Sefunmi Osinaike: Learnings from Building a Fast-Growing Edtech Startup

Hello, hello everyone. Happy Monday. I hope you're all having a great start of the week. It's nighttime over here. Let me know where you're based out of so we get to, you know, know the time right, the time over there, right? So we have a super exciting Monday session for you today. We have Safoumi with us who's the founder of Co-Lab, which is a product management education platform. Sefumi can probably explain it way better than I can. He's been a product management professional and now he's focusing on helping other people get there, right? So without further ado, Akshay, could you bring up Sefumi?

Hello everyone. Nice to meet you. Hi. How are you?

Awesome, awesome having you, Sefoumi.

Yeah, thank you so much. First of all, can you hear me okay? I just want to make sure that my sound, my audio and video is coming in perfectly.

Yep, perfect. Yeah, so before I hand over the stage to Sefoumi, just some housekeeping rules. If you guys have a question, we have a Q&A button on the right side of your screen. Use that button to send in all your questions. We'll answer them right at the end once Safoumi is done with this presentation. And right after the event, we have a networking lounge that you guys probably saw when you were entering the event. So you guys can stay back, talk to each other. The FI team will be here. If Safoumi has time, he might be here as well. So that should be fun. I have a poll here that I wanted to run. So Safoumi, so that you kind of get a good idea of the type of audience we have here. Right, so let me just share that poll. So yeah, so the question is, what is the biggest challenge you face when it comes to growth? You guys can vote by clicking on your screen. The first option, acquiring new customers, retaining existing customers, scaling operations, access to funding for expansion. Okay, cool. So yeah, we have people voting in. So can you see the screen?

Yeah, I can see the screen perfectly.

Okay, okay. So it seems like most of our audience— and most of our audience, it tends to be early, early stage founders or aspiring founders. Um, yeah, so they seem to have some trouble with acquiring new customers. So hopefully can help you, you know, address some of those issues with his presentation. I won't take up much more time. I'm going to close the poll now and I am going to go backstage. Sefumi, the stage is all yours.

Cool. Awesome. Well, hello everyone. First of all, I'd like to say thank you once again for taking the time to join me here today. My name is Sefumi Ashinaike. I do have a presentation for you, but I'd like to keep things casual. I don't want to make things super formal. I'm like very approachable, so I don't want it to seem like I'm talking at you. So if you have questions, feel free to put it in the chat. I would like check occasionally after I share specific sections, and if there's anything else I think I need to touch on that, I'll do that in the upcoming sessions of the presentation. So I'm gonna start sharing my screen now and then we'll start the presentation. And again, thank you so much for the opportunity, Founder Institute. I'm super excited to be here. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I believe that my LinkedIn was already dropped in the chat, but I'll also drop it again in case anyone wants to DM me, you know, follow up with me if there's any specific questions that you might have about like what I do or specific questions. So feel free to just like connect with me and then we'll sort of like take it from there. So I'll just put that in the chat and then I will start sharing my screen and then we'll take it from there. I hope you all can still see me. And hear me clearly. I feel like the video is a bit choppy for me, but hopefully for everyone else it's good. Cool. So I'm going to share my screen. All right. Can everyone see my screen? I'll just wait for people. Okay, cool. There's thumbs up. Nice. Oh, I love the emoji reaction. So thank you everyone. Great to see that everyone can see my screen. So now I'm going to be sharing a little Learnings from building a fast-growing edtech startup. So I'm one of the co-founders of CoLab, and I'll explain what that is in a second. So my name is Shifumi Oshinaike, and yeah, I'm very excited to be here and just like share some of my learnings to you, and I hope it's very helpful for you in your journey. I do coach founders on the side, so this— I'm sharing some of the learnings that I've shared with them. So hopefully this is like very valuable. Who's talking to you? Like, why am I qualified to be able to speak to you here? So a little bit about me. I have background in electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada. So I studied electrical engineering thinking I was going to go into power and alternative energy. But while I was in the university, I really got fascinated by all the things that were happening in Silicon Valley where young people like myself at that time were like building companies without any permission. This was like right around when Dropbox just first came out. And I thought Dropbox was like one of the most fascinating products ever because it was just so, it felt like magic to me. And for me, I really wanted to be a founder that can build products that can help solve problems. So while I was in the university, I decided to try my own startup. So this is the first logo that you see here, that teal color is my first ever startup or first ever attempt at a startup. So it was a time management tool for students to improve and enhance their productivity. Unfortunately, it didn't work out, but I learned a lot by trying to build a product and go from zero to one in a product. So we actually ended up building the iOS app and an Android app, an application for students. We released it, but not only do we have problems with customer acquisition, which it seems like a lot of founders have that trouble right now, there wasn't any clear monetization path and it wasn't really resonating with people. So after like 5 or 6 months, we pretty much shut it down. But I pretty much took all my learnings from that experience and I used it to try and build my career in product management. So I realized that by being a founder and by building stuff and working with engineers, you actually gain a lot of skills to sorry, excuse me, understand problem solving and understand how to work with cross-functional teams to deliver value. So, excuse me, apologies for that. I don't know, something just got stuck in my throat. So I literally took my talents to the Bay Area. So I worked at Microsoft and I worked at Apple in product roles and just really learned to build my product skills like in more build my product skills to be able to understand how do you build products at scale that impacts like many people? How do you think about the product principles that drive some of the best products that people use? So I got a lot of my training there, headed back to Canada to take my talents to a company called Ecobee where I spent 2 years working on smart thermostats. So Ecobee is a Nest competitor. So I was working on the thermostat product. I was the software lead for that. So I was able to build out amazing, impressive features that we could be competitive. Then back to the Bay Area again, spent a year at a CRM company called Copper. And then that's when I started thinking about like, you know, maybe it's time to get back out there and do my own thing again. So I then in 2020, I did launch a book. I wrote a book called How to Product. So it was essentially a collection of stories on how to transition into product management from outside the industry. If anyone is interested in reading that, feel free. Feel free to let me know and I'll work with Founders Institute and hook you all up with like a coupon code that you can get the ebook free. Also built other products on the side just to just like keep up with my product skills. So that's like a product called Wins. That's on the iOS App Store. But now I spend majority of my time with CoLab and essentially CoLab, we're an online school that helps mid-career transitioners to be able to upskill so they can transition into the tech industry specifically around product management. My co-founder and I were recently listed Forbes 30 Under 30 last— what, this year, for the work that we're doing at Co-Lab. So that's a little bit about me and my background. So, you know, even from when I was in university, I'd always had that itch to scratch as it relates to entrepreneurship. And now I'm on my third year going into my fourth year while being a founder at Co-Lab, and we're doing amazing, impressive things. I'm happy to share some of my learnings from there. So in terms of like what Co-Lab does in terms of our impact, so since 2020, we've actually trained over 900 career transitioners or students, or we call them collaborators in over 50 countries. Because we're a virtual program, because we're a virtual school, it allows us to be able to scale. Majority of our customers are based in North America, but we've actually been able to impact people, you know, in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, uh, Asia as well. Um, so we're getting towards like a 1,000-student milestone, so we're very excited about that. And our program has a 95% completion rate. So this is one of the things that we're very intentional about in the beginning, I'll sort of like show you how we were able to accomplish that. And it's important that when people learn with us, we want them to take it seriously because we all know about people trying out Udemy courses and not finishing them and it not just being engaging enough. So we decided to design an experience around what people actually need to do. So that's one of the reasons why we have a high completion rate, something that we watch very closely. We do have some cohorts where we actually have 100% completion rates, which is very impressive. But it's one of the things that we really focus on, especially with the work that we do. Our career advancement rates up until 2022 was around 80% of folks who landed jobs or promotions within 6 months of completing our program. We now have alumni that are now at top tech companies and are fast-growing startups across the globe. So this is just a little bit about the work that we're doing in terms of like, you know, why, where we exist, why we do the things that we do. And I'll sort of like share ways that we're able to get to, where we are today. And when it comes to edtech, so there are different kinds of edtech companies. So I just want to just clarify what angle we are in. So we're not a platform, we're not a software-based company. We don't build products, right? We're more of a services-based company that uses products or uses tools or uses like what tech enabled to fuel some of the things that we do, right? So it's different if you're like building a platform for students to be able to learn and building an LMS So building for all the people. So just, I just wanted to just like set that expectation so that you take some of the learnings that are applicable to the kind of business or the kind of startup that you want to run. Cause the things that work for us doesn't necessarily mean that it will work for you. So I just wanted to just like throw that out there to just make sure that, you know, you're taking the things that are very applicable, although some of the foundations and the core principles that we use can be applied in a bunch of different startups and different fields. So definitely just wanted to call that out. So let's start with, you know, if you're an aspiring entrepreneur, how do you make things that people want, right? I think you need to start from the bare bones, and before coming up with whatever business plan or whatever exit plan that you might have, or whatever reason that you want to be able to create a company, you need to be able to start with solving a problem for someone. And I think this seems very counterintuitive that I have to even have the slide, But I think the more, the more I coach entrepreneurs and the more that I speak to entrepreneurs, I realize how many people lead with their solution instead of even thinking about if they solve a problem. I saw a stat recently, um, whereby a particular company like analyzed over 100 startups, and half of the reasons why most of them failed was that there was no market and there was no real problem for them to solve. So I see a lot of entrepreneurs who literally just have an idea and they just go straight to building ideas, just go straight to is saying, do you know what, I'm going to build this idea for someone, and then I'll figure it out. And then they spend a year, 2 years, 3 years working on a problem. And, you know, lo and behold, no one cares about their problem. They can't monetize it, they can't stay in business, they have to close down. So for whatever it is that you want to do, you need to be able to start by solving a problem for someone and just start with one person. That person could be you, it could be somebody else, it could be someone close to you, it could be, you know, other people that you're familiar with, ultimately you want to make sure that you're able to validate it with one person before even going through the process of building. So now I wanted to tell you more about, you know, the process that I use. So this is like very common product development framework or even just like a startup framework for how do you go from one end to another end. And I like to think about things in phases. So each of these circles that you see are in phases. So if you want to make something people want, it's almost a long cycle, like Like I said, I'm 3 years in and I'm still going through this process over and over and over again and iterating continuously. And the first thing is the idea phase. So when you're in your idea phase, again, a lot of entrepreneurs, you all are here because you have an idea that you feel can be valuable. You have an idea that you feel like you want to bring to market. You have an idea that you feel like will create a profitable company or be able to impact people. And then what do you do in that phase? And I think it's important for you to try your best to understand the problem. Who does it happen to? How does it happen? How frequently does it happen? And really spending enough time on this idea and think phase. So you can actually even bucket some of these phases. Like when you're in this idea and think phase, you want to be able to do a lot more user research, exploratory research, generative research, whereby you're just looking at the space, right? And I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs always ignore this step because it's not fun. It's not fun looking at competitors. It's not fun getting heartbroken when you realize that there's another company doing exactly what you're doing. And then you're like, oh, should you really do this? You know, so when you lead with that, you're already thinking about the solution. Again, going back to when I say idea, I don't mean like, oh, you want to build X, right? It's like, hey, what problem do you want to solve, right? And for us, and I'll explain what our problem was, it was like, hey, people wanted experience. So the idea and the think phase, you need to be able to spend as much time here as possible. There's this quote by Einstein. He says, if I had 1 hour to solve a problem, I'll spend 50 I'll spend 55 minutes trying to understand the problem and I'll spend 5 minutes working on the solution. But I think a lot of founders are very solution-led because they think in terms of outcomes, in terms of what people do, in terms of what people experience. So the idea and think phase, I want to encourage you to not build anything, don't buy any domains, don't try to develop your curriculum or develop your product. What you want to do is talk to customers. You want to spend time talking to as many customers as possible, spend time validating your idea, spend time identifying what risks you have, spend time understanding whatever assumptions that you might have about the space. So in this phase, you're really trying to gather as much insights as possible by trying to figure out what signals are there before you even move forward. So I encourage you to spend like a couple weeks, maybe even a couple months really in this idea and think phase before you even like make any progress. This is where you just sort of like thinking about it. And fun fact, you know, with terms of Co-Lab, we started thinking about, you know, what it would be back in 2018, but it wasn't until 2020 that we started. And I'm not saying use 2 years to think about your idea, but ultimately you want to be able to spend enough time thinking about what it is that you want to do. In our own case, you know, we're a bit scared and frightened to be able to do the work, to be able to get to where we wanted to go to. But I do think that really spending enough time, maybe a couple weeks or a month in that idea and thinking phase will be extremely valuable for you. Next, you then want to go into what I like to call the explore phase, right? So for every given problem, there are possible multiple solutions. So there is no one solution that is going to win. There are different variations in terms of the solutions. So you want to be able to explore what solution can actually fit the problem that isn't necessarily identical to what's already out there. But even if it's identical, but certain people don't have access, how can you bring that and give that access to people? So different ways to think about the explore phase. It doesn't have to something totally net new or something totally innovative. Ultimately, what you want to do is be able to pair possible solutions and possible outcomes to the exact problem that people are solving. And again, the rule of thumb here is I think you need to be able to think that as many people have this, many people can actually use this solution, many people have this problem, so you need to be able to tie that solution in there. So with the idea, think, and explore phrase, that's what I like to coined like the problem space. You want to spend as much time in the problem space as possible before you go into the solution space. So the solution space is where you then go into like building and you want to launch that. And then between building and launching, you want to be able to iterate that over and over and over and over and over again as much as possible. And then you can then deal with growth. So I'll talk about each and every one of these phases and then we'll sort of like take it from there. But again, the reason why I also spend the majority of the time in the idea thing and explore phase is because that is going to save you a lot of headache when you're moving forward in the journey. So this is how you want to make things people want. If you're an entrepreneur, please use this framework or use this process and internalize this as ways that you can actually make sure that you're going to be successful in the future. So essentially, there's the industry's catch-22. The tech industry has a catch-22 whereby you need experience on the job, but you don't have the experience to land that job, right? So people tell you that, oh, you know what, we can't hire you because you need more experience, right? And it's like, hey, how will I get experience if I don't have the job? So a lot of people find themselves in that cycle, especially career transitioners. Like, let's say you were in sales for, you know, 5 years and 6 years, and now you want to transition into product management. You have 5 years of sales, but you don't have the product management experience. So what do you then do? If you tell a hiring manager, they'll be like, ah, you should just remain in sales, but how do you even like get the job if somebody doesn't believe that you can be a possible product manager, even though you feel like you have the right set of skills? So we looked at this catch-22. We really studied how people have overcome this catch-22. This was also a problem that I experienced when I wanted to be a product manager, right? I wanted to be a product manager. I didn't know how to, I needed to get experience somehow. So you need to figure out, we need to break down what does experience look like? What are people looking for in experience? So we spoke to 100 aspiring product managers to understand their pain points. We spoke to another 100 product managers who got a job who didn't have experience before and tried to understand what exactly they did. We then spoke to another 100 hiring managers to understand what experiences would they look like. Again, these are 300 different customers, 300 people that you are trying to understand. And this is even before building anything, because again, like I said, you wanna get as many insights as possible. And I know as I'm seeing this, this might seem like, wow, this is so much work. Why don't I just like build it and see if people will like it? And yes, there are ways that you can do that, but sometimes building can take a long time. And I can also share ways that you can actually bypass that quickly if you're interested. So yeah, feel free to, if you have any questions, put it in the Q&A and then we'll, we'll talk, we'll talk through that. So again, we wanted to really solve that problem. And as we were speaking to each and every customer segment, we're, we're getting valuable feedback, valuable insights. And what we realized is the way people were learning was very far away from the on-the-job expectations. Hiring managers wanted people who had had experience working with developers and designers. 'Cause majority of the product management roles, especially early on, were execution-based. So they wanted to know that if they've worked with engineers or not, it wasn't about how many case studies that they've done, how many product management books that they've read, how many certificates that they've done. So that was the key there. And one of the things that we found with the aspiring product manager, that they couldn't find ways to be able to create that experience. So we're like, okay, is there an opportunity for us to be niche and create and solve this problem one way or another? So we looked at all the things that were out there, you know, like all the MOOCs, all the cohort-based courses, and nothing really spoke to us as like a viable solution that could really help solve this problem. So we now have this hypothesis that if we simulated what it feels like for people to be able to work in a product management role, that could actually count as an experience for hiring managers to be able to make a bet on these aspiring product managers. So we had this hypothesis of, you know, if we put the product manager, take a product manager who wants to break into the industry and give them UX designer, give them developers, give them mentors, and build something together, put them in a team to be able to build something together in a short amount of time that can— that counts as experience on the resume so that hiring managers can, um, take a chance on them. So while thinking about this, we're like, okay, cool, who does this relate to most? So we felt like, okay, related to aspiring product managers, so etc., etc. Um, after validating it with those those 3 functions. So next thing, what we did is how I then ended up validating Colab. And I think this is an important lesson for you all today if you want to validate whatever problem, whatever idea that you have. So this is without building anything. So what I did was I sent an email to people. So I had an email list, thankfully, um, or if you have like a group, or, uh, if you're in a group or a community with your target customers, or your hypothesized type customers, you want to be able to like send them communications and interact with them as much as possible. So again, the idea and think phase, you want to make sure that you're talking to customers as much as possible. So I sent them an email. In the email, I invited them to a webinar, and in that webinar I was talking about like some of the riskiest assumptions that I had around like what I just showed you in the previous slide of, hey, do they want to work with engineers? Do they want to work designers, they don't want to work with, you know, developers and mentors. So I kind of like put that outline there. And in the webinar, I was talking similar to this session. I was talking about, hey, this is what we're going to— this is what we're going to do. You're going to learn all these things during this program, etc., etc. And after that, after the webinar, I told them to pay. Actually, I was like, hey, if you're interested in this, you know, here's the link, sign up, right? And this was my— while doing this, I was thinking like, hey, you know, if this is a big enough problem that people have, people will pay for it, right? So I made that bet, and after the session, we actually had one person who paid for it. So that was like a good signal. So I did this process again, and then we had more and more people. So the first time that I validated this problem, um, we had 9 paying customers before any of this existed, before we even had an idea where to even find the where to find the developers and how to even build a curriculum. But for us, that was a big signal, huge signal that, hey, we're onto something and we believe that we can solve this catch-22. And our ideal customers had that feeling and had that conviction that that catch-22 could actually be resolved. So that's also one of the ways that you can also think about, you can be creative in terms of how can you find ways to solve your customer's problem before your product exist. So lesson 1 here— so I wanted to just give you that background. The first lesson that I want to share in terms of whatever it is they want to do to build your, uh, your, your edtech startup or whatever startup is know who your ideal customer is. It's very important to know who's your customer, who's going to pay you, what are the other stakeholders, because this is very important. I'll tell you, I like all the process that we went through to be able to make this happen. So a lot of times when I ask entrepreneurs, who's your customer? Most times I hear people say this, you know, a lot of founders that I coach actually say this, they're like, oh, I'm building this for everyone, you know, everyone is going to be able to benefit from this tool, everyone's going to be able to benefit from this customer, from this product that I'm building, from this solution. I want you to avoid this as much as possible, like you cannot be building products that Not everyone, even everyone in your target market is going to use, right? You can also say, hey, this is a $50 billion market. If you get 1%, we're going to make this. Like that, there's so many assumptions and there's so many gaps there. So avoid thinking that you can build something for everyone. Ideally, you want to get to the place in a couple years where you find product-market fit. This is when you find a group that really needs that problem solved. This is when you factor into the market. So it's not just the product anymore. Is not the market. So people who have purchasing ability and whatnot, but ideally you need to be able to start with a niche. You need to niche down and be as specific as possible before you grow. Because if you think about the products that supposedly in today's world are built for everyone, let's take the Facebooks of the world. They started somewhere. They started with Harvard college students. So they didn't just start with all college, they started with students in Harvard, then they went to other colleges And then as the product continued to grow, it's like, okay, when people graduate from college, they're going to take them to the workplace. People who are about to go to college are excited about this, so they were able to like grow into that. So, but initially they didn't try to build for everyone at the same time. Like, it's so interesting because like recently I heard about a product that helps people who are dieting for keto, and that product makes $7 million a year, right? You can see how niche-specific that is, just like helping people who are trying to do a keto diet. So if you niche down and be specific versus like, oh, I want to help everyone, you know, diet better— again, this is different from edtech, but I want you to think about if you're niched down and be specific, you can easily target the right amount, uh, the right kinds of people. So in terms of defining your customers, so there's this like thing that I like to show, like how you can think about niching down. So let's say like you're building for college students, right, or working professionals, or athletes. This is a good way to define customers, like, you know, college students, but I think it's still broad, right? One of the things that I coach founders on is like, hey, you need to be more specific. You can't just think that, oh, you're gonna aim all college students, you're gonna target all college students immediately for your V1. A better way to approach this is, for example, for the college student students, example, you might want to be as specific as targeting PhD students who are working on their final thesis. It's almost like you can imagine exactly who you're going to talk to, who you're going to reach out to, who you're looking for. So the more you niche down, the better it is. So let's say you want working professionals. That is too broad. You want to be as specific as saying you want mid-career sales professionals who are working on B2B SaaS products. So with this, you can almost think about about doing a query and finding those people and talking to them and seeing if they actually have the problem, number one. Number two, they care about the problem being solved. Can they pay for a potential solution? Are they in the market for a potential solution? So, that's also one of the things that you need to do. Lastly, let's say you're targeting athletes. You might want to be more granular, more niche to say, hey, football players recovering from a knee injury, right? So, then you can then, again, do a query, reach out to those people and actually speak it takes them. Again, the person you start with doesn't mean like that is going to be the person that's going to give you product-market fit, but you need to be able to start there, start with some of the power users, people who like experiencing your problems significantly, and then sort of like go from there. So one thing that I really truly want you to do and take away as a founder is be as specific as possible while defining who your customers are. How do we find our ideal customers? So initially, initial targets were, because I talked about what we do initially, and I was like, aspiring product managers, right? It's not bad. It's like, okay, it's niche enough because we're not just saying, you know, working professionals, we're saying aspiring product managers, right? So we've narrowed it down into one discipline and we're focused on aspiring product managers. But the reason why this wasn't enough, and this is what we started with back in 2020, But we realized that if you see just aspiring product managers, someone can tell you they're aspiring product managers, but they're aspiring to be a product manager in 3 years or in 5 years. So they're not ready today. So if you start targeting them and you're like, you know, why aren't these people— these people said they're aspiring product managers, why don't they want to take my course? Why don't they want to take my program? Well, it's really not very painful to them. So it took us a while to really be able to like think about like, hey, is this what we should be targeting? We then went one level deeper. We then refined that target into aspiring product managers who were unable to land job interviews due to no or low experience. So this then implies that our target customers must have been so interested in product management that they've applied to a job. And not only have they applied to a job, they've gotten that feedback that they don't have experience. So it's painful for them. They're thinking about it. They want to solve that problem because they don't want to be told that Hey, you don't have experience, or this is the reasons why, you know, it's very painful for them. It's occurring maybe frequently, and then they're thinking about it as top of mind. They want to solve that problem. So this was when we refined it, we're able to grow significantly more because that way, this is where we're able to then double the amount of students that we were acquiring because the messaging is more focused. Whenever you're on sales calls or whenever you're on admission calls, It's very clear exactly what the problem is. We tell them, ask them, hey, tell us about your last interview. Have you been applying? Guess what you've been hearing? This is what you're hearing from. And then they resonate with that story more because they're actually living it, that they're actually going through it right now. So it's important to redefine it, refine it. But even this refined target isn't as perfect enough because I think there are ways that we can actually move forward. And I'll share that in the upcoming slides. And this is also another realization that The problems that you want to solve, you can't just think about the problems in isolation. You need to be able to think about it as it relates to customers and the customers that those problems impact. And not all customers are the right set of customers that you need to start with. Now, not all customers are the ones that you should go after. You need to be able to go after customers whereby the problems are very painful, it's excruciating for them, almost like they're begging for a solution. So it's in that intersection that you really find you really find a lot of like value in. So definitely like think about problems, but not just ignore the customer, continue working with Italian customer until you can move forward. So, so my lessons here again, number one, you need to be as granular and as specific when defining your customer. I need to be a painkiller, not a vitamin, right? For the people who want to be product managers in 5 years, you know, our product is kind of like a vitamin. It doesn't, they don't, they don't care about it right now, it's not top of mind for them. But you want to be a painkiller, you want to focus on, you know, the top problems and charge for your solution as soon as possible. Again, those people who paid for our solution initially, those are the people who had that problem and it was like, it was top of mind for them. And next thing, you want to be able to go after frequently occurring problems because there's no worse feeling than trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist, or you're trying to convince people that they have that problem. Because the person who wants to be an aspiring product manager, who's an aspiring product manager, wants to be a product manager in 5 years, it's hard to convince them that, hey, you know, you're gonna have this problem later on once you want to apply, so start this process early. This is like, hey, they're not even there yet, so maybe you can create an offer for them that, you know, doesn't necessarily mean that they have to like pay anything, but like they're sort of like keeping you top of mind. So those are some of the top lessons here for sure. Next thing I also want to talk about Now, once you think about customers and their problems, next thing that I do not want you all to ignore is market and opportunities, right? Because this is where value is created. Because you could have customers who have problems, but those customers might not have the purchasing power, and they admit it's a problem, but they can't afford your solution, or they can't afford a solution that would be good for them. So that's where you need to be able to tie into a product. This is what product-market fit is. It's not to say that you build a bad solution, right? Or you don't have the right customers. Sometimes those are the wrong customers. You need to be able to find that amazing intersection whereby people are actually able to pay for it. So now I wanted to bring back the slide again and talk about, hey, when we were thinking about our ideal customers, number one, getting the initial target. Aspiring product managers. We talked about the refined target, um, APMs. But now one of the things that we realized is like, yes, sure, we, you know, doubled number of students were able to enroll because of now targeted, targeted messaging. But one thing that we then realized is like we were then attracting people who simply just wanted a job, right? And when people who just, I just, they just want a job, then you then start to find customers who don't have the project in power because they are currently unemployed. Yes, they're experiencing this problem, but they are not able to pay for it. So this is when there's now friction between like, they tell you that, hey, they are your customer and you've experienced this problem, but now they can't pay. So like, are they really your customer? Are they really a potential customer? Especially when you have like a high-ticket item like ours where you're like, hey, you can't really make it for free, you know, for them, or there's no other way that you can like serve them as a customer. So you now have to start thinking about the market. So we went back to the drawing board, start thinking about, hey, how can we target people who also are in the slide that I mentioned, the whole like, um, customer problems on markets, because like that is also very important. So once we refine it, we then went into our ideal targets, which is aspiring product managers who were already in a tech and who are looking to better prepare for the role by filling their knowledge gaps, right? So this is a better customer segment. Again, this is the first lesson and trust me, if you spend time defining your customer, it will save you a lot of stress moving forward because you wouldn't be trying to serve the wrong people. So this final target is, it implies that they already have jobs, implies that they care about product manager and they don't just care about just landing job, they care about succeeding in the role, right? So, and that is better for us, it's better for the service that we provide, it's also better for the even current state of affairs, 'cause again, not everyone is getting jobs right now. So if you just like promise jobs and whatnot, like you might struggle a little bit 'cause then you're fighting against the market, right? Versus, hey, someone who just wants to make sure that their confidence, wants to make sure that they have all the skills, they wanna fill that knowledge gap. That is sort of like what we care about. So finding your ideal customers might take a while. And again, each of these, we spent a whole year going from one to the other. So it's one of those things you might have to continue to work on. So the second lesson that I want to share, I know we've talked about, you know, how challenging it is to acquire customers and where do you find your customers and whatnot. Finding customers is one thing, but also like finding ways to continue to grow is another. So going back to this diagram that I shared, so once you have a potential solution and you built it out and you're launching, you want to make sure that you're iterating as much as possible. And for us, like we obsess over iterating, we obsess over doing, doing as much work as we can to make the product very good, to make the program very good. And to continue to make sure that we continue to spread that amazing word of mouth. So first lesson here, keep iterating. Well, we've done over 20 cohorts, and I kid you not when I say no two cohorts have been the same, right? So we deal with people, we deal with like, um, individuals, and we always try to make sure that everyone has a one-on-one experience, and every cohort brings something new, something valuable, something that we've taken the feedback, taking that feedback, and we've iterated and we've tried to make it better over and over and over again so that we can be better for our next set of customers. So number one, keep iterating. I keep thinking about what ways can you get back to delivering value to your customers, because again, you want to make sure that your customers are top of mind and you're doing whatever you can to serve them. So One of the ways that we've been able to allow and to grow the way that we've grown is, you know, going back to this lesson, is like figuring out what's your flywheel. And our flywheel for us is actually our word of mouth. So one channel that we've used very well is LinkedIn. So we've used LinkedIn to be able to grow our customer base and our student base because we have students who are constantly advocating and constantly excited about the work that we do and the work that they're doing. So if anyone who's familiar with Colab, you regularly see our students building in public, students like sharing their weekly learnings and even posting badges like this online to show that they've been part of our program. This has actually enabled us create a flywheel that creates, you know, a lot of exclusivity, hype, and just like interest around the things that we're doing. Because each of these people have their own network. And as they're talking about the things that they're learning, how they're growing, it actually spreads the word for us. And, you know, if they're having a good time, people in their network might be interested and they wanna be, they wanna also learn. They might also want to try and, uh, transition into product management. So it's something that they would want to take moving forward. So that's also one, one thing that we've been able to do, and we've been doing this since our very first cohort where people are able to like talk about the work that they're doing and just continue to, to like spread the word. We have those people and they also are our advocates. They regularly talk about the things that they're doing at Kolar, talk about the students, they showcase the myths that they face, the challenges that they also face as being a mentor So the lesson here is like figure out what is your flywheel, and this is an organic flywheel by the way. You wanna make sure that it's organic. It doesn't cost you that much money besides time, 'cause early on you might not have enough money for ads or, you know, spending money with influencers and whatnot. You wanna make sure that you are able to curate an experience that can generate hype, generates interest so that people are, excited about the things that you do. So this is one of the ways I've been able to like actually continue to grow month over month because of how excited people are. And then they see these mentors and they're like, oh, I really wanna work with this mentor. That allows people to come into our program. Last lesson that I want to share before we open it up for Q&A and also the last portion is operational efficiency. So this is one of the things that startups do not prioritize early on because, you know, they're constantly iterating, you're constantly learning, you're constantly running experiments. But how do you focus and prioritize repeatability? Because in order for you to do things, you want to make sure that if you're doing something new, the second time you do things, it's better for you, etc., etc. So one thing I wanted to talk about is is operational efficiency, because I think that's something that has allowed us to grow and scale as much as, as much as possible. Again, going back to this diagram, you know, you build, launch, iterate, you do that as many times that you want to grow. And growth can also mean number of students, number of customers, even the team members that you add. So as we even grow our team members, you want to make sure that as you onboard new team members, there is something that can make sure that they are successful while we're trying to navigate and figure out, you know, are there other initiatives and how to go through the cycle again if you want to create new programs, you want to create new products. So it's one of the things that we prioritize and something that I always encourage the founders that I coach to prioritize very early on, like around like the 1-year mark, you want to start thinking about how can you make things repeatable. So this is like a diagram that, you know, we created this this, I think, 2 years ago, um, or like a year and a half ago, when we started thinking about our core systems, right? Uh, and it's changed over time, so this is like an old one, and we've iterated from this. And this is just essentially mapping out what are the things— how does your product work, right? So this could be a software product, it could be a services product, it could be hardware or whatever. We want to be able to think about like, how do people, how do customers flow through experience, what are the things that they do, where do they spend majority of the time, what is spending you the most time, what is costing you the most money, what is the biggest headache, what can you automate, you know, what tools can you use to augment this experience. So we started defining our systems very early on. It's like, hey, we wanted to know what recruitment looked like, what does onboarding look like, what does the team match algorithm look like, you know, if you want to monitor their progress, what does that engine look like, what is the core learning experience, How do we support them post-program? How do we support them during the program? So each of these systems, ideally you need one person in each of these systems, but you're a startup, you can't, you can't do that early on. So you wanna be able to think about, okay, how do you make sure that these things are solid, these things are bulletproof, and you can make as much progress as you want. So one of the things that we have looked into to solve this problem is Playbooks. Playbooks, right? For every single system that we have, we have a playbook for how to run, how to engage, how to make things happen. So we have for each of our programs, there's a playbook for each of our huge disciplines. Like for operations, we have an operations playbook, we have a marketing playbook, we have a sales playbook. So as founders, it's very— you're like, ah, I don't need to think about this, it doesn't matter to me, I just to focus on building. No, because, you know, building is great, but once you build, you have to maintain, and then you have to then figure out, you know, how does this tie into everything. Stuff is not documented. If you have somebody leave, how do you figure out how to keep engaging them? Uh, so it's, it's very tough when you, when, when you're doing all the things. So one of the things that we like to do is we like to document and write down as much of the process that that we have. So building playbooks has allowed us to be able to move faster, onboard faster, and allow us to learn very quickly and iterate from there. So it's one of the underrated tools that you can actually use. And I always encourage people like, hey, you don't have to— it doesn't have to be perfect the first time around. You need to like build it as you go along. And then that will be incredibly helpful. So some of the key learnings I want to share, just like wrapping this up before we go into the Q&A because I want to make sure like I give like ample time, like 15 minutes for the Q&A before going into the breakout and the networking. Number 1, remain customer obsessed. Keep talking to your customers. I know a lot of founders who don't even interact with their customers. Like I try to speak to an aspiring customer, customer every given week because it's important for you to maintain that relationship with them. You need to keep innovating and just keep iterating and innovating because you want to make sure that you're solving your customer's problem and you're doing things that makes them excited and actually solves a problem. Early on, you want to perfect one distribution channel. So whatever is your strength, it doesn't have to be, you know, organic. It could be, you know, it can be other forms of digital marketing. Ultimately, it can be content, So just perfect one channel very well and then work towards repeatability because in that way you can actually continue to do the things that you want to do easily and more easily. So for every founder, French, aspiring entrepreneur out there, let's get ready to build. It's very important. Excited for every, everyone's journey. And again, like I said, like regularly coach founders and it's just very inspiring to to see how they're able to overcome some of the challenges that they face as they're building their next product. So if you'd like to connect with me, this is my email if you ever wanted to email me, although I just have my LinkedIn, I'll post that in the chat again if anyone wants to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have. Otherwise, yeah, I wanted to open it up for Q&A. And then we'll sort of like take it from there.

Awesome, thank you, Sifu. Yeah, absolutely love that. I love the presentation. It's a lot of learnings that we also as a business, you know, have picked up, and it's also a lot of learnings that we kind of impart to people who also participate in our programs, right? So it's really cool to see a lot of the things that we see every single day. So Safoumi, what I'll do is that I'll bring up the questions on stage, right? We have a couple of really interesting questions. Some have a ton of upvotes too. So yeah, guys, you probably, yeah, you're already using the emojis. So show Safoumi some love. I think this was a pretty great presentation. Let's give him some thumbs up, hearts. Let's go, let's go. Awesome, awesome. So yeah, let's kick off the Q&A. Uh, so the first question here is from Kaya, right? Uh, her question is, hello, I'm working on implementing a paid model for my startup. How did you come up with the numbers with how much you charge for your services? This is, I think, a pretty important part of building your product pricing.

Yeah, uh, great question, Kaya, and best of luck. And it's great to see that like you're implementing a paid model for your startup. So the answer I'm going to give is this might be counterintuitive or maybe not helpful, but there is actually no right way to price your product ultimately. So every founder that I speak to has a different answer. So number one, the way I like to think about it is, first of all, you need to be aware about what are your competitors charging, right? So across the board, What are the things that your competitors are charging? So that gives you an incentive. One thing that we do on our part is that we actually write down how much does it cost us, number one, how much value do we think we're providing, right? So let's say it costs you $5, right, to create, but you feel like you're giving them $20 worth of value. It doesn't mean that they'll pay $20 worth of value, right? So you need to be able to understand between that $5 and that $20, what makes sense for you and what makes sense for your business. Some people might just like fix it at 10 or fix it at 15, right? You also don't want to be too different from what your competitors are out there because like people will look at competitors and be like, oh, one competitor is charging 5, one competitor is free, why is Kaya charging 15? But if you can, as long as you can explain why it's 15, I tend to see that customers will still be able to understand. And that goes with like being able to understand that value that you're giving to your customers. So once that value is clear, that helps you communicate like, hey, why is it $20? Like, 'cause you almost want to treat it, give it to them like they're getting a bargain for what you're doing. 'Cause you're like, hey, I'm giving you $20 worth of value for $15 or for $10. For them, they're like, wow, this is worth so much more. It makes sense for me to be able to spend $10 right now. So I think it's like a combination of those things. So to summarize, understand what your competitors are doing, understand how much it costs you and your business, so understand what your cost to serve is, and then think about the value that you're providing and try and find like a midpoint. And something that you can always like change and iterate over and over again. But great question. Oh, you're on mute, Danielle.

Can you hear me now?

Yeah, I can hear you.

Yeah, yeah, virtual session, what are you gonna do, right? So yeah, we have a pretty interesting question from you, right? So this is more so about team building. How did you find and build your team when you got the idea? How did you talk to— how did you talk them into it?

What are the type of expertise you look for in your team to make it come true? Amazing question. So whether it's finding a team or finding a co-founder or finding a team, it's always very interesting and it has its challenges. So one thing I always advise entrepreneurs to do, like as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, co-founder, you always need to be scouting. You always need to keep your eyes open. Like finding talent is your job at some point in the process. It's going to early on and later on, it's going to be your job to to find talent. But how do you know what you're looking for? And how do you know what you need? So if you do a great job at understanding what problem you're solving, and if you have realized what potential solutions look like, there might be gaps in your knowledge. So you want to find people that will complement you in some of those things. So for example, let's say you're not great at sales, you want to be able to like get someone— if it's a very sales-heavy job, you want to be able to find who's good at sales and try to do whatever you can to convince that person to join your team and lead sales. If you're technical, or if you're non-technical and need someone technical, it's a no-brainer to be able to find like a technical co-founder or technical teammates. Being able to just understand, like, think about it as a matrix, like, okay, to create startup X, you need sales, marketing, customer support, tech, you know, data, And you need to figure out what skills you have. I mean, maybe you might be good at all of those things, but you can't possibly find time to do them. So you need to prioritize what is important, what skills do you need, and then you then start looking through, through, through doing that. So I think that's what, uh, I realized that like, hey, for me, um, I started with like, hey, what do I need to make this work? And I was like, what don't I have time to do? Or what, what can't I do very well? And I started reaching out people. That's how I found my co-founder, and that's how we found other people. Or you might even get to the place where you've done a job, you've done it to the best of your abilities, and now you want to focus on something else. So in my case, I was leading ops for like a year and a half, and we got it to like an amazing state, and I was like, okay, I want to start focused on— I was focused on like building additional product lines, and I can't do that while doing ops. So now you just hire someone to take over that you train them. So it really depends where you're at in the process, but ultimately you need to start from like, what are you looking for? What do you want? What don't you want to do anymore? And then you start looking for those people, whether it's like you keep your eyes open on LinkedIn or Twitter, if you hang out on Twitter and you're like, oh, people are building in public and you see something, always reach out to people, grab coffee, see if they're interested. You don't necessarily need to tell them to like join your company immediately. You can just start of like small conversations or small projects and then take it from there. Hopefully that was helpful.

Yeah, so one of the things that you kind of touched on in your answer was finding a co-founder. So I kind of want to expand on this question and ask, um, what are good traits for someone to have for them to realistically become a co-founder, right? Because we have a lot of aspiring founders over here, who are at the moment solo, but we always advise that, you know, when you're building something, you need to look for a co-founder. The startup journey is a tough journey. So yeah, what advice would you have, like, just expanding on this answer?

Yeah, I agree. I think plus one on that. Like, building a startup is definitely a lonely and scary journey, so you don't want to do it alone. So finding a co-founder is very important. I think the most important thing to find in a co-founder is someone who has the same values as you and has the same vision and mission, and they're aligned. Alignment is the biggest thing you can possibly have. So alignment is number one. After you figure out alignment, then you want to figure out, like, do they complement you? Do they have the skills? Are they going to be an extension of you, or are they going to be totally different from you? Are they going to own those things? And then you need to also think about the ability, like, do they have the ability? Do they have the drive? 'Cause some people might have the same values as you, they have the skills, but they don't have the abilities. If like, if they're not, maybe you're an early stage startup that you need to grind, you need to work 15, 16 hours a day and they just only wanna work like 8 hours a day, there might be a mismatch there. So I think it goes back to like, yeah, values, mission, vision. But yes, I would plus one recommend having a, Yeah, having a co-founder for sure.

Yeah, so like one of the places that you can find a co-founder is always online. Like Sefumi said, you know, be active on social media, look for people who are interested in what you do. There are also events like within your local ecosystem. We also run a ton of events for where you can, you know, connect with people, find co-founders and stuff, right? So thank you for that.

That answer.

So, okay, I'll do 2 more questions because I realize we're reaching top of the hour. So yeah, let's— this is more so related to Colab, and I think this was pretty interesting. So the question is, did you test and iterate the Colab curriculum product before scaling it, and how so?

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Um, so we had a test cohort, and where we got a lot of feedback, where we had like a small group of people who was giving us feedback on like the information and like how the structure of the information, et cetera. And then every cohort, at the end of every cohort, we get feedback, um, what's the, like the things that work, things that don't work, which is why we change it every time. We've iterated over 20 times. Like no two cohorts are the same. Literally before this call, I was having a meeting of like something else that we're going to change again because you learn and you need to grow with the times. So we test, we iterate it, we iterate, we even test different versions of it sometimes during the program whereby, you know, someone is getting like one, one kind of curriculum, the other person is getting another kind. So you can A/B test things like that and see which teams or which individuals do better. And that gives us like signals as to like, hey, how can we make things clearer? So we always need to do that. We, we test, you know, in cohorts and sometimes before we roll it out and we test one idea for one cohort, that cohort becomes the guinea pig and then we sort of like roll it out. But before we do, we always have like a test, like a small group of people, we have beta testers and then we continue from there.

Right, awesome. Uh, so what we'll do is we'll take one last question and You kind of touched upon this during your presentation as well, but like maybe you could add a bit more to it. So the question is, and it's from Roman, to identify a niche, probably we need to talk to customers or can we maybe research this somehow? We have an answer that we give at FI, but I'll kind of let you start.

Yeah, talking to customers is always a good idea and I would always recommend talking to customers. You never get— like, you need to build that relationship. It's one of the most important things you can do as an early-stage founder. But you can also research as well, but it needs to be paired with— I don't— I've never seen a successful startup built without talking to customers where it's just research. So actually, there is one called Calendly. If you read the story about Calendly, he didn't talk to customers as much. He mostly did research. But that is an anomaly. Majority of founders will tell you that they talk to their customers as much as possible. So that's where I'll lean towards. Um, yeah, that's where I'll lean towards. Yeah, let's keep it short and simple.

Yeah, so for us at FI, it's absolutely the same thing. You have to talk to your customers and you have to keep talking to your customers because the truth is you're solving for a problem.

Right?

Your customers don't necessarily want what you're building, they want a solution to their problem. And to understand that problem and to build for it, you need to be, you know, constantly talking to your customers, right? Yeah, yeah. So awesome. Um, with that, we're, you know, 2 minutes away from the hour mark. Uh, Safumi, thank you so much for taking out the time to, uh, be here, given that really, really awesome presentation. Guys, all of Sefumi's information is in the chat. We'll also be sending you an email with the recording of this session as well as some resources that Sefumi might have for you. Sefumi, thank you so much and thank you everyone for joining.

Of course. Yeah, and if I wasn't able to answer your question, feel free to ping me on LinkedIn and then happy to like answer the questions there. But yeah, thank you so much, F.I., for having me. Having me. And yeah, see you all next, in the next one.

Awesome. Have a good Monday, guys.