Ankur Nagpal — How To Launch Your Own Profitable Online Course

This is an intro, intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy, my.

Boy, Matt Wolf, Joe Fear.

Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

Yo.

My name is Matt Wolfe and I'm here with Joe Fear. This is Joe Fear, and today this is an interview that I was actually pretty excited about doing. This is the founder of a tool that we use every single day in our business.

Yes. It's called Teachable, and it's amazing. We've used it for probably over two years at this point, and this is our first chance actually sitting down with Angkor Nagpal. He's the founder of Teachable, and he's. He's got a cool backstory. He's taken this thing from literally a side project with a buddy of his in doing products, creating products and stuff, and he just wanted to create a better solution for housing your content, selling your content and all that. And now he's literally gone to what, startup kind of land in Silicon Valley and it's blowing up and. And this is a cool interview. He tells you the backstory and how to actually create courses with it and you can actually profit quite a bit. I mean, this is what we do.

Yeah. And also we're going to be doing a free workshop with him, which we'll give more details on the call about that workshop and it should be linked in the show notes. But yeah, we're going to talk about startup culture and we're going to talk about creating products on this call, so enjoy.

All right. Encore. How you doing, man? Thanks for coming on, man.

I.

Excited to be here.

Awesome. Yeah, I think we've been using your platform, I don't know, a year or two now.

Couple years.

Yeah, a couple years at least. Yeah. Teachable. And I think we've been like the biggest evangelist in our groups.

Yeah. Glad. I think it was Naveed that connected us. Glad to be connected.

Awesome. Yeah, I mean, with Teachable, we've definitely been using it for about two years and we're actually kind of bummed out that we just now learned there's an affiliate program because we've literally been telling everybody about Teachable. So we love the platform and we're really excited to dive in with you today and talk about the platform, some ideas you have about creating content for the platform and marketing and just we're going to go all over the place and have some fun, I think. Awesome.

Let's do this.

Let's kick it off with just getting a little bit of your Backstory and how you kind of came into Teachable and doing all this stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. So at this point, we're in our fourth year, which feels like forever, but, yeah, Teachable started honestly, it was a side project. Me and a buddy of mine, we were teaching courses ourselves. We had a couple of courses on Udemy, and it was enough to see the power of online courses. Like, we're like, wow, you know, like, this is the future. But it was really, really frustrating to find an easy solution to sell courses. You know, you kind of had two alternatives. You had marketplaces like Udemy and skillshare that had the simplicity, but you can't build a business when you don't own your audience. That was really frustrating. On the other hand, you had the option of finding 25 WordPress plugins, tying them all together, and praying to dear God that nothing breaks. So those were the two alternatives. So Start, you know, built this initially as just a small side project for myself and my buddy. And no, we sold a few courses on it, and then we're like, wow, you know, there's something here. And little by little, day by day, offered it a few more people. Now here we are three and a half years later.

What kind of courses were you selling? I'm just kind of curious.

Yeah, absolutely. In retrospect, they weren't very good courses.

It was basically around the premise of growth marketing. In a past life, I spent a lot of time building Facebook applications and just, like, consulting companies on how to, you know, optimize for growth. Growth for mobile apps. Yeah, the courses were growth mobile apps growth or Facebook apps, and just, like, things you could, like looking at onboarding flows. Just very, very much in the realm of growth marketing.

Gotcha. Nice. Yeah. And we have a ton of experience with that whole cluster web of WordPress plugins. Like you said, it's kind of funny because we did.

Cluster web is definitely a euphemism.

Something like that just made it up.

Yeah. Okay. So one of the things that we're not super familiar with, we've never really. We were in this world for a little bit, but for a very short amount of time is this sort of startup world, the startup culture, venture capitalists, angel investors, that kind of stuff. So we're really curious to hear what that process was like for you when you had the idea for Teachable. The whole funding process and just that whole world is sort of nothing we know much about. So we're curious about how that whole thing worked for you.

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I should preface this With I was very, very fortunate because for me, it was a world that while I had not been a direct part of before, like this is the first time running a venture backed company. It's the first time running a business as a business in the past. So right from when I was in college, by setting my sophomore year in college, I started building Facebook apps. But I went to school at UC Berkeley, which is right around Silicon Valley. But during that time period between the age of 18 to 20, I got to know a lot of people in and around Silicon Valley. So that was kind of almost a bit of an unfair advantage I had when it came time to fundraise, because the first thing I did was took a flight to San Francisco, emailed 20 of my friends, asking them who should I talk to and kind of short circuited the process of raising money by virtue of connections I had before.

Nice.

So that definitely helped a lot just being able to go to people that were friends of mine that are now either investors or friends of investors and using that network. But yeah, it was a really cool experience. Got to learn a ton. Not just about raising money, but it also, like you learned so much about the right narrative by which to talk about the business, by having a lot of meetings and realizing like, oh, this exact same product can be pitched in like six different ways. But guess what, number five works so much better than the others.

That makes sense. Yeah, that's interesting. We had kind of a short glimpse of time in the startup culture doing. We had, like you said, a bunch of meetings, we had investors and all that stuff and we learned to pitch it a lot better. I think. I guess our issue was the way to scale quickly and kind of make decisions on the fly. Rather it's now it's a decision by a committee, more or less.

That was our experience in the startup world, was there was so many voices involved that anytime we wanted to make updates to the platform we were working on at the time, there was 12 voices that all had opinions on it. That slowed down the process. Have you had to deal with that at all?

Voices like as in the investors.

We had investors. There was actually about what, five partners and then a few investors. So, you know, we had a. It wasn't just like Joe and I were the founders. We actually had five founders who all had a voice.

And then we added.

Right from the outset, I mean, I have at one point the partner that had the course with me, he was part of the team as a co founder for about the first two years or so. But even then I mean, I was the majority founder, he was a minority co founder. So decision making was always easy in a way that, of course, we talked about everything. It's a collaborative environment, but it was very clear where the decisions were made. When it comes to investors, we've been very fortunate in the sense that our fundraising has been on very, very good terms. But, I mean, we control a majority of common stocks and we control our board majority. So we keep our investors informed with everything we do, but we don't need their permission for anything. We don't need to, like, get their sign off on anything.

Right, right.

Unless it's something major like we're going to sell the company.

Yeah. So I think our problem was we just had things structured wrong from the beginning.

Yeah, sounds like it. So, yeah, it's a.

It's a completely different topic. But I've actually, like, I think at conferences, I've actually talked about ways of optimizing fundraising in a way to have the best of both worlds, which is being able to have capital to move fast, but also structure things in where you're not giving up control too early in the game. And in my mind, you know, basically have both, like, you know, like a lot of people think having investors comes with a loss of freedom. I think there's a way of structuring fundraising where that's not true at all.

That makes sense. That's good feedback.

Now, if you had any advice for someone who's thinking about, you know, going and trying to get some venture capital or getting some angel capital, what sort of advice would you give? People.

Start building relationships early. I can't remember. Some vc, maybe it was Mark's sister. Someone said they like to invest in lines, not dots. What that means is if someone. If you were to meet someone today and you were to meet them again three months from now and they're able to see progress a little bit further, you were to meet them again nine months after that and you've progressed further. At this point, they aren't investing in you with one data point, they're investing with you. If you were to draw a line between every time they've seen you, like the trajectory. So when you know someone over a period of time and you can see the trajectory by which they're progressing, it makes you much more likely to invest in them, it makes you much more likely to raise capital. And in that way, so many people that end up investing this company are relationships I've had for, you know, anywhere from 1, 2, 3, 5, sometimes 7 years. So you Know, just starting early, even if it's not directly for the purpose of raising money, is really, really important. But on a local basis, like, say you want to raise money today, what I would recommend is even when you have, say, meet someone and it's not a yes right now, to always think of it as a not now versus a no. And one of the easiest. I have one really simple thing I tell founders trying to raise money that are kind of in the process is like, just start sending either maybe bi weekly initially, but later on a monthly update with your progress to anyone, including people that have said no to you, just because if you're progressing, they're like seeing the momentum. And very often they could come in at a later point.

Yeah, I'm sure with those updates, they're gonna be like, man, I kind of wish I was in a little earlier.

Yep.

Something else that's pretty underrated is just like regular, reliable communication will already, like, you know, be a very, very positive thing. Like, there's a lot of investors that complain they invest in companies and kind of hear from them on an ad hoc basis.

Right.

If you have some kind of discipline around it and you're like, okay, you know, I'm going to email everyone on the 1st and 15th of every month. And you actually do that. Like that in itself puts you above a lot of the lot of the competition.

That's good feedback too. Yeah. And that goes. We're just working with clients. I know. We've learned that lesson many times. So now that you've gone kind of past this, I wouldn't. You're still in the startup phase, I would imagine, but not doing your own, you know, work by yourself without investors. What does your day to day look like now? Running teachable.

Oh, man, about roughly 25% of time hiring. So either I'm very involved in direct hiring if it's a pretty senior role, but even otherwise, for almost every role, I am the final interview, which very often is not really vetting, but it's more selling, especially sometimes. It's a super competitive candidate, lots of companies trying to close them. It's really me being at the candidate's beck and call, doing whatever it takes to convince them to work here. That whole hiring stuff is about 25% of my time. Roughly half my time is supporting my functional team leads. So right now, most departments, finance people, customer operations, growth product and engineering reported to me. So working with each of the functional leaders to unblock them or help them however I can, you know, can be lots of different ways and the last 25% of my time is dealing with shit shows like, just like bad shit.

I thought we were going to be part of that. No, I'm just kidding.

Having to deal with damn podcasts all the time.

Yeah.

No, but the other 25% is just like the unexpected stuff, like the bad stuff, the conflicts when, you know, things don't go as planned, when people don't get along.

That kind of stuff.

So it sounds like you basically transition more to a leader. You're visionary, you're selling the vision of the company. I'm sure you have a roadmap.

I can't remember who. Someone. I kind of have tried to simplify my job. Someone says a CEO's role is at the end of the day, three things really. One is like you're always. One is setting the long term vision for what the company and product is like the. Not the day to day, like what should color should the sidebar be? But really, like, what are we trying to do? The second thing is selling.

Right?

You're selling, you're always selling the company to investors, to potential employees. At no point am I going to get past selling to potential large customers. That always remains a part of it. And the third thing is ensuring we don't run out of money. So those are kind of the three. If I were to simplify my job into three things, I think it's those three things.

Very cool. Yeah, that makes sense. So I guess now let's transition into. Because we have a bunch of people that always ask about Teachable, what makes it different than the rest of the platforms out there? You guys are completely unique compared to almost all of the platforms out there, which is great. But what are some things that you can do? Or basically, how does Teachable improve upon the other platforms out there in the marketplace right now?

Yeah, we kind of already alluded to it with the whole WordPress plug in hell.

But I kind of want to give people who might not have heard of Teachable kind of, you know, what your take is on it.

Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of things we've focused really hard on we're going to continue to focus on is one is just the idea of design. And I think simplicity is a part of it here too. But really like, you know, we're in 2017 now. Most websites are beautiful. Most cores, a lot of cores, hosting websites are still ugly as sin. So really trying to, you know, be able to one make it easy for someone to build something beautiful really, really easily, really, really simply like, you know, be Able to have like a really good experience for their students. That has always been a big focus. That's continuing to be a big focus is like, how can we help people make beautiful courses, beautiful websites, beautiful learning experiences? And, you know, simplicity was phase one. Phase two, which we've put a lot of the building blocks into, is how configurable it is. So right now we allow someone to go in, if they are so inclined to go into the markup and almost rewrite all the HTML themselves if they want to. What we're missing, that's going to be, I guess, like the next phase is like building a layer of abstraction in between so.

They can not just like pick the colors and fonts and so forth or dive into the markup. There's an in between where they can choose from a lot of different themes and so forth again to customize and configure. So that's, that's, that's one very big focus. The second big focus for us is E Commerce. Like at the end of the day, we are E commerce for information, right? We help people sell courses and all of that. So that's been a huge, huge focus for us. So right now, for instance, we're processing roughly $10 million every month. So it's something because of all the data we have, we're constantly optimizing checkout flows. Like a lot of the features we've been focusing on, right from, you know, allowing people to have one click upsell, allowing people to charge in 100 different currencies, allowing people to sell courses, one offer as a bundle, allowing them to have affiliates, allowing them to have authors, allowing them to have, you know, breakup courses into payment plans, allowing them to have monthly memberships, annual memberships. Like there's so much E commerce stuff happening behind the scenes that we work on really, really hard. Because very often doing that right means like, there's a direct increase in the amount of revenue our customers make.

Yeah, that's really interesting you say that too. Because when people have asked me about teachable and what it is, my best sort of comparison that I've given people is I've always told them teachable is to info products what Shopify is to physical products. And that's kind of how I've always compared it. So it sounds like you're kind of spot on with the way we've always perceived it. So that's pretty cool.

And in time we'd like to kind of expand that. Right now it's information products, but really we want to in the future Be a vehicle for any kind of expertise you might have. I mean, right now, the operative word is courses, but really it's just a form of expertise. And we want it to be the go to place to sell anything that you, you know, create with your brain. It's a product for your mind as opposed to a physical good.

And that's kind of like Udemy. That's. And that was, you know, because Matt and I, like I was saying, we. We have a few products on there and kind of toyed around with that. But yeah, it does have that feel. So, you know, the listeners, if you're familiar with Udemy, it's honestly, the translation is almost seamless in the environment, and it gives you a lot of fun.

You get to keep more money.

Yeah, you keep more money. And with teachable, you could, if you wanted to, essentially create your own Udemy with your own sort of repertoire of courses.

Exactly.

So very cool. Actually, we want to shift gears a little bit and actually talk about the processes and the ideas you have for people who actually want to create courses. So let's start from the beginning. And if. How would you. What sort of feedback would you give someone who doesn't quite have an idea for a course yet? How would you give them, you know, some ideas on how to go about starting down in a business model of, you know, creating info courses? But maybe they don't necessarily know what to create a course on yet.

Yep.

I mean, so I think, yeah, we preach this on our webinars all the time, but one is kind of defining what a course really is. And for a lot of people, they think a course is a collection of videos, a collection of information, a collection of material. I mean, we want to reframe that and think about every course as ultimately a transformation, ultimately an outcome for a student. So for us, like, if you want to kind of workshop a course idea, what we tell you is think about what is the strongest outcome a student could have or the strongest transformation a student could have, and then use that to pick your idea. So say, you know, your topic is, you know, exercise and fitness. We would push you to distill down exercise or fitness into one specific outcome someone gets. So maybe it is, you know, you're gonna help someone lose 10 pounds in 60 days. That's just one example. But then, okay, then that's what your course is. But really just like simplifying it to one thing and one thing only that people get out of the course. Because when you talk to students, you find that students aren't Necessarily buying the course. They're buying the outcome. Like, they're not buying. It's almost like one of those, you know, those cheesy, like, fitness products or whatever. There's a before and after picture.

Yeah, yeah.

People are buying the after picture. They don't care. Like, that's what they're buying. They're buying the vision of. They're not buying an iPhone programming course. They're buying the vision of them building their own apps. The small difference, but, like, when you. When you get that, everything kind of flows from there.

Interesting. Okay, yeah, and that's what. That's exactly what I was thinking is you always got to sell that outcome and make it. Make it feel like it's within reach as well. But obviously they don't know the process to get there.

Okay, cool. So once they have their idea for the course, how do you suggest people go about making it? Obviously teachable is the platform that they would go and put their content in. But what sort of tools, processes, what sort of things do you recommend people do to actually get the course created? Because a lot of people might have the idea for the course, but they don't know what that next step is to get it out of their brain and onto. Onto the Internet.

Again, this might sound a little counterintuitive, but if someone, for instance, has a course idea but no audience around it around the topic, we would recommend not building the course, building an audience around it, then building the course when you've got the audience. So that. The last thing I want is someone to basically have a course idea, go into months of producing a course, and then realizing no one buys it. So what we would tell people is one, if you already have an established audience, fine, you can go ahead and make a course. You'll be able to convert some of them all signals clear. Otherwise, we tell people, okay, fine.

Basically by either giving away free content or, you know, some other channel like that, think about how you're gonna build an audience for that course. Whether it's, you know, giving away, like, whether it's giving away free resources, whether it's going to some kind of a social channel, whatever it is, start building an audience around the course. And when you have the audience, then figure out, you know, then kind of create your course, sell it, and move from there.

Got it. And that kind of transitions to this question I've had in my mind now is, is how to best market your course. And obviously, having an audience, we all know you can hit the email list, you know, and all that, and it's a lot easier. But do you have any maybe tactics that you've seen work best that were absolutely blowing it up, you know, to sell a course or maybe even to grow that audience? I know you mentioned social and I.

Mean it's not sexy but like in terms of like, it's not like this one hidden trick that's going to help everyone, you know, like have a bigger course sale than ever. But the fundamentals are the same. You know, grow a targeted email list. Sell to your email list over a specific number of days, like when you get to a point where you've kind of mastered having launches and stuff, then you can figure out evergreen funnels and all of that. But in general, if you're just starting out, having a launch is the easiest and most successful way of optimizing your earnings. So email list have a launch over a specific time period. Make sure most people, what we find is if you're looking for like the one easy hack or whatever in order to make more money, most people are undercharging, especially for their first few courses.

That's true.

We've worked with people one on one. We've realized they can frequently double their price and make twice as much money. That's generally the one kind of quick thing a lot of people can do. Other quick things that we've seen people can do is.

One, by adding, by adding some kind of upsell that is related to getting one on one help or coaching or something. You can also generally change your average order price almost 2x to what it'd be, what it would be without that, which is another kind of quick thing you can do in order to optimize earnings. The other thing is the presence of more than one pricing option also improves conversion rates in a nice way. But none of this is a substitute to the hard work of, you know, building an email list and actually generating an audience that wants to. That's interested in your topic.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And we're big preachers of that as well. You know, we're big on content marketing. Create a bunch of content for free, put it out there to the world, prove your value to people, build the list in the process and then once you've built that list, people will be ready to buy from you. So, you know, we definitely preach very similar philosophies. One thing you did kind of touch on a second ago was pricing. And I do know that one of the things we get from a lot of our clients and a lot of our students of our courses is pricing products. Do you have any sort of formula or thought process that you recommend people use when they come up with the price for their course.

So in general, I really, really, really encourage people to Never charge under $100. It's very, very difficult to build a successful course business charging under $100. And I mean 99 is fine, but under 100, I mean, like, you know, like a $30 course.

Right?

Yeah.

Obviously there's exceptions, and if you want to create a tip, the problem. The thing is, if you're advanced enough where you know when to do the exception, that is fine. But in general, we recommend people to start at a minimum of $100. And if that makes them uncomfortable, I think you again, take your course back to the outcome, back to the transformation. Like, how can you make the transformation worth enough? And the other reason for charging more is we've seen with our data that people get better results. So you get better students, they report higher satisfaction ratings to actually consume more of the course. That's part of the issue I have with Udemy is it's race to the bottom, where most people aren't watching all the $10 courses.

Yeah, well, I mean, one of the. To be perfectly honest, the reason we stopped really doing anything on Udemy was they made it so the maximum price of Any product is $50, and we don't sell anything that low.

And it goes back to what you were saying about doubling your price. We actually recently did this. We doubled the price for some big masterclass that we sell. It was $500. We raised it to a thousand conversions stayed exactly the same. Yep.

So a lot of people find that. And I also like the idea of, like, especially if this is a flagship course that you keep developing every, every year, making it better. It's basically every time you sell the course, it's the cheapest it's going to be available for. So say you launch it at 99 or $199. Year one, year two, the same course as 299. Year three, the same course as 399 or 499. It kind of keeps linearly going up because it keeps getting better. But that way it's also a good incentive for people. Is like, look, if I'm buying it now, yes, it was more expensive than it was last year, but this is the cheapest it's ever going to be between now and infinity.

That makes sense. And it's good scarcity play too, when people see that rise. Now, I have a question. This reminded me of a really cool feature that teachable does have is you can actually see how people are progressing through your course and how much content they're actually going through. Do you have any tricks or strategies to actually get people to digest the course further?

I think again, I would generally think about what the outcome is and work it from there. I think a lot of people are index and I've done this too on the wrong things. Looking at the percentage of completion, for instance. And maybe it's our fault too because we surface those metrics, but I think very often that's not the that helpful if people actually reach the outcome. Like, I don't think it's necessary for someone to watch every video and I don't think it's realistic to expect someone to linearly watch and complete every video versus kind of skipping around to the things they think are most actionable and accordingly, you know, getting there. With that said, I do think like dumb, like not dumb, slightly silly, gimmicky things to incentivize completion have only shown to help.

Like giving incentives for hitting the goals. But I do think in general we as an industry, and I take responsibility too because we track a lot of like completion rates and so forth. But I think we as an industry should start measuring student success not by student watching video, but student achieving the outcome they set out to reach.

Right. That's good. And maybe it's a form of a quiz.

Potentially it's quiz honestly for now it might like there's. For most things, even though it's not great, there's no shortcut to like actually just serving people asking them two or three months after they bought like, hey, did you achieve these goals?

Yeah. No, I agree. Our biggest sort of goal with our courses is to collect as many testimonials as possible. So if we're collecting testimonials from people that have gotten results, then we know we're on the right path with.

Okay, I actually want to. I want to shift the focus back to teachable a little bit. And I'm not sure how much you're able to share with us or, you know, able to talk about. But we're curious if there's any sort of roadmap items that are in the works that people might be excited about or that you're excited about that you can actually talk about.

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, as I said, kind of some of the big focuses are. One is we want to be able to build some kind of a theme marketplace or way for people to dramatically change the visual appearance of their website. It's something we've been excited about for a while. We're working on it. Don't have an idea in terms of when it's coming because it's a pretty long significant project, but that's something we're super stoked about. Something else we're pretty excited about is again, well, I should caveat this. A lot of this sometimes is unexciting, but really the world of payments, right. And the reason I say some of it's unexciting is anytime you do payments, there's a large part of it that's fundamentally unsexy, like dealing with taxes, giant pain, but really important. But we're trying to see what we can do as a platform to offset some of the pain people are feeling with that. One of the ways we did that is we have to comply with EU's crazy tax laws, which is super unfun. But we by doing that, minimize other people's pain and kind of took on the pain ourselves. But with payments, there's a lot of that stuff that, you know, we want to focus on and we want to continue doing so we want to do that. The third thing we're working a lot on is we're trying to revamp the affiliate program that exists within Teachable so a lot of people can have affiliates for their courses. And it's a alright product, but I think it can be an exceptional product and that's something we're excited about and we'll hopefully have a lot more to share soon in terms of just being able to help you give your affiliates a better expanse. But longer term, I think we can actually end up with one helping you generate more affiliate sales. And down the line you're starting to think about can we actually help top courses find more affiliates? So lots of cool stuff coming.

Very cool. Yeah, no, that's exciting stuff. Okay, so next week actually, you and me, you, Joe, we're all going to do a free training for people. By the time this podcast episode actually goes live, the training will have already happened. But we're going to make sure that we make the replay available to anybody who's listening and wants to check that out. I just want to touch real quick before we start to sort of wrap up here on kind of teasing what's going to be in that training? A little bit. Yeah, absolutely.

So there's two things that this training is. It's kind of a hybrid of two different trainings in some ways. One is we're going to go through our like, like recommended gold standard process for Anyone to go from like zero to successful course. So it's seven steps. Like how you start by workshopping your course idea how you like. It's the exact steps like we talked a little bit about this today, but this is the webinars in a lot more detail. Starting with how do you actually come up with a profitable course idea? Followed by how you determine how you reverse calculate how many email subscribers you need to hit your launch goals to how you actually go about acquiring the subscribers, how you figure out pricing, how you record your course content and how you finally end up creating the technology and launching to them. That's kind of phase one of the webinar. Phase two is we're going to show you a couple of the brand new e commerce payment features that if implemented correctly in my mind can 1 get you more students and 2 increase the average order value pretty considerably. So I'm going to dive into those two features towards the end. But yeah, lots of cool stuff.

That sounds pretty awesome. It's like a masterclass in product creation and getting your thing up and live. Really?

Yeah.

It should be fun.

Cool. Yeah. I've yet to see one of these presentations so I'll be right there in it.

Yeah, this will be the first time that we're seeing it when we do it live too. So we're excited. And we've actually put together a little bit of a bonus package too for anybody who decides to get teachable through our link on this training. So that'll be pretty cool.

We're excited about that part of our framework. And I don't know if you know about this encore but people listening you might is we have this whole big framework, this kind of ecosystem of all of our systems and teachable's right there is that membership tool software. Everything pretty much feeds right into it and then out of it into spreadsheets and all these things so we can run everything right through it. So this is like the crux of anything.

I'm glad to hear that man.

Yeah, it's pretty rad.

Cool. So we've got a couple little wrap up questions that we like to ask everybody. The first one is do you have any book recommendations that you find yourself recommending often to people? It could be either about business or completely off topic. Doesn't matter to us. We're always looking for new book ideas.

Yeah. Over the last it's funny, over the last year since start 2016, I've kept a Google spreadsheet of every book I've read. I give my own rating and all that. Oh, that's cool. The only book that's been a 4.5 out of 5. I mean a pretty harsh reader has been Sapiens.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

So good. So good.

If I were. There's one book I recommend to people right now at this point it's Sapiens. So I recommend that because it's not really business related. It's more. Tries to be a. This is the one book to describe all of human history and where we're going. But definitely recommend it as my kind of top pick right now.

I know that's a beefy book. Would you recommend the audio version or the actual book itself?

I personally can't do audiobooks. I focus. I tried it so many times. I just like, my mind wanders.

I think that was my issue because I started the audiobook and I honestly got wandered. I wandered like you. I started walking around and not paying attention.

Yeah, I can't. I can't. And some people try doing it faster than normal, but then it feels like a stressful experience to me.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I read the old school way.

Don't rush the human experience. Human history. Cool. Sapiens is good though. No, it's really good. Yeah.

Yeah, I've had that on my Amazon wish list for about a year now, ever since I think Tim Ferriss might have mentioned it on one of his shows and I think it's time to pull the trigger on it. So. Okay, so after listening to this podcast, we definitely want people to go check out Tim Teachable. Check out the training that we did together. Is there anywhere else you'd want people to go? Is there any way people could connect with you or learn more from you other than the two things I just mentioned?

That's a lot of it. I have a horribly inactive Twitter account that's probably still the best. Getting in touch, which is my full name at Twitter. We're also teachable on Twitter, teachable on Instagram and all of that. But yeah, I think that's probably the best channels.

Right on. Cool. Well, thank you very much and definitely listeners. If you're not on the actual website, go there on our page in the show notes. You'll have a link to the replay for the live training. There are the free training. That is. And check it out. Reach out, get teachable. It's totally worth it. And I think there's even a free tier that you can kind of start with and dip your toe in the water. So very cool. All right, Encore. Thank you very much, man. Appreciate it.

Awesome. Thanks for having me, guys.

All right, talk soon. Hey, thank you, thank you, thank you for listening to this podcast. Now, if you want to learn more and hear from us every single month, which a lot of people do, it's pretty fun. We actually write this thing called the Evergreen Profits Letter, and that is a printed newsletter that we actually send to hundreds of people every single month to your doorstep. So you actually get it in the mail. You can read this sucker. You can highlight it, you can dog ear. You can scratch some stuff out. If you don't like that one, you say, no. Joe and Matt, that's not cool for me. But you can take a lot of different strategies, about 15 or so from every single single issue, and it's really cool. So basically, these are actionable strategies that you can use in your business right away to test out and pretty much build on what you already have going on. So check it out. It's at www.egpletter.com. it's pretty amazing, and you should go check it out, see what it's all about.

Boom.