because you could get garbage leads that sign up for trials and then don't convert, but for actual paying customers who are retained, what seems to be working best so far? I think our best customers are X and word of mouth. I think the reason for both of those is that

57:26our message gets in front of people who are receptive to hearing it. I would say that a big part of our struggle is top of funnel, like how do we raise awareness with the right people? And what tends to happen on X is that I get in an argument with someone who is basically arguing that kids should not be learning or kids are learning too fast or something like that. And then the entire internet piles on and I am kind of like the loud voice saying that kids should be learning as fast as they can learn.

57:58This is our thing. I think people hear that and believe in the mission. And because it's hard to make sophisticated product decisions about these nuanced products, they hear the mission and they're like, okay, this is a company that believes in a mission of very accelerated learning, which is something that I believe in too, that I don't hear a lot of people talking about. I'm at least willing to go out and try their software. And I think that's why we get people from X. And we have not been able to replicate that on, say, meta ads. Meta's algorithm, basically, you give them your ads, you give them

58:28your videos, and they put them in front of the people who engage with those videos the most. And so we absolutely have content that goes viral, that people engage with, that gets a lot of interaction and even gets very, very cheap leads, but they're not qualified leads. So they're not getting in front of the right people who care deeply about accelerated learning and are willing to pay for it. Here's a just tagline that came to mind, less nagging for parents, faster learning for kids. Right? You're not saying no nagging. Faster learning for kids. You probably put the

59:03kids first, right? Faster learning for kids, less nagging for parents or something. I like that.

59:10Yeah. Faster learning for kids, less brain damage for parents, whatever. You could test a bunch of them. I think one of the things that really sets us apart is our motivation design and our way to keep kids motivated and engaged. And we really have not found a way to talk about that in a way that gets any sort of traction. I've tried, but a lot of the arguments that I get into are around topics like accelerated learning or phonics. Phonics is a big cultural touchpoint right now. So there's a war going on about phonics? There's a huge war about phonics. For the past 30 years, schools have been debating over whether or not

59:43phonics is the right way to teach kids. Seems like something you could test. Yeah. I don't know. And they have tested it. Basically, everybody outside of education, everybody in cognitive science, everybody in the rest of academia completely understands that phonics is the only way to teach reading. Academia and teachers and schools have been the one holdout refusing to teach phonics, saying that all we have to do is teach kids to love reading. That if you show them a picture of a puppy and they say, dog, they got that right, they're reading because they understood the gist, they have comprehension. Slippery slope, that one.

1:00:17Yeah. We think that motivation is one of our biggest differentiators and it just have not found a way to talk about that and that engages people. But maybe this less nagging for parents is that. You know, I will say that this may not matter. There may not be much collateral damage, but when I have seen some exchanges, I think that some percentage of the observers of those arguments might feel like it's Mentava versus teachers. And I don't think that's a great fight. Agreed. Because there are plenty of teachers too who are just as frustrated as the parents

1:00:49in a lot of ways. They're hamstrung, but so it goes. We try very hard not to position ourselves as Mentava versus teachers, although I know it doesn't always come off that way. But to a big part, I think teachers are the victims here too. They were told in teachers college that phonics will turn kids off of reading and they believed what they were told and they went out and talked to the best of their abilities, the best they knew how. Let's come back to the word of mouth. This is something that everybody wants, but sometimes it's difficult to get high resolution on the mechanisms of word of mouth. Do you have any

1:01:25insight on what that actually looks like? At what point this is, I think, perhaps a helpful question, like at what point do people suggest that someone else checks out Mentava? Is it after they've been on the app for three months, six months? Is it as soon as they sign up and they are on 48 hours? At what point throughout their experience of Mentava do people share with others? Do you have any idea? We get that wow moment within the first week where parents, sometimes it's the first day,

1:01:58sometimes it's the first week, but very quickly the parents realize, if it's a good fit for the family and the kid, parents realize very quickly, oh my God, this software actually works. Going from there to word of mouth, we have a lot of parents say to us that they tell their friends about it. There's some reluctance to tell their friends about it because there's a certain amount of shame around using a $500 a month app. There's this sort of cultural shame around using your resources to allow your kids to get ahead. I have friends who can't afford private school who know that their kid is not getting a good education in their local public school,

1:02:32but they insist on sending it there because they feel they have a responsibility to not give their child an advantage. I know. There's some deep-seated self-hatred there. Yeah. God, I wish they should take the money they're not spending on their kid and put it into therapy first. But I mean, that may come off a little callous. We have tried incentivized referrals. That's what I was going to ask about. What is the incentive that you've tried? I believe we did as big as, if your friend signs up, we will give them a free month and we will give

1:03:04you a free month. So that's basically, that's $1,000 user acquisition cost. And we send out coupon codes to our entire customer base and we got zero referrals. Even though we know that customers are actively referring friends, we have a lot of people who sign up. I do an intro call with almost every customer who comes on board. And so we know that a lot of people came because they saw their friend use it, the word of mouth. But the incentives, they drove zero. What do you attribute that to? My guess is that our customer base at $500 a month is fairly wealthy.

1:03:38And so that $500 bonus that they get is not as valuable to them as the social currency that they either gain by referring this or sort of lose by telling someone about this product that they feel guilty about using. And so I think that, yeah, it is an incentive, but they already had very strong incentives to tell their friends about it if they love it or were reluctant to tell their friends about it. What makes the people who do refer through word of mouth different from the archetype that you just described? The people who have some shame around it, they don't want to burn

1:04:12social capital because what if their friend's like, oh my God, I didn't realize you're such a rich asshole or whatever. What makes the other people different, the ones who talk about it? I don't know if they're different. What I've heard from the people who do refer their friends is that they're very selective about who they mention it to. They have specific ideas about which of their friends would be receptive and they tell those friends about it. And my theory is that they tell those friends about it anyway to help their friends out. And like the $500 is not a driver of behavior. Have you done multiple tests? Did you just do one incentive test?

1:04:42And that was kind of it? Yeah, we just did one. Yeah. I mean, I do think the devil's in the details with a lot of these. That could be it too. Right. I mean, for instance, one free month versus $500 credit, which sounds better. $500 credit sounds better, but it's the same thing. Also, and this may be unappetizing, but if the cost of delivering the product is zero, which makes a bunch of assumptions around the associated

1:05:13costs of various things and customer support and da, da, da, da, da, da. But if the cost of development is high, but the cost of delivery is low, you can afford to do very limited first 100 people to get it, use a little scarcity, free year. If you refer three people, $6,000 value. If you get three people to sign up, whatever, I'm pulling that out of my ass. Yeah. We can be more generous. But it's like, if you tried that and you limited it to the first hundred people, you know, your maximum downside cost. It's not this open ended fog of scary expense because

1:05:53you've already set a cap. I am a big fan. I mean, sometimes you have critical weaknesses, some Achilles heel that needs to be fixed. And I think that there are, I think the website hops to mind for me as an example of that, which I don't fault you for because you're doing so many things at once, but we will get to that. But also for me, I'm like, look, if something isn't working and it's just continually not working, which is not the case with the incentives, because you only tried it once. I think that's worth testing. And also it's because that is related to one of the two means

1:06:23that has proven most effective for acquiring customers who are retained X and word of mouth. But X is time consuming. You got to write, you got to engage, you got to respond. Like maybe you get lucky and there's an easy one that really pulls some weight, but you got to keep feeding the monster. Whereas if you figure out some type of flywheel that involves, and incentives are just one tool in the toolbox, right? But really focusing on how you can facilitate word of mouth. And

1:06:57particularly if there's a prompting at that first peak of magic, the wow experience that's within 48 hours, boom, they get an email or a notification of some type. If it's one week, it's within one week. And I think that could obviate the need for paid advertising. There are plenty of huge brands with monstrous ARR that never spend a dime on advertising because they figure out the small levers to pull that in concert, create a flywheel of some type for this type of referral

1:07:35generation. We will put these up for people watching the video. If you're on audio, I'm afraid you're going to have to really use your imagination. Would you like to talk about the website or would you like to talk about any other challenges, goals? We'll probably touch on a lot of it as we look at the before and after on the website. But is there anything else that you would like to cover before we get to the website? Do you have any thoughts about very, very top of funnel? Just like as parents are first exposed to

1:08:10Mintava, like how we might want to think about positioning ourselves or messages that you think might reach out broadly? Okay. Top of the funnel, it's like get as many parents who see this sentence to be interested in Mintava. Is that the question? Or is it a question of marketing channels? Because like a big top of the funnel is not always a good thing if it creates a bunch of noise and garbage applications that are going to churn. I'm not saying go broad. I'm saying what sort of messages might get the attention of the specific

1:08:42kind of customers we want if they've never heard of Mintava before. Well, this is going to seem like a lazy response, but it's usually where I like to start because you've thought a lot more about this than I have. What is on your shortlist at the moment for how to do that? The two that we've been playing with are, you know, teach a kid to read, you know, teach a preschooler to read, which we don't love because we feel like it doesn't differentiate us well. The other one that I think does differentiate us is talking about the mission, talking about acceleration, talking about schools not supporting fast learners. In terms of top of the funnel, the phrasing that you were just mentioning or the taglines,

1:09:16how would people see these across all marketing, Facebook, X, website everywhere, or would it be somewhere else? Say TikTok, X, and Meta, Facebook, Instagram ads are where we get the most volume. Well, I mean, look, my beginner's eyes, uninformed, knee-jerk response would be, my daughter made more progress in one week with Mentava than six months in kindergarten. You start with the testimonial and not to be too Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, but for those who

1:09:50haven't seen the Alec Baldwin sequence, it's very short. You should watch it. But Ida, A-I-D-A, do I have your attention? Are you interested? Have you made your decision for Christ? Got to watch the clip, folks. I'll link to it in the show notes. And then action is the last piece, right? But that type of testimonial is what I would use. That's what I would test. We haven't tried that. That makes a lot of sense. We'll go for it. You hit a few things at once with that. If a company says, we are the best, you're like,

1:10:23of course you're going to say that. What do you give me next to prove that you're the best? Testimonial gets around that. And fortunately, you're not dealing with a medical product or something where you have structure, function, claim restrictions, which are very important to have. And thank God we have the FDA and FTC and all that stuff. But in this particular case, I don't think you have too many restrictions about how you can use testimonials, assuming you have written permission from the people who provided those testimonials. And the mock-ups that were

1:10:56created for the website, for a revision of the website are one thing. But if you were like, you know what? We can't make, I'm afraid the internet is broken. We cannot create any new pages. I'm like, bummer. I'm like, okay, then make your main page the testimonial page. That's what I would do. You talk about that. Like I would make the main page a testimonial page. And then you have a persistent pop-up, like in the middle of the screen. That's like, is your kid ready? Take the two minute quiz.

1:11:29If I'm playing with applying constraints, you cannot create a new website. Is the current homepage the one that should be the homepage? Maybe not. Maybe not. I feel like I'm getting too into the weeds, but I feel like this is exactly where like your expertise is coming through that. Yeah, of course, starting with the testimonial. Like if I, if I did a short video, like a, I don't know, a 60 second long TikTok video, where would you go after the testimonial? Like what would the beats of that video be for you? So here's my hot take. And it could be totally wrong. I mean, everything I'm saying could be wrong,

1:12:01but my hot take is that the people who can spend 500 a month and are busy and value their time. And this is not going to be a fair assumption for everyone on TikTok, but I don't think that is where the people making the buying decisions are spending most of their time. I could be wrong, right? I mean, there are younger men and women I know who spend plenty of time on TikTok. Do you have any idea of who is making the purchase decision? Like how many males versus females are actually putting in their credit card information to buy this right now? Which that's a very heteronormative

1:12:36question, but you guys get the idea. I think it's roughly 50, 50, judging from the customer calls that I do. In the beginning, it was very heavily male, but I think that was just my audience at the time. And now it feels a lot more balanced. Yeah. You probably don't have this information. Any idea on the age, like the sweet spot age range using past customer data of your current customer avatar? If I said to you, okay, guess what? You only have one opportunity to ever

1:13:07sell Ventava. That's the bad news. The good news is I'm going to put you on stage in front of an audience of 5,000 people, but they all have to be of one particular demographic slash like personality slash makeup. Give me the census data. Give me age 35 to 45, first generation immigrants who work at tech companies, who value education, who see it as like a ladder to a better life and are willing to pay money to make their kids successful.

1:13:37Okay. I'm guessing those people are not on Tik TOK.

1:13:44So the beats of the video, honestly, it's a tough one for me to answer off the cuff, but I think in part because it may not be the right medium where I think video matters is showing actual kids using Ventava and learning with Ventava. Here's a crazy question. And I think I failed my computer IQ test for the day because maybe it's something obvious. Is it possible to turn on audio for the current video that is right in the middle of your homepage when I open it?

1:14:16You know, that's a good question. Hey, I don't know Chrome. I kept trying to figure out how to turn on the audio. Cause I'm like, it's not really for you to turn on the audio. I wanted to hear what the kids were saying while they were using the software, but I could not figure it out, which could be user error. That was a request that we were planning to do. I don't know if it, it may not have gotten done. Yeah. That was an oversight. Okay. Good catch. Yeah. So that does nothing for you.

1:14:49And it is at least on a 13 inch MacBook. That is the entire screen on Chrome. Brutal. And I'm like, okay, so if we come back to the website, right, and I'll just give people

Website copy and design

1:15:01a visual description and we'll throw it up. It's got a very familiar layout, which I think is, there's nothing wrong with this familiar layout, but you got like Mentava company name, top left, you have a menu bar at the top, parents, teachers, about reviews, case studies, sign up, login, and then you've get started at the top, right. Then you've got the giant video playing with no audio and a cute little character, presumably from the Mentava app itself. And then under the video that is auto playing, it says most education companies try to lift the

1:15:35floor. We want to remove the ceiling. Mentava was built for unusually fast learners. Try it for free. And the try it for free is a button. Okay. If we were to look at a heat map of what I just described, meaning what is clicked on the most, do you have any read on which elements I just mentioned get clicked the most? Oh, I imagine people clicked the video. Yeah. Which doesn't, at least my experience was it didn't do anything. Yeah. Okay. Um,

1:16:09I think, and I'm sure they're called something else now, but way back in the day, you could get a heat map and it would be so called because things would get redder and redder and redder the more they were clicked. And so you could add a view, look at a website and with these tiny little circles indicating clicks that were colored in the way I just described, you could get a pretty good idea of what people were clicking on or trying to click on. Let me, if it works for you, let me pop open

1:16:41some mock-ups that were created using Claude in an incredibly short period of time. It is just insane what you, what you can do these days. Shout out to Lenny Ruchitsky, who had some really good tips on how to use these LLMs for design, turning your LLM into a, or maybe your AI into a world-class designer. All right. So I'm looking at the website right now. And if I go right now, 13 inch,

1:17:13I did not look on mobile, which I probably should have, but on the Mac book, which is kind of my workhorse daily driver, the try it for free is where the screen ends. My world of Mentava on first contact is what I just described. And then if we scroll down, you got best reading app for kids and you got all these amazing testimonials, which I think do a hundred times more for you than what I just described. Now, if we go to the mock-ups that I sent over and we can play around with these because

1:17:46they're not perfect, but you'll notice a couple of differences. So I'll point out some of those differences. So instead of get started in the top, right, which is that button. And I still, it's replicated in another place on the, on the homepage, but it's, is my child ready instead of get started? Maybe it helps. Maybe it doesn't something that's very easy to split test. Then the actual tagline on this mock-up, I don't love. I'll be honest. I like it more than the

1:18:17most education companies try to lift the floor. We want to remove the ceiling. I do prefer what is in the mock-ups to that, but it's not where I would put it, right? I think maybe, what was it? Less nagging for parents, you know, faster learning for kids. Faster learning, less nagging. Less nagging for parents is maybe what you test, but some kids are ready to read before school is ready to teach them. Okay. I don't like that because ready and read throw me off. Frankly, they're just, I know that sounds ridiculous given we're talking about learning to read,

1:18:49but they're too similar. So I would not use that phrasing. But then below that, we get an idea of what we're actually talking about. Because when you say most education companies try to lift the floor, we want to remove the ceiling. It's like, well, who are you selling to? What is it? Education company. Is it a clinic? Is it a company that sells consoles to nursery schools or daycare centers? It's not as clear. Whereas Mentava is expert reading instruction for your child. Oh no, no, no, no. It's just too wordy. Mentava is expert reading instruction.

1:19:22That's terrible. But your child will actually want to do. So you could say Mentava teaches reading that your child will actually want to do or something like that, right? 15 to 30 minutes a day, a coach on call and nobody in your house has to be the teacher. It's not quite right. But below that, you have two buttons, take the two-minute readiness check, and then how it works. And then a video that could autoplay or not, but I would definitely have audio in there. That's one option, right? And then right below that, and I'm not convinced this is the way to do it,

1:19:53but it makes it very explicit below the readiness check. $500 a month per child. Most families finish in six to 12 months, free 14-day trial, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's one approach. You could also, rather than make the $500 fine print, you could just lead with it. It's like, you know, Mentava is, you could have what we had before, faster learning for kids, less nagging for parents, if you want something that works and not something that's cheap, right?

1:20:28We have absolutely had luck leading with the price. We've had customers tell us, we use you because you cost $500 a month because we knew there's no way you could be a scam if you managed to charge that much money. You can't survive, right? You can't survive for years if it's not working. Yeah. Some of these other mock-ups I sent you, I do like the tagline on the second one better than the first one for children who are ready before school is. Okay. A bunch of the other copy would be replaced. And I think that one is too sassy looking. It's just, it looks like it's

1:20:59trying to sell a tablet, which is not what you guys are doing. You know, watch the 60 second demo or whatever. The not a score mock-up I don't particularly like, but I do like in the third option leading with the testimonials. I like that too. Right. So for instance, let's imagine the first, maybe the first mock-up, but the, some kids are ready to read before school is ready to teach them. Man, that's a mouthful. It's a tongue twister for me. If it were, you know, faster learning for kids, less nagging for parents, make your child love learning, something like that.

1:21:36And then on the top right, much like the third mock-up, there was this big testimonial, which was like, my daughter learned more in one week with Mentava than in six months in kindergarten. And then there was another one, maybe if you pick it, you've got a million of these testimonials, right? You've got an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the testimonials. If I were going to pick from the ether, one other type of testimonial, I saw a number of testimonials that were like, we got rid of our tutor and did this. Maybe that's the other one.

1:22:07Just so you address that. What about this comp? What about the comparable, the cost of it? You just have a testimonial, do some of that heavy lifting for you. I mean, you have so many good testimonials, right? These are, these are real testimonials. Yeah. Last fall, he didn't know how to read his letters. Now he can read his baby brother, a book before bed. Like what? WTF? Are you serious? Like you guys changed our lives. There's not a world where I could teach a child to read without your app. I mean, these testimonials are crazy. So aesthetically, you have some choices to make. Some of these are

1:22:38a little too sterile. The last page of mock-ups I think are a little more friendly, like the second to last one. Maybe a little too busy and a little too like, did our web designer take LSD? But you get the idea. I'm just going to note what I like about these things. So the testimonials, I would a hundred percent test having the testimonials very prominent and just looking at your homepage as a print advertisement effectively. Like you want to have a clean visual progression through

1:23:12the piece, right? Like generally people are going to be pulled to a graphic and then to the largest headline, then to like the second largest. So making sure that the visual tracking isn't too pinball machine. So frankly, it's like if I were going to be really nitpicky and try to pull something from like Ogilvy, I would say the, eh, you could have the video on the left instead of the right and then the headline on the right for, if we're talking about people who track from left to

1:23:43right with reading. But what I do like about this third one is that it's got a couple of bubbles on top of the kid learning 15 minutes a day. These would have to be fact checked, obviously, like audited to make sure, but you know, 15 to 30 minutes a day, a real coach for you on the couch and pajamas, whatever the, some of the main features are, and then take the two minute readiness check. Can you speak to the real coach or the coaching aspect? Is that a thing or is that

1:24:14just a hallucination? Yeah. So when, when you sign up, we have the, we have to have a parent app. And even during the free trial, we prompt you to book a call with me and chat about like, where do you think your child is stuck on? Like, what have you been having issues with? How is the free trial going? And then you have the parent app where you can send us, you can chat with us, you know, 24 seven, and we will get back to you as fast as we can. And we use that a lot for customer support, but just also parents are confused about whether their kids are engaging the right way and we can, we can let them know and get them back on the right path.

1:24:46And how much do you sacrifice? And you can tell me what the exact bracket is, but on this third mock-up, something that was put right above the headline, not saying that's the right place for it, but a reading program for curious three to seven year olds, is that an accurate description of the product? Would you say that's the sweet spot in terms of ages or what is the ideal age range? I'd say three to five, three to five. Okay, great. So reading program for three to five year olds, how much do you lose by saying three to five? That's maybe not the right way to phrase the

1:25:18question, but for instance, like Jake came in, what I'm trying to figure out is like how much noise and time-consuming activities are introduced by having people try this too early. versus just saying, you know what, it's not for two-year-olds. That's going to be like 90% failure rate. So let's just say three to five. Do you feel like that would help or hinder results? I'm very comfortable saying it's probably not for two-year-olds. I

1:25:49think the two-year-olds that this works for, although we've had a couple are very rare. Yeah. Okay. So if you were to give an age range right up front as a way of discouraging people or ultimately maybe going to be frustrated, right? Would three to five be the bracket? Would it be two and a half to five? I would actually say three and a half. Like we... Three and a half. Okay, great. None of these design ideas are permanent decisions. It's a living, breathing website. You can change it. But what I've found with the startups I've worked with,

1:26:24and also just with all the stuff that I've launched myself, it's like being very clear about who you are for and who you are not for makes everything else easier, particularly when you're explicit about it. Can you give some examples of what that means? Because we want to do that, but I think we're not sure how. Well, what that means is if someone says, like in the case of the four-hour work week, which I think crossed your path many, many years ago, in the case of the four-hour work week, it's like I would get these questions when I did media around or even

1:26:56from my editor early on. It's like, well, how can employees and big companies use this? And I'd be like, frankly, it's not ideal for them. There are things they can use. And let's just say 20% of it, I think is going to be very, very valuable to them. But it's really designed for people who are in a job but want to experiment with designing their own lifestyle vis-a-vis starting a company of some type, ideally product and not service. And that happens to be a huge market. You don't have to please everyone. Even if you tried, it's not going to be possible. So that would be one example.

1:27:31In the case of, for instance, there's a company that I'm involved with. It's probably 30% of my protein calories called Maui Nui. Maui Nui venison. It's wild harvested venison from Hawaii. And it's the most nutrient-dense red meat you can buy, period. Full stop. And it's expensive. It is. If you think mentava is expensive, no way. Maui Nui venison is much more expensive. But in my case, I'm like the one place, when I have kids, it'll change. But healthcare and nutrition

1:28:08and exercise, I'm not going to try to get the Goldilocks perfect amount. I'm happy to overspend to ensure that I am getting the best. And it turns out there are plenty of people who fit that bill. Even if you just had professional sports teams, collegiate sports teams at the high end, and military, that can still be a really sizable business. So that would be another example. They don't hide it. You very quickly determine that this is going to be expensive.

1:28:38It's not so much like a framing of the messaging. It's just like the price tag is there. They're unapologetic about it. It's just not something they pay attention to. I would say that there is one facet, which is price. I'd say price is just a very clear delineator. So rather than use four paragraphs to describe something that is probably accidentally going to insult a bunch of people one way or the other, it's just like, I think there are ways that

1:29:09you could skin the cat. Oh, that's a terrible expression. I wonder where it came from. I was thinking, I think about a lot of these things. Like, can have your cake and eat it too? I'm like, where does that come from? If you have your cake, of course you're going to eat your cake. Like, why is that double dipping? It doesn't make any sense. In any case, the point is you could say something. I mean, maybe there's something about, I'm sure there is. I would just have to spend more time on it. But like the teaching your kid to fish as opposed to giving them a fish. Traditional education gives your kid a fish and forces them to eat it. You know, what if they loved learning how

1:29:42to fish and all it took was 15 minutes on a tablet and you did not have to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? I'm shooting from the hip here, but I do think that there are, I mean, I'll take another stab at it. Another stab would be, you know, for parents who realize that the education system in the US is broken in one fundamental way, colon, you know, eager, fast learners cannot learn at their own pace. It's not perfect, but it's edging directionally. I think towards something useful.

1:30:20Let's see. I mean, there are tons of examples. If you look at, and you could look at, you know, punk rock bands, you could look at fashion brands, like how do they position? Very often it's, they're very good at making a stark contrast between like our people and not our people, which this is coming back to like the do nothing that may not be a task worth spending a lot of time on, but there are a lot of ways that you can distinguish. I think who you're for is a lot more

1:30:55important than who you're not for stating who you're for. I'll give you an example. This is something I'm working on right now myself because the book that I was alluding to is primarily a book on saying no, which I'm working on the positioning of this right now because the first third of the book is how to identify or create the few things to say yes to that actually make all the difference. So it's not exclusively a book on saying no. It's a book on making really high leverage decisions. However, the crux of

1:31:27the book, because there's so many, it's very easy to say yes. I mean, just everyone's got promiscuous overcommitment in their lives. And a lot of tech is designed to push us into the realm of distraction, infinite distraction. But with saying no, I'm going to get a bunch of pushback. And I address this pushback in the book, but I'm going to get lots of things right off the cuff on social. I can, I would bet my entire net worth on it, which is must be nice. You're already successful. So you can just say, no, I'm too kind for that. You're just saying this after the fact,

1:32:01I bet in the beginning, you had to say yes to everything. Like there are a couple of pieces that I feel very confident are going to come up and I have somewhat of a binary choice, right? Like I can try to respond to all those and I can try to convince them otherwise, which I could, I could do it, but it'll be very time consuming. And it's, you know, it's, it's not going to make me particularly happy. I'm not going to enjoy it. Let me put it that way because I'll have to do it

1:32:31repeatedly over and over and over again. Because if I'm like, did you read my blog post? Like, no, of course 99 out of a hundred people did not know 999 out of a thousand would probably even worse ratio. Didn't see it. Or I can just say, you know what? You're right. This is for people who've had just the bare modicum of success where they have figured out maybe one thing they're good at where they have too much inbound and too many requests to their time. That's who this book is for that by the way, still well over a hundred million people. I do not need to worry about an audience for

1:33:07the book. But if I try to boil the ocean and somehow homogenize it into appealing to everybody, the game is lost. I'm dead. So these are the types of things I'm thinking about where it's like, okay, well, if I'm stating who it's for, how precise do I get? How much do I reduce the aperture of the description? And it might make sense to really, really reduce it. I mean, when I launched the four-hour workweek, I was like, in the background, in my mind, I was like,

1:33:37I am pitching this to 20 to 35-year-old tech-savvy males in San Francisco. Phase one. Phase two, same kind of psychographics, female, same city. Next, same thing, New York. And then the sort of sphere of available readers was expanded to a handful of other major cities. And then before you know it, okay, fine. Then 16-year-olds in like Oklahoma are reading it and like 60-year-olds in

1:34:12Sri Lanka and so on. But if you try to start there, you're fucked. So when you have this very specific idea of who you're trying to reach, what are the specific behavioral changes that does that drive for you? Is it like specific messages that you're hammering on? Marketing. In that case. Like where you're running ads or the messages that you're running? All of it. So I mean, I ended up, I always like to look for the uncrowded channel. So in my case, this would not, I don't think this would be appropriate for Mintava. But when I'm launching something, I often look for, always look for, don't always find, but I always look for the

1:34:46fast-growing undervalued channel. And if I can't find that, or even if I can, I then ask, and that could be channel or format. Then I ask, what is the most uncrowded path to communicating with the tastemakers in that sphere? So I'll give you a concrete example. In the case of 4-Hour Workweek, which was published April 2007, 20-year anniversary coming up next year,

1:35:17which is insane. But there was this relatively new thing that had hit a critical mass. It was called a blog, just short for weblog. And when I reached out to best-selling authors to ask them about their recent launches, and I asked them, what was a waste of time? What under-delivered? What over-delivered? What surprised you? What came back was, TV is becoming less important for prescriptive nonfiction

1:35:51or nonfiction in general, NPR, marketplace, or a handful of NPR shows. And there's this new thing, it's really weird. They're called blogs. And this thing, I never expected. I put this excerpt up, I did a little interview, sold more books than some gigantic morning show in New York City that gets all the fanfare. And I was like, okay, well, I think I'm going to push all my chips in on this thing called blogs after I heard that six or seven times. And then the question was, well, how do I communicate with bloggers? And the answer was not email because that was the most

1:36:22crowded channel. So I spent my marketing budget basically for the 4-Hour Workweek flying to conferences to meet these people in person. WebExpo, I can't recall where that was held, but I spent all my time in the lounges, didn't really do anything in the panels. And at the time, I'm not going to give like the whole Dr. Evil life story, but met Robert Scoble. I have a lot of rules and thoughts around this type of approach, but flash forward, I'll give a different example. 4-Hour Chef. 4-Hour

1:36:57Chef was launching in 2012. I asked the same questions, reached out to people, asked them the questions I already mentioned. And they said, you know, radio is getting less important. It's not having quite the same effect on sales as my last few book launches. But I went on this one thing called a podcast. And I was like, huh, okay. Well, I'd heard of podcasting, but I thought it kind of lived, you know, it came to the fore for a brief moment and then kind of flickered out and died.

1:37:29But that wasn't true. It was just very, very early innings in podcasting in 2012. And when I launched the 4-Hour Chef, I was on Joe Rogan before Joe Rogan was Joe Rogan. Back in 2012, it was like, Joe Rogan, you mean the guy who used to be on Fear Factor? That was the reference. It wasn't like, oh, the guy who was in the Oval Office and pushed through the executive order and is like on every major news outlet every day where they're quoting his podcast.

1:38:04Man, this is incredible. That whole story is amazing. So Nerdist, Mark Maron, Adam Carolla, these OGs in the game, I was able to see the effects of that firsthand. Right now, later, I took that experience and used it to inform starting my own in 2014. But for each book, right, with Tools of Titans, no, was it Tools of Titans? I also did a bunch of experiments with BitTorrent with 4-Hour Chef and gave away the audiobook for free and like all these experiments,

1:38:34they don't all work out. I don't think the BitTorrent experiment really panned out as I would have hoped. But that's how I workshop. I do think, and look, you're the CEO of the company, you don't necessarily have the time to do this. But I imagine that you have the opportunity on these calls that you get on with the live coaching. I think in-person workshopping is just the fastest way to get feedback, real feedback. Because sure, you can get feedback that is measurable in the forms of clicks and so on. And you can use user testing and see how people are reacting to a

1:39:10website, which I think is interesting. If you have a webcam on, you can look at their face and where they pause, which is not going to be transmitted if you're only getting click-through data or click data in the case of a heat map, let's say. But when you're talking to people in person and trying to explain what you do, it's like, do they lean in or do they lean back? Do they follow up with a question or they're like, oh, interesting, right? If I'm at a party and someone's like, what do you do? And I'm like, I write books. 99% of the time, even if they don't want to talk to me,

1:39:41they're going to ask what kind of books. On the other hand, if I'm like, I'm an accountant, I have some accountants I love, right? But if I'm like, I don't really want to be at this party and they're like, what do you do? I'm like an accountant. They're like, oh, yeah, that must be a job. There's no follow-up. And you can get a feel for which messaging is working. Or if you give them a paragraph and then two or three people at a bar, you're just having casual conversations

1:40:12with that event, they all ask about the same little thing that you've been discounting that has been a minor cameo in your messaging as opposed to the leading headline. And you're like, you know what? Maybe I should test that. That's brilliant. It makes me think of comics trying out at open mic nights, right? I'm leaving so much on the table. I'm doing all these intro calls with our new customers. I should be asking them, if I said this, how would you have reacted to it? What were the pain points that got you to sign up? I should be networking events, trying more taglines and seeing what gets people interested

1:40:48in having longer conversations with me. You're going to be having these conversations anyway. Just like it's more signal if you ask someone to buy and they actually pay, as opposed to, do you prefer A or B? Similarly, it's not bad to ask, do you prefer A or B? But the fidelity of that signal isn't as strong, in my opinion. It's not as reliable as if you mention a few lines and

1:41:19then just wait. And if they don't follow up and two or three people don't ask follow-up questions, it's a problem. But if they latch onto something, you're like, okay, that was an organic, that was like a proactive move on their part. It wasn't in response to a question. They're not trying to appease me necessarily. Maybe they are. Maybe there's a component of people pleasing or just being social, but that's why you have to talk to more than one person. And I'm like, the four-hour work week was workshopped. I didn't intend on writing a book, but it was notes from a class that I taught twice a year. It was a guest lecture. It wasn't an ongoing class, but I got to see what didn't work.

1:41:56It was very much like a stand-up comic. If I tried a joke and it fell flat twice, I was like, kill it, yank it. That's got to go. It's not working. So I'm not sure if that's helpful, but there are other things you can use. I mean, for instance, with some of these mock-ups or if you're testing copy options, I think it's most valuable if it's on your own website because you control it and you can try to discern intent to purchase. However, there are many services that do this.

1:42:29I don't know how I ended up finding this one. It's one called PickFu, P-I-C-K-F-U. We'll put the branding aside, but instant consumer feedback, split testing, and market research. So they've got their fancy social cred with these logos, HBO Max, L'Oreal, Wayfair, et cetera, have supposedly used it. But you can, I believe, I think it's PickFu that's allowed me to do this. It might've been another similar platform, but basically picking Amazon Prime members

1:43:01and then serving up, you can spec out your demographics and then it just surfaces three options. And the reason this can be helpful, well, there are a few reasons. Like I use this for split testing different aspects of the design and packaging around the Coyote card game, which I created with Exploding Kittens, which came out, I don't know, a year or two ago, which was a really fun experiment. I've never had anything in thousands of Walmart and Target

1:43:34stores, which is super fun. But you're not going to get much data from Amazon and you don't really want Amazon to be your debutante ball where you show up in your new dress for the first time and see if people like it. I do not like taking that type of risk. And there was internal debate. There were diverging opinions. And in the case of like Mantava, it's like, I don't know what your traffic looks like. If you are going to get a statistically significant signal with which you're

1:44:07going to make an important decision about something, you might just not have the volume necessary. Maybe you do, but maybe you don't. And in this case, it's like, look, if I want 5,000 people to vote on something in 72 hours, I can do that. It's a function of cost. And maybe it's like 500 bucks, 600 bucks. It's very affordable. And you could very easily, I can't recall what the competitors are, but you could use, you know, Claude or ChatGPT or whatever to ask like, what are the three most compelling competitors to pick Foo with similar pricing? Because some of them are going

1:44:39to be very, very, very expensive intended for large enterprise. They do the same thing, frankly. It's gussied up a little bit in a tuxedo and you have to do a sales call or they demo and then like quote you a price. If you see that and you're just looking for fast, quick, and dirty, then I wouldn't proceed. These are all kind of different tentacles that are all out probing that bring information back to like the central brain that then determines which I want to split test in a

1:45:10place with higher stakes, but better signaling for purchase intention, which would be your website. And it doesn't like, you can do it really fast. I'm famously impatient. I do not want to wait weeks and weeks and weeks. So I'm like, okay, cool. 72 hours over the weekend. Great. I'll just let this run. And then on Monday we can look at it. And if it's an edge case where we've got something, it's like, okay, well, it's like 49% of 51%. Don't be too cheap on this because you can get a false positive on something. I mean, you know this you've done, you did more math by eighth grade than I did

1:45:40throughout all of high school. So I don't need to tell you about statistics, but the point is don't do the bare minimum because very often the results will flip when you get just a larger sample size. These tips are so helpful because I think it makes me realize how many opportunities we're leaving on the table to iterate with our messaging and get it dialed in. So I'm pretty excited about this. Let's throw out a prompt for people who are still listening or watching this. Let Niels know like what, look at the website, inamentava.com, check it out. Of the things

1:46:14we've talked about, what is resonated? What should the tagline be? What language or features or anything have resonated most? Just let them know on X. Tag them at Niels Hoven. That's at N-I-E-L-S-H-O-V-E-N. And trust me, Niels will be paying attention. So check it out. Is there anything else that we should cover? I mean, I feel like we have hit a lot. I don't feel like we need to spend a ton

1:46:44of time on competition. I mean, I did a competitive analysis, but I do feel like you're heavily differentiated. But if there is a particular competitive snag that you run into and you're like, oh God, Newman, they brought up whatever again, then we could talk about it. But if not, then we probably don't need to spend too much time there, right? I mean, you got the cheap reading apps. I don't think we need to spend time on that. Teach yourself books and kits.

1:47:15We got live online tutors. Then we've got kind of like the super mega, super comprehensive, localized options like AlphaSchool, which are just a different category altogether. So I'm not sure we need to spend time on that. Big fan of AlphaSchool, by the way. It's just a different thing. They use us. My kid is using their homeschool program right now. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. They're investors also. Oh, nice. I didn't realize that. Joe Lamont was like, I will take your entire round right now if you let me.

1:47:47That's cool. Yeah. Joe is very smart. Funny story. He may not realize this. Probably doesn't. Why would he? But I almost ended up working for Trilogy Software out of college. The reason I fell in love with Austin is because I made it to the finals round of interviews and they flew out the finalists to Austin and gave us a whole whirlwind tour and kind of, I don't think it was whining and dining, mostly just dining, but they made it really fun. I didn't make the cut in retrospect. I guess,

1:48:20thank God, right? Blessing in disguise kind of forced me to really scrap for a while, which was good for me. But I've been in Austin for more than a decade, still in connected with Joe. So that'll happen eventually. Anything come to mind that we should cover? I'm not sure if any, if there's

Targeting specific communities

1:48:34anything outstanding just while we're here, if there's anything else that you'd like to chat about. Do you have any insights on getting in front of people who aren't actively looking for your product or who aren't actively trying to solve a problem? Like don't know they have the problem yet. Tell me more about that. The issue about parents not realizing how much school is going to hold back their kids until like it's too late or that, you know, your best opportunities for acceleration are even before your kid gets to school. Yeah. So the question is any thoughts on how to get in front of those people? You know, they say you want to be the painkiller.

1:49:07Like you want to solve the problem that your customer knows they have. And I think for a lot of our customers, they don't realize that this is a problem yet. They don't realize how far their kid is from their potential. Yeah. Or one of the strongest reasons I have for teaching your kids to read early is because when they hit school, your school is going to try and hold them back. And being able to say, my kid can already read, you need to give them more opportunity is like one of your strongest negotiating levers. Yeah, that's a great point. I really like that. Let me do like a Rashomon multi-directional thing on this question. The first is coming back to like, what if I did nothing?

1:49:44One position I could try to take and might not be justifiable is the people who are using your product understand the problem. So just spend a bunch of focused time on the referral engine for those people. Then you don't have to explain anything because chances are they're not going to have to explain anything either because their cohort of friends, i.e. parents with kids will

1:50:18be cut from the same cloth. Then it's a question of how do you congregate the converted versus how do you convert the non-believers? I think that may be a better question. I think there's a lot there about like giving our customers the tools to let their friends know about this problem that maybe their friends don't know about yet. They're going to have that opportunity to explain it if we can give them the words for it. I would also say that if you had a two-minute readiness test, make it interesting. If the parents never end up using Mentava, how can you make that as illuminating and

1:50:52useful as possible? That would be a worthwhile thought exercise. Namely, how can I make this two-minute readiness test? Or like, is your kid ready? Or there's probably a better question to ask, better wording for that. But I cannot tell you, there was this thing a couple of years ago. I don't remember what it was selling. It was definitely selling something, to be clear. Like this was not just some questionnaire online for fun, but it was a bit risque. Hope those three-year-olds aren't

1:51:23listening to this, but it was like a sex compatibility test. And you would like take this thing. And then, you know, your girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse would fill it out or whatever. Oh, mojo upgrade. I remember it. And then it would tell you like, oh, you're a switch. And this person is a that. And this person is a this. And like, you might be into all these things. And it was, people got very excited about it and they shared the test. The point of that business was not to provide tests. It was selling

1:51:55something else. I can't even remember what it was. I didn't buy it. But in one of the more awkward transitions of my podcast career, let's now come back to children. It could be fun to try to create a readiness test, which is not sexy enough. It would have to be called something else, but a test that people could take in two minutes that would give them information that they would find valuable or interesting or fascinating to the extent that they would want to share the free readiness test with their friends. Because then they're not saying, hey, I'm not automatically

1:52:33one of those rich assholes who can burn $500 a month, which is not what I think. I think it's a fantastic investment. But they're not risking that social judgment by recommending someone take a free two-minute test. I think that's another opportunity, potentially. And then, where are you based, Niels? I'm outside Seattle. Outside Seattle. So in Seattle, you probably have some organization like this. If you were in the Bay Area, just because I'm familiar with the Bay Area and I've been there for so long, you mentioned

1:53:04first-generation immigrant, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I would go speak at the Indus entrepreneur, Ty, in Silicon Valley. Sorry, what did you say? The what entrepreneur? Indus. I-N-D-U-S. Let's see if it still exists. The Indus Entrepreneur, Ty, nonprofit organization. There it is. So, Ty.org. T-I-E.org. Wow. Well, let's see here. The world's largest community of

1:53:39entrepreneurs. Hmm. I'm interested in about the genesis of Ty. Yeah. So, let's see. Board of trustees. Who's on the board of trustees? I'm expecting. I have high expectations, Ty. Let's see who we got. Yeah. Founder of Emphasis. Baller. Okay. Oh, this website. I could use a website upgrade. Here we go. Jensen Huang. I believe Ty is one of the most extraordinary communities known to the industry, any industry. I mean, they've got some good testimonials. But the point of this is that

1:54:10back in the day when I lived in Mountain View and I would go volunteer for Ty because it was the only way for me to punch above my weight class and meet people who would otherwise be completely unreachable. It was basically all Indians. Fine. Great. But if you want to talk about first or second generation immigrants who are all in on learning, it's about as warm an audience as I can imagine. Yeah. So, you can check it out. The point being, if you were like, all right, well, look, I'm going

1:54:43to take a trip anyway to the Bay Area or maybe they have a chapter. Let's see. Chapters. I mean, it's freaking Seattle. Come on. I would think it'd be, well, they got Nairobi. They're going to make me scroll through all the countries. Oh, man. All right. There is, I'm boring the hell out of people. Yeah, there's a Seattle chapter. But the, and all over the U.S., Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, et cetera. So, I would just say pitch to your dream customer or get up and talk and see if you can

1:55:17get on the main stage at one of Ty's large events and give a presentation. This is another way that you can test things. Give a presentation. If it's good enough, if it's not, then too bad. Try again. But if it's good enough, which does not have to be great, but if it's, I suspect you'd have a very warm audience. And then you see what people ask you. You see what people mention and you see what people ask you afterwards. And then you're hearing from the converted exactly what they want to know

1:55:51to join your church. I feel like this is the bread and butter question to ask you. How do you get on the main stage at these events when you don't have a track record? I think you do have a track record. I think you're underselling yourself. I think you point to some of these, I think you point to your pedigree. So, in other words, that third paragraph where I was like, use that sentence. Neil's worked at Cloudflare Class Dojo and Pocket Gems where he ran the highest grossing mobile game in the world in 2011. Well, first of all, it seems like Ty has branched out way

1:56:23beyond Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, which is great. But depending on who you're pitching, you have to customize to who you're pitching. But I would say it may be easier than you expect. So, I didn't even know that this is a thing. So, people reach out to organizations and say, like, I know you have a conference coming up. I would like to be a speaker there. And like, here's what I do. People definitely do that. I mean, I have not done this type of legwork in a very

1:56:54long time. But yeah, just cold email and pitch them. And you want to make sure it's thematically related to what they're doing, right? But they have the Thai Global Summit, Tycon Silicon Valley. Maybe Tycon Silicon Valley is more interesting because you could use it as a recruiting tool simultaneously, depending on what your priorities are at the time. Definitely going to be a high density of venture capitalists, although perhaps you don't need that at this point. But yeah, let's see. ThaiGlobalSummit.org. What I would say

1:57:30is don't be too attached to getting on stage and spending an hour talking about how Mintava was born and this and this and this, right? Maybe it's the behavioral optimization or what did you call it? Motivation engineering. There's a term you used that I'm blanking on. Maybe it's that. Maybe it's commentary on disrupting and innovating education in the United States. And oh, by the way, I'm the

1:58:01founder of this startup and you spend two minutes on that. But like, how did we get here? Okay, now I'm giving a broader talk about my thoughts on education and where it's possible to stick in door wedges so that we can gain a foothold in something interesting. I am really just shooting from the hip here. But there are lots of things. I mean, look, you could have some side hobby. I'm making this up. Let's just say you bump into the chairman of the board of trustees of Thai and he's about to go on a trip

1:58:38and you're like, huh, seems like he's got an Olympic archery recurve bow that he's taking with him. Isn't that interesting? And you get into this whole archery. You're like, you know what? I'm into archery. And he's like, would you come speak on archery? And the answer should be absolutely. I'll get on stage and talk about how I approach the task of learning archery. And oh, by the way, I work at this company and here's a minute on Mentava. It's like, yes. The answer to that one's yes. As long as you have a very clear idea of what constitutes a success. Getting on stage to talk in front of an

1:59:11interesting audience is not enough. What constitutes success? Is it recruiting? Is it feedback from people when you get off stage? If that's the case, guess what? You probably want an earlier speaking slot as opposed to a closing speaking slot. You probably don't want to be speaking on the last morning when a lot of people have already left if they're coming in from out of town. This type of thing. And I'm not, by the way, saying that you should focus on Thai, even though I do think it's at least

1:59:43when I was exposed to it, a very interesting organization. And again, an uncrowded channel. It's like, I might've been the only white person volunteering there. And I was like, that's ridiculous. This is an absolute goldmine of brilliant people and world-class entrepreneurs. And it's like, why isn't everybody here? So it's cool to see that they've grown so much. I think what's coming through so much out of these conversations with you is that it's like an exercise in thinking out of the box. It's like, okay, I know what the goals are. Where are the open

2:00:17channels? Where are the unoptimized? Like where were the opportunities that nobody else is looking for? Where are the shortcuts? Yeah. And I mean, it might not even be going to Thai, but you look at their team and you're like, oh, look at that. I'm looking at the board of trustees and you might realize like, oh, wow, Kamal Agarwal follows me on X. Hmm. Maybe he'd be open to hopping on a phone call or a zoom, or maybe you look at the bios and Anita is mother of three. And you're like,

2:00:54where do the Indian moms in the U S congregate? Are there WhatsApp groups? Are there message boards? Are there whatever? And I'm not saying this is a good idea, but I do think there is value. And I did this. You might recall very early on, I mentioned the four hour work week and the like, whatever the range was I gave like 20 to 35 year old tech savvy males in San Francisco. That's very specific, but the target isn't the market, right? So the initial target is lead domino that you tip over

2:01:29that makes the rest easier to tip. The eventual market can be infinitely larger, but the reason for being so specific, there are many reasons I gave a few already. Another is that I can achieve a surround sound effect for a very small number of people where they feel like I am ubiquitous and that there is a perceived momentum that is very helpful. Because at that point in time, going back to 2007, if I was on Gizmodo tech crunch, I think it was 42 or 43 folders, Merlin man, and a few other

2:02:04places at the same time, as far as Silicon Valley technorati were concerned, I was everywhere. And there are other ways to approach that, right? It's like, okay, like J date for Jewish dating. Okay. That's like, they're very, very clear on who it's for. And it's like India is a subcontinent. It's a gigantic place. So I'm not trying to paint with a broad brush, but it's like, okay, maybe I try to create a surround sound effect and a critical mass within the Indian communities in the United States.

2:02:41I'm not saying that's a good idea, but I would say that's a very achievable, or at least it's very concrete. It's more precise than like parents who want their kids to learn faster from a marketing perspective. Because then you can figure out, well, maybe I sponsor a Thai event. Okay. Maybe there's some app that they're particularly fond of for cohesion. I don't know what that would be. Again, making this up as I go. Maybe there's, who knows, like this is going to sound antiquated, but like Facebook groups or something, who knows, right? And you're like, okay, well, maybe I or my

2:03:17wife could become active or somebody on the team and like offer free trials in exchange for feedback. And nothing sneaky, nothing underhanded. It's just like people underestimate, I think, the power of a surround sound effect for a very focused group. And this just happens to be the thing that popped into my head, but there could have been a dozen other examples. This resonates a lot because if that surround sound effect is going on, then at some point you're like, I keep hearing this name. I keep hearing this product. Let me go see what this is all about.

2:03:47I'm curious. I want to look into it. And that's, that's all we need that first hook. Well, also again, this I'm stereotyping here, but this is my lived experience. It's like, I would put a lot of money on black that the management organizers of Thai care a hell of a lot about education and education for their kids. I would really like, I would put a lot of chips on, on that. And maybe that's the way to make the ball roll downhill as opposed to pushing it uphill.

2:04:19You don't need to convince them. They're convinced. They just don't know that you exist.

2:04:25You know, and then you can focus on the stuff that's really fun to focus on. I mean, a lot of this is really fascinating and on some level fun to focus on, but it's like, then you can focus on like making it as good as possible for them. Like, I think that's quite a fun piece of this whole puzzle. Well, I like this a lot. Yeah, that's an approach and it's a very human scale approach. I'm not suggesting something that requires hiring McKinsey. I'm not suggesting something that requires outsourcing analytics

2:04:56to some Borg, which I'm certainly not averse to, but it's the amount of intelligence that you can absorb both explicitly, but also kind of implicitly and intuitively by spending time in some of these concentrated environments. You're like, oh, okay. For at least this subset of Indus diaspora entrepreneurs, these are the questions and comments that come up when I use this two minute spiel that

2:05:28I've refined on Mentava. That's valuable. That's really valuable. And then there are ways online that you can also convert that into very targeted paid advertising. This is turned into like an infomercial for Thai, but it's like, maybe they have a newsletter. Like these are relatively low cost things. And I'm going to get in so much trouble for this, but it's like, look, I've lived, went to two universities in China. Also probably you could find an equivalent for first generation in the U S Chinese parents who are

2:06:04all in on education. And chances are if they made their way here, which is hard AF, they're going to care a hell of a lot about giving their kids as many advantages as possible. And there's no convincing, right? They just don't know you exist. We had one customer who is, I think Chinese, possibly Vietnamese. And she was saying like, she loved Mentava because she does not speak English very well. So she's like, I probably wouldn't be able to teach my kid to read. So I give them this

2:06:34app. That's cool. I sit next to them. I do my work and just to make sure that they kind of stay on task. Yeah, that's super cool. So those are some of the things that I would be thinking about. I mean, I only know my toolkit, right? So I have lots of blind spots, tons of blind spots, but I will say that this is, I think this type of product, even though I don't yet have kids hope to remedy that soon, but this is the type of business I like a lot. You have premium pricing. You have to build a

2:07:06product that allows you to charge premium pricing. So there's upward pressure on product quality and you can find very discreet populations that are already converted. Education is not a nice to have by hook or crook one way or the other. Sure. You might get lucky and your kid is like the Ramanujan of self-study, but in most cases, kids are going to need nudges in the right direction. They're going

2:07:38to need tools. They're going to need guidance. And it's like, people are willing to pay for that if they have the means. So in any case, Niels, people can find Mentava, obviously at mentava, M-E-N-T-A-V-A dot com. Check it out. Who knows? Maybe the website will be revised by the time you see it, but they can find UNX at Niels Hoven, N-I-E-L-S-H-O-V-E-N. I was dying to ask you about

2:08:10beauty and the geek, honestly, but I'll save that for our round two. All right. That's round two. Anything else that you'd like to say or point people to, any requests you'd like to make of people listening or watching before we wind to a close and land the plane, at least for now?

Closing advice for parents

2:08:30I think my one request to people, whether or not they try Mentava, is you will have to advocate for your child throughout their lives, especially when it comes to education and never, ever let anybody make you feel guilty for advocating for your kid. I love that. That is a great place to close. Niels, thanks for taking the time, man. Great to see you. Thank you so much, Tim. Yeah. Love Mentava, the mission behind it, the purpose behind it, the ethos. Not to mention the product. I mean, go look at these testimonies on the website. It's bananas.

2:09:05And to everybody listening, we'll include links to everything, probably not the sex compatibility tests, but we'll include links to just about everything in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast. If you search Niels, N-I-E-L-S, or Mentava, it will be the only result, so you'll find it there. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Make sure that your compassion includes yourself. Thanks for tuning in.

2:09:54Easy to sign up. Easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short,

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2:11:22massive juggernauts, they all use Shopify. I started my first online business back in 2001. Back then, it meant late nights, a lot of broken code, emailing tons of customer support emails, and headaches after headaches after headaches, hoping the payment page wouldn't stop orders, drop orders, the whole nine yards, right? In contrast, my Shopify store got up and running well within a few hours, ran 24-7 without drama, and ShopPay, the easiest checkout on the market, got customers from add to cart to paid in seconds. ShopPay lifts conversions by up to 50% relative to

2:11:58guest checkouts. It really smooths the way I use it all the time when I'm buying stuff. So if you're ready to make your first sale, check it out. Go to shopify.com slash Tim and start your free trial today. One more time, that's shopify.com slash Tim. I've easily worked with 100 plus founders and entrepreneurs over the last 20 years, and I've seen some massive wins, some huge companies built, and some failures and zombies. Among other things, repeatedly, I've seen how customer service can make or break a company. This is where FIN comes in. F-I-N. FIN is an AI agent, and people throw that around

2:12:34a lot. In this context, think of it as a digital employee. And FIN, your digital employee, delivers high-quality answers and helps resolve complex questions that your customers may have. And a lot of name-brand companies use FIN. Rapidly-growing companies like Asana and Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and past podcast sponsors like Gamma and Vanta rely on FIN to deliver accurate and thoughtful customer support to millions of customers and users. FIN is also built using custom models trained on thousands of actual customer interactions, and it understands the complexity and nuance

2:13:09of customer service like no other agent. This is what it does. You feed FIN your internal knowledge and policies, it learns your rules, and they can start supporting your overstretched support team. It's an extension. It's, in a way, infinitely extensible of your support team. And because every business runs things differently, FIN is fully self-manageable. So check it out. See the difference FIN can make in your business. Check it out and learn more at fin.ai slash Tim. That's F-I-N dot A-I slash Tim.