Blake Nubar created Vizzy Guides, animated study aids that turn textbook material into picture-based memory tools. He and his partner dressed in a gorilla costume at a 3,000-student lecture hall, sold the guides for $5 each, and made $800 that first night, $5,000 over the semester.
Chapters
My business partner and I, we, we were experiencing this problem with, with school, right? And I think every student experiences it, and it's studying for exams sucks, right? And what you're constantly doing as a student is you're absorbing all this information, you're just cramming, hoping to get a good grade, regurgitate the information, and everything's over. So We actually were going through this process. We started drinking heavily one night and we're like, and we're all great ideas. Yeah. Yeah. We just were just like, man, like studying sucks. There's got to be a better way. So we created what we called a Vizi Guide. And instead of like studying all this crazy content that is like textbook stuff with all this, like we call it word vomit. Because if you ever studied like a bunch of study guides, it's just terrible. And we decided to turn those study guides into what we called Vizzy Guides, like visual guides. And it was just like mnemonic devices, like visual animations, like all this cool stuff. And when we were done, we sold them for $5, put them up on a WordPress site, and we were ready to go sell it. So we had this crazy idea because we were drinking heavily. We had this crazy idea to buy— I bought a gorilla suit and I jump in this gorilla suit. My business partner has a boombox and a hat on and we bombard this class at the college I was attending with like 3,000 students in it, and I just get in a gorilla suit and I'm holding the sign being like, hey, do you want a better grade on the next exam? He's got the boombox on. We have original footage of this. It's crazy. And next thing you know, we walk out, we go to the bar, we— because we were drinking, we continued our drinking. Like, man, did this thing work? Is this gonna make money? So we're at the bar, and after this entire gorilla suit stunt, we— my phone went off and it vibrated. We got like our first sale online for $5. And a few moments after that, a few more sales came in. Long story short, we made like $800 that night. We made like $5,000 that semester. And it kind of, you know, that's when the your mind was blown moment.
