Welcome to the 8th edition of GrowthDeck! If you enjoy reading deep dives like this, please share it with your friends or colleagues who would appreciate it. Now, let's dive in!

Can you imagine a side project becoming a $250M exit?

That's precisely what happened with Ankur Nagpal, Conrad Wadowski, and Teachable. There's so much to learn from their journey. In this issue, we'll explore how they scaled Teachable with incredible growth tactics that you, as a founder, can apply to your own journey.

Teachable’s (Formerly Fedora) journey begins with its founder Ankur realizing the need for a creator-friendly course creation platform. Ankur himself used to run a course on Udemy, but they faced scaling challenges due to limited access to users and revenue share changes.

So, Ankur decided to build Teachable in 2014, as a side project that quickly grew into a real business making $5,000 a month. This success led to raising a seed round and building a team to expand Teachable's impact.

Teachable has had an incredible growth trajectory. By 2020, they expected to have 50,000 artists and more than 30 million students enrolled in various courses.

After reaching this amazing growth, Ankur decided to sell Teachable to a Latin American firm Hotmart for approximately $250M. According to Ankur, this move would help them to create the “largest possible impact in the shortest period of time”.

Let’s directly jump into the nitty-gritty of the details, as any company grows, they face different kinds of struggles. You need different answers for all the struggles. Here is a tweet by Ankur to show, how fast they have grown!

So now we know about the story of Teachable. But how did he do all these in this short span of time? What growth drivers did he use? Let’s dive in!

Teachable’s Growth Drivers

💯 1. The One Metric Focus

"The One Metric Focus" is the concept of choosing a single core metric that aligns with the stage of the business and serves as the primary driver of growth.

In Teachable's case, they initially focused on "Weekly Active Users (WAU)" as their core metric. This metric helped them optimize their core product value and test user acquisition approaches to improve user stickiness.

Before fully committing to MRR as the core metric, Teachable surveyed their users using Sean Ellis's approach to validate product-market fit. The positive responses from the users confirmed that MRR was a suitable metric for their growth stage.

One metric allows everyone to focus on the best ideas. It is different for everyone and there’s no special formula or algorithm. The first step is to Look deep into your funnel. If anyone want to take a look at the entire process, here is an excellent blog by Teachable’s cofounder Conrad Wadowski link.

One year into the journey, they were stuck at 10k MRR, they tried several different growth hacks, but their MRR was stuck at 10k, it was not increasing. This is when they decided to make Growth their core company value.

🎯 2- Implementing the “Growth” Model

Teachable's growth journey began as a slow climb, as is the case with many SAS businesses. Here is their journey for the first 4 years.

This model which we are going to discuss was developed by Andrew. With this model, they decided to start by setting a monthly growth target every single month

And then work backward and figure out how to do it the other goal behind this model is that they wanted to leave as little to chance as possible. Here is a real example.

Now there are obviously a few things that are always predictable for the month which is used in the example below:

Ankur mentions that all the growth that has happened is due to the strategies they adopted every month for “Revenue to be found”. Here is a quick look into the strategies they used at different phases.

You can go really deep into this strategy by watching a 40-min mega growth lesson by Ankur here. The best thing why this worked is because they would exactly know why they failed at the end of each month.

🔥 3- Extraordinary Live Events

Teachable’s revenue per customer was relatively low, so having a dedicated sales team wasn't viable. However, they had a significant number of freemium leads that weren't converting to paid customers.

To address this, they started conducting 2+ live webinars each week with a strong focus on converting potential customers. These webinars offered valuable information, and at the end, a call to action encouraged attendees to make a purchase.

Those who bought during the live session received bonus content for free. The success of these webinars, led by a webinar genius, allowed them to convert approximately 30% of attendees into paying customers and double their free-to-paid conversion rate.

This strategy simplified their marketing engine, allowing them to find more webinar attendees consistently. Down the line when the numbers started to look stupid for conducting weekly webinars, they introduced a summit like the example below which led to 50k $ MRR in the very first summit.

⚖️ 4- Doing things that don’t scale

This is one of the growth drivers which comes out of their implementing the “Growth Model” strategy. Every time they look for new innovative ways to find the “Revenue to be found”, they discovered new strategies, which really helped them grow to 10M$ ARR.

To start with one of the funniest failures we came across, here is one:

Because Udemy was a rival, Ankur created a script to extract emails and urge Udemy teachers to utilize Teachable. However, the script accidentally emailed Udemy's founder.

Thankfully, Gagan Biyani responded graciously. 😂

Looking into things that worked out for them:

1) Ankur had long desired to get Pat Flynn on their platform. However, he faced difficulties getting an introduction. So, he took matters into his own hands and cold-emailed Pat every time he saw he was going to a conference, pretending to attend a conference he wasn't actually going to.

Surprisingly, Pat agreed to meet, and Ankur immediately bought his ticket to seize the opportunity.

THE RESULT?

The meeting went great, they started speaking and Pat became a customer and eventually became an advisor, and the single biggest affiliate to our platform.

2) Ankur and Conrad were always hustling to grow monthly course sales on their platform. The graph was looking promising after a long time, but they noticed that none of their customers were launching anything in December 2015, potentially leading to a down month. (Since a significant part of their revenue was transaction fees back then)

To avoid this, they took matters into their own hands and flew to Berlin to spend Thanksgiving with their top customers. Together, they worked on creating a brand new course to launch in December. Their efforts paid off, the crisis was averted, and their numbers continued to grow steadily.

All these amazing strategies led Teachable to eventually exit for upwards of 200M$ to Hotmart in 2020.

This was one of the greatest startups we wrote about to date; the quantity and quality of knowledge we individually gained from it was just priceless. Here are a couple of the best tweets by Ankur:

Really excited to see his build in public journey on his current venture of Ocho. A great initiative for business people. Ocho in a single line is “Personal finance, engineered for business owners.”

That’s all for today. This edition took us about 21 hours of effort. If you think your friends or colleagues would like this, please share this link with them. Thanks for reading and don’t be shy to leave a comment if you have any. Also, please consider following us on Twitter (Keval Jagani, Meet Shukla) and sharing this blog post.