Founder Nick O'Brien Wants You To Build A Profitable Company From Day One
This interview with founder Nick O’Brien is part of the Leveraged Leaders interview series. The series introduces you to creators and entrepreneurs who are actively building digital businesses and sharing their stories to help you find actionable ideas to build leverage of your own.
My favorite takeaways from Nick are:
Building network effects in a peer-to-peer marketplace.
The myth of lifetime value.
The power of first-order profitability.
Nick O’Brien, CEO of TeachMe.To
1. 💼 Business
What do you spend most of your time working on? Content business? Software business? Service business? Tell readers what you're building and why.
I spend most of my time working on TeachMe.To, the beginner's lesson hub. Our app takes all the pain out of learning a new sport by helping beginners easily find and book a passionate coach to help them reach their goals.We are the easy way to learn to play.
I love working on problems at the intersection of bits and atoms. The software product we're building at TeachMe.To solves an important pain for people in their everyday lives. And it provides meaningful income to passionate players who want to teach others the sport they love.
We've built a national network of 1,000s coaches across the US teaching sports like golf, tennis, and pickleball. That's pretty cool, if you ask me.
2. 🔎 Niche
What niche are you in? How did you identify the problem in your niche that your business or content solves?
Our niche is hands-on learning. We identified the problem from experience trying to take local lessons. Finding and booking a local coach just sucked. The whole process was antiquated. Googling, comparing a bunch of indie websites, calling different coaches, and trying to figure out what was trustworthy and worth it. As a beginner, a convoluted purchasing journey is the last thing you need on top of an already-intimidating act. It was a niche begging for a modern booking experience. That's what we're solving for. TeachMe.To is a lesson hub for beginners that makes getting started easy.
3. 🛠️ Leverage
What's the highest-leveraged activity you do each day?
As a leader of a team of about 20 people, my job is all about leverage. The best thing I can do is obsess about making everyone around me faster and more productive. What I can do alone pales in comparison to what a motivated, effective team of 20 can do. I spend as much time as I can doing 1:1s and finding ways to accelerate and unblock my teammates.
4. 💻 ↔️ 🖥️ Network Effects
How do network effects play a role in your business or brand? How are you using them to grow?
As a peer-to-peer marketplace, we are a network-driven business. There are network effects on both the demand and supply side. On the demand side (students), network effects occur primarily in the form of word of mouth. One great lesson can lead to referring ten friends. We want to deliver the best experience in order to drive that demand-to-demand network effect.
On the supply side (coaches), network effects happen most often with coaches bringing new locations online. More location options creates more demand for lessons, because more people are likely to discover an available option. This is a supply-to-demand network effect.
There are also some awesome supply-to-demand and supply-to-supply loops we're seeing:
Supply-to-demand: Coaches are proud to be a "TeachMe.To Coach" and link to their profile on social media and their own personal websites. This drives demand back to us.
Supply-to-supply: Coaches often have friends with similar skillsets in other cities. They may not want to spark competition, but they're happy to share a great side hustle with friends (one of the "best" of 2023).
We incentivize all of these loops aggressively to make them spin faster.
Nick tightens up his golf game with a TeachMe.To coach.
5. 🧰 Tools
What's the one tool you can't live without in your business? It could be software, hardware - anything that's indispensable.
Slack. As a remote company, we live or die by our workspace. We've built our Slack into a veritable virtual office by taking a thoughtful, intentional approach to our culture and norms in Slack, as well as the organization of the workspace. Some tips:
1. Use channel folders.
2. Create a channel for every process step in the org. We have 10 product development channels that reflect each step of our development process, from idea to production. This allows for segmented, simultaneous communication organically.
3. Mute channels liberally, and focus on notifications for tags.
4. Be quick to huddle and slow to reply.
6. ∞ Limits
What are the limiting factors that keep your business or brand from growing as quickly as you want?
Marketplaces have an ebb and flow with regard to which side of the market is a bottleneck. Right now, we are demand constrained. We have more coach availability than student bookings. We're working hard to continue scaling our acquisition channels to put more pressure on supply expansion.
7. 📣 Call To Action
What's your main call to action and why have you chosen it?
TeachMe.To is “The Lesson Hub for Beginners.” We aren't trying to serve everyone — and that's on purpose. We believe that advanced players are already well served by existing solutions, but beginners are not. Being a beginner isn't easy. It's intimidating to learn something new, especially from a possibly patronizing stranger. Our network of Passionate Players is carefully cultivated to make TeachMe.To the easy way to learn how to play.
8. 💡 Advice
What piece of advice would you give aspiring creators or entrepreneurs about using the internet to scale their ideas and products?
Back to the old adage here, which I believe comes from Y Combinator, with a slight twist... make something people want... AND innovate on distribution! Our business isn't a revolutionary concept. Many people have tried and failed to build local lessons platforms. We're succeeding because we took a first-principles approach to the business model and go-to-market. I can't give away all our secrets, but I can tell you that I stole most of them by studying other great marketplace entrepreneurs. Podcasts are a great tool for this research.
I’m a big fan of Invest Like The Best, Tim Ferriss, Masters of Scale, Lenny's Podcast, and All-In. However, I'll often start by curating a list of entrepreneurs / businesses I want to learn from and searching for those names on Spotify.
9. 📉 Failures
What have you worked on in the past that has "failed" in your eyes? What did you learn from that experience that you're applying to your current project?
Learning from failures is one of the most crucial parts about building a business. I have failed as often as I have succeeded when building companies. I've learned to be stubborn and persistent when it comes to achieving a vision, while staying humble and open-minded about the details. It's hard to know exactly where your product will take you.
A TeachMe.To coach helps a student with their swing.
10. 🧐 Wisdom
What's the one thing you'd wish you'd known before you started building an internet business?
Lifetime value (LTV) is a myth in internet marketing. Assume your customers aren't going to stick around and focus on first-order profitability (contribution margin). This attitude will help you build a great, durable business.
I learned about this at my first startup, Alloi. One of our mistakes was over-indexing on growth and justifying it using future earnings. This is an unhealthy cycle for startups and constrains your cash on hand to invest in improving your product. And that's the most important thing: an incredible product. At TeachMe.To, we've maintained first-order profitability as we've scaled, enabling us to invest in our product without sacrificing runway.
11. 🪓 Hacks
What productivity hack do you swear by and why?
Minimize meetings for as long as you can. As Naval (Ravikant) says, they are the death of productivity. If you're a leader, you can only do this for so long. If you're an individual contributor, it's an amazing hack.
12. 📥 Stay In Touch
Keep up to date with Nick’s journey by:
Learning a new skill at TeachMe.To
Following him on Twitter @commute
And if YOU want to be featured as a Leveraged Leader, shoot me a note at Thomasw@wealest.com and tell me what you’re building.