Confronting Sam Ovens' 1st Hire On Why He Quit Consulting.com

As far as consulting, I think you stayed there for two years, right. What led to you leaving? Because it seems like you're having a really great time.

So I'm super passionate about what we were doing in consulting and the roadmap kind of shifted. What me and Sam originally wanted to do was build the company up to 50 million just with three course products like our. Yeah, three products doing 50 million, which is feasible. That would have happened. We were getting there like we were already running at 30 million. But then what we wanted to do was build tech, do kind of the Brunson model. And we were trying to determine what play that was going to be. And I was fighting for an LMS like a Kajabi or a teachable or something like that because I wanted to be able to sell to our students immediately. And are the consulting. When I say are, sometimes I just still think I'm at consulting. So just ignore that.

Totally can relate.

Right. So our LMS that we built in house is really, really cool and good and has a lot of features that Kajabi teachable other solutions don't have. So I was like, well, the code base needed reworked a bunch of other things, but that is a product I knew we already had product market fit for, and that's what I wanted to pursue. And that was going to be the idea for a while until Sam got The idea for School.com, which I linked you to, which is basically how he puts it on that splash page, is it's like Facebook groups, but better. And that's where the consulting communities are now. So all of them migrated off Facebook groups into Skool, which is Facebook groups, but with some of the functionality of like Quora, Reddit and some other really cool features that haven't launched yet, to my knowledge, with school, but are going to be really cool.

Is this kind of like a circle so type thing?

Yes, it is. It's like, you know, I'm not sure if the features are the same, but it's the same concept, is that the problem would be Facebook groups suck for putting your people in there. We have something and a core concept that, that we talked about early on for school that became the idea for school was that what's the best way to learn from someone and how do you know people in your community? How do you differentiate good advice from bad advice? When someone says in the Facebook group, and that is a bigger problem. The problem that Sam's going after is a bigger problem than the one I wanted to go after. Like, Sam's seen a billion dollar exit for school. If he does it right, potentially it's a social media network. It could be, if done right, some acquirer Facebook groups kind of killer. Right. And but if, if it doesn't, it's going to be hard. It's going to be hard to monetize it because a lot of people monetize social networks with ads. So I was, yeah, the philosopher and it was a hard call. I was like, I don't trust my ability as head of marketing, to be honest, to compete with those people. I've always done well in my career trying to be really, really good in industries where not that the people aren't as smart, but that it's really hard to compete with venture backed companies like that that have funding. We were bootstrapped. We were using consulting's money to build school and without investors or anything like that, I'm like, I don't know, like the team that Facebook hires is talented and we just didn't have the money to hire that talented team. Seems like Sam's doing it though because he was like, hey, he'll pretty much go bankrupt or broke trying to make school work. I know for a fact. I do too. I really respect it. That's the main reason I left and that's the main reason why I'm doing what I'm doing now. Because.