Revolutionizing Learning and Overcoming Challenges – Tyler York of  Achievable

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hey there, entrepreneurs. My name is Sushant and welcome to Treptalks This is a show where I interview successful e-commerce entrepreneurs, business executives, and thought leaders, and ask them questions about their business stories, and also dive deep into some of the strategies and tactics that they have used to start and grow their businesses.

And today I’m really excited to welcome Tyler York to the show. Tyler is the founder and CEO of Achievable. Achievable is an online trust preparation platform that offers modern guided and personalized courses for various high stakes exams such as finra, SIE, and Series Exams, G-R-E-U-S-M-L-E, and others.

They emphasize delivering better results in less time and offer a past guarantee for certain exams. And today I’m going to ask Tyler a few questions about his entrepreneur journey. Some of the strategies and tech data he has used to start and grow his business. Now, before we dive into this interview, if you enjoy this kind of content, please make sure to hit the like and subscribe button.

And for more interviews like this, please visit us at treptalks.com And with that, Tyler, welcome and thank you so much for joining me through your trip talks. Really, really appreciate your time.

Track 1: Yeah,

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: thank you. Happy to be here. So your, uh, business achievable. It’s, uh, very interesting. It’s a test preparation platform.

Can you share a little bit about, about your story? What were you doing, uh, before you were, you started this, uh, when did you start and what kind of gave you the motivation and idea to start this test preparation business?

Tyler York of  Achievable: So before achievable, I mean, I guess sort of the origin story of both Achievable and then it also kind of covers our careers a little bit, um, was, um, me and my co-founder Justin Pincar, were roommates at college at Carnegie Mellon University.

Um, so he was studying human, uh, computer interaction, computer science, double major, uh, which is pretty tough to do. And I was not smart. I was in marketing. And so basically, um, you know, we. Actually started a couple of companies in college, didn’t really work out, but we always kept in touch and always knew what we wanted to start something together.

Um, but then we went off to have kind of our separate careers. Um, I did a, a number of early stage startups, mostly in the video game industry, uh, before ending up at a job at Glue Mobile, uh, which then was acquired by Electronic Arts. And so that was kind of my career path. I ended my career, uh, running the marketing for a game, a mobile game called Task Sports Baseball that I grew from, you know, well, me and the team, not just me by myself, uh, grew from, spent me four to $104 million in annual revenue in just three years.

So a very successful game. And, you know, managed basically all of the marketing operations for that game. Additionally, Justin, um, you know, he, after graduating college, uh, went to work at AdMob, which was then acquired by Google. While at AdMob, he helped run the mediation layer and scaled it up to over a billion impressions a day.

And it’s a big part of the reason of why AdMob got acquired. And then from there, after working at Google for a little while, he decided he really wanted to work on, have more impact in his day-to-day work. And so, uh, also wanted to work on education. So he became, I. One of the founding engineers and architects of multiple ed tech startups, um, before in 2015, um, he came to talk to me about working on a new idea that he had.

So, Justin, in addition to kind of all his other things that he does, was also, uh, learning Japanese. And while learning Japanese, he came across a learning method called Space Repetition, uh, which is a learning method based in the science of how memory works in the brain. It was actually originally discovered in the 18 hundreds by a psychologist named Bin House.

Uh, and essentially you can train your brain to memorize things. Um, it’s not so much like, oh, some people are better at remembering things than others. Like you can actually do this deliberately. Um, and so hardcore language learners, like people learning Japanese, um, use it as well as medical students and people that are trying to memorize a hundred thousand facts for jeopardy.

Track 1: Hmm.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Um, and so. The thought was basically that space repetition was this very powerful method. There are some free resources like on Key, which you know are great, but they’re not a vertically integrated test prep product where you can basically not even know that it’s there and it’s helping you learn and memorize all the material you need to know to pass these tests.

And so that was the idea for Achievable, and we got together to start the business in 2016.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So achievable. I mean, it’s very interesting, you know, you know, you’re mentioning spaced repetition. Um mm-hmm. Do you think all these tests that you’re preparing students for, that’s kind of the basic ingredient to be successful in those tests?

Or like you’re like there’s, there’s other things as well.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah. I mean, what I would say is that essentially. Almost every one of these high stakes tests from anything from the SAT all the way up to, again, like the finger exams or the medical licensing exams, they all require that you have to remember something.

Track 1: Hmm.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Right. And some that can be a mix of what we call trivia, which is just like, you know, what is the contribution limit of a Roth IRA? What is the maximum gift limit? You know, what laws apply to like the security sale? Or it could be things that are application based, like how to do an option straddle. I.

And in all instances, you have to remember how to do it right. You either have to remember the right answer, you have to remember the method for solving the problem. Um, and Space Fair Petition works equally well for both. And so that’s sort of at the core of our learning experience. We obviously provide a holistic learning experience.

You’ve got a great textbook, videos, we teach you everything just like you would in every other course, but the thing that we do differently that other people don’t really do. Um, is we also have these space repetition backed quizzes that are being algorithmically fed into your queue, depending on our estimate of your memory strength of the individual item.

And that is something that, um, sets us apart, I think, somewhere else with the competition.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So you’ve kind of taken the on key and integrated into your platform.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Essentially the same idea, obviously not the same platform ’cause we do not work with aki. Okay. Um, but it’s the same learning method, right? I mean, it’s, there’s nothing about the learning method that’s really copywritten or patentable.

Um, it’s something that you could go look up on Wikipedia and essentially, um, there’s multiple ways to implement it, right? Uh, the most common one is what’s called the lightener system. And so. You know, other people can do this too. Uh, but just it does take some technical knowhow and I think that’s a big part of why we haven’t seen it as much.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So on your website, I see a lot of courses and there’s a, uh, different instructors that have like different, um, hourly rates and things like this. Can you talk a little bit about how exactly it works? So somebody enrolls into a course and are they enrolling with a certain instructor or there, or a scientist instructor?

How exactly does it, uh, work?

Tyler York of  Achievable: The courses and then the tutor directory are two totally separate things. So every achievable course, there’s only one course. Um, generally speaking, what we do is we seek out the best authors that we can find in each area. A lot of times those are people that are tutors or people that were already published, authors for that course in the past, and then we contract them to develop the course with us.

Separately from that, the tutor directory is something that we provide as a free resource for all potential students. It’s free for the tutors and free for the students. It’s literally just anybody who wants to be listed there can be listed. I. And it’s a great way to figure out what tutors are available without having to sign up for some other competitors that will send you a lot of spam emails and just otherwise, uh, you know, they, they are usually taking a cut, right?

So they have different incentives. Our incentive is just to provide a good free resource for potential cut, uh, people that are potentially interested in the exam.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: What I’m understanding is you are just another school. You have different methodology of teaching, but you do have a lot of other competitors who teach or do preparation for these, uh, classes. Um, what is your business model? Is it, you know, when you create, uh, these courses you license, uh, I guess would it be called licensing the courses because it’s somebody created by someone else?

Um, and then you pay them every time a course is. Uh, purchased and you keep a certain portion of it. Is that kind of the business model for it?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah, I wouldn’t call it a license. I mean, we, we contract with authors to write the course material for us. Okay. And we have different payment arrangements for that.

Um, but essentially like in terms to answer sort of your original question, like. Functionally to the end user, we are gonna be very similar to a Kaplan or a Princeton Review or something like that. Um, the differences is, and sort of the things that have helped us win and be successful in these markets, um, is we have a really big emphasis on both strong customer experience and high course quality.

Um, and those are things that really have helped us grow a lot through word of mouth and just generally. Like doing right by the customer. For instance, A good example of this is like, we don’t charge subscriptions. We charge a one-time fee and you get a whole year of access, which is more than enough to prepare for any of these tests for the most part.

Um, and the reason for that is because most of the people preparing for these tests, so trying to get through it as quickly as they can, they don’t want to spend four months preparing for the GRE. They wanna spend two right. Or, and so if you are selling a subscription product, your financial incentive is to take longer, right?

Where the customer wants it to be shorter. But we try to always like align our interests with the customer in the way that we conduct our business. I think that is part of the reason why people really, uh, enjoyed working with us.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Now, this reminded me of. This language learning app, you know, given that you mentioned, uh, your friend was learning Japanese and things like this, uh, Duolingo, right?

Mm-hmm. And I, I believe mm-hmm. Isn’t, isn’t Duolingo like, uh, based on a similar kind of a methodology? Like they keep on feeding you like repetition and, you know, practice and things like this. Is that kind of the general idea here as well?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Probably. I’m sure they would think so.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah. Okay. Um, so when you started out, uh, when you were starting out this business, um, what kind of investment go into this?

I mean, given that it’s an online business, I mean, uh, I’m assuming there’s like the, the platform component of it just to get the platform started and then there would be some marketing to acquire customers mm-hmm. And so forth. Can you talk a little bit about the early days and, and what kinda kind of gave you the confidence that this will actually work?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah, so when we first got started, we took a look at, you know, probably about 50 to 60 different markets that we could potentially, that we felt like we’re going to be a good fit for the MVP of our platform. Um, and the big thing about it was the test needed to be high stakes. Like it needed to be something that people were really invested in because the biggest problem with space repetition.

Based language learning apps is that if you don’t show up, then it doesn’t work that well. Like you’ve gotta study in order to learn. I mean, it kind of obvious, but I mean, when you’re starting a business, you don’t wanna be starting a business in an area where your biggest challenge is just apathy.

Track 1: Hmm.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Right. You want people to be committed. So we were looking for something where people were committed, where there was a financial outcome attached to it, preferably. Um, and also where the existing competition was not very strong, especially not very strong technically, and had poor user experiences. Um, and then was something that we felt like we could get, you know, market penetration in.

Uh, and so through our research we found, uh, the fin our market, and at the time which 2016, it felt like a really good fit. Um, you know, finra, I’m not sure how familiar you are, but basically it’s very high stakes. Um, you, in order to sell securities AKA stocks in the United States, you need to be licensed.

Hmm. And if you fail your licensing test twice or three times, sometimes you generally lose your job. So imagine you finally get your big break, you got a job at Morgan Stanley, and you’re so excited, and then. You can’t pass this test that you didn’t even know existed until you got there.

Track 1: Mm-hmm.

Tyler York of  Achievable: And now you’re out of that job again and you’re back to, you know, hoping to get a job at in Salesforce or something, right?

Like mm-hmm. It’s, it’s very high stakes. And so we felt like that was a really good fit. Um, and then the competition at the time, you know, barely had mobile apps. Um, a lot of the competitors were very, you know, it’s an old industry. It’s like, you know, it’s a highly. It’s like a regulated industry in a lot of ways.

And, and so it’s a little bit slower moving. Um, and so that was where we decided to focus on and we originally set out by, you know, like creating the course and then doing a lot of just cold calling. Um, the nuance with the FINRA exams is that you need to be employed. In order to take them. You can’t just take the FINRA series seven off of the street.

Mm-hmm. You have to have a job at a FINRA registered firm. Um, and so therefore it meant that the only way we could go to market was B2B because we had to get into firms and then get those firms to trust us to help their reps get licensed. Um, and that was very, very challenging as a small startup selling, you know, something that’s.

Pretty important and, you know, potentially affects people’s careers to very large banks. Uh, that was a very challenging process to go through. Even so, we were still able to get three top wealth management firms as customers over our first two years. Um, and we ran controlled pilots with a couple of them.

We were able to show demonstrable e efficacy. The strength of space repetition and how it helped people remember the material and that became more pronounced as essentially their learning journey went on. So like the boost was, you know, smaller in week one, but by week eight it was very large. Um, but unfortunately it’s just, again, you know, we needed a large catalog of all these different FINRA tests, not just a series seven, in order to really make headway with these larger firms and actually replace.

The products that other people already were using. Um, so given that we actually, you know, with a little bit of good fortune, um, happened to be in the market at the time that this new exam called d Finra, SIE was announced, which stands for the Securities Industry’s Essentials exam.

Track 1: Hmm.

Tyler York of  Achievable: And that the purpose of this exam was that for the first time, anybody could come off the street and take it.

And the goal was so that. That whole exercise that I talked about earlier where you’re somebody that got a job at Morgan Stanley and you’re really excited, but then you have these tests you’ve never heard of and then you’re really bad at them and then you can’t pass ’em and you lose your job. Spinner was trying to solve that problem.

Um, so they made the new SIE, which is basically taking sort of the first half of the series seven and establishing like a common core curriculum. Um, that’s meant to be like the entry level test. And going and taking that and, um, making it so anybody could take it, which means that you can take this test before you get a job.

So then, you know, first off, if you even have the ability to pass these tests ’cause they are challenging. Um, but second off, it also is a way to pre-qualify yourself for employment, um, and put your resume ahead of the stack compared to everybody else’s. Um, so we said, you know, we’ve had so much trouble going B2B, I think we need to pivot the business to B2C and focus all, all of our efforts on this new test.

So that was what we did going into early 2019. We launched it March, 2019, um, and we also worked really hard on having really high quality content to go with it. Um, and it basically has done extremely well. Since then, our success with that FINRA SIE exam has allowed us to build a catalog of, you know, FINRA series 6, 7 63, 65, 66.

We’ve got series nine. We’ve got more on the way. And essentially now we are able to win the corporate deals that we weren’t able to win eight years ago, uh, because we have the catalog to support all of their needs. And so that’s been, you know, the FINRA side of our journey. In addition to that, we’ve also launched a lot of other tests, uh, including the GRE, uh, which has been very, a big part of our business as well.

Uh, the US I’m only step one, which is the first step to becoming a medical doctor in the us. Uh, we have an a CT course working on an SAT course, um, and a course for the new classic learning test. We’re one of the first providers for that. Um, and so we’re starting to diversify and broaden our portfolio a little bit.

Again, always kind of going back to our core principles of it needs to be a high stakes test that people are gonna be invested in working on. Um, it needs to be a strong outcome attached to it, and it needs to contain the type of material that are going, is going to work well with the digital training format.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: I would, but I would assume that there’s probably a, isn’t there Probably a much bigger market for. Courses of going from, let’s say, um, medical school entrance examinations, or, uh, I mean you already have the GRE, um, or even maybe, you know, high school. High school or grade 12, uh, you know, just science math courses, um, you know, people, tutors teaching them, uh.

I mean, there are, there are free resources like Khan Academy and, and so forth that, that have, that are covering that. But I would assume like there would still be a big demand for students who are looking for like that one-to-one kind of attention. Have you ever explored that kind of a model?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah, we’ve looked at it.

Um, our goal with Achievable is to build one very high quality course that everybody can use. Then, you know, if people are looking for additional help in the areas, we can connect them with tutors. But we’re not in the business of being a tutoring company. Um, those already exist. There’s a lot of challenges with those businesses, is a huge problem.

Getting people to, you know, use your platform instead of just pulling their customers off the platform and taking your commission away is a huge problem.

Track 1: Hmm.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Um, and so we’re not really interested in engaging with that. I think that we definitely, I mean certainly if people want tutors go to our website.

There’s a whole free director of tutors that you can look up and we encourage people to look at them ’cause there’s a lot of really good people in there. Um, but a lot of these people are independent businesses, right. And that seems to be kind of how that model works. Um, a lot of people I think, have tried to tackle that and haven’t really been successful.

Now, you know, lately there’s been multiple companies that have claimed to be AI tutors that have shown up. Um, so far what we’ve seen is that they have, they aren’t accurate enough, uh, to be a serious threat to professional tutors yet. Um, that could change in the future, but for now, um, you know, using an AI tutor is kind of like working off of a c student’s notes.

It’s better than nothing, but you probably wanna work off the A students’ notes.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, AI is getting good and I mean, I think if somebody has the will to learn, I think AI can be a great tutor. Like, uh, it can really accelerate, uh, someone’s learning. Um. I’m very curious to know, I mean, you said that at the beginning you tried getting into to sell B2B right?

And trying to get those customers. Mm-hmm. And it’s, it was challenging. I mean, this is, um, this is the experience of a lot of startups. Um, what, uh, can you share a little bit about, you know, what did you do that actually worked in the end? Like, was it really just a lot of networking goal? Outreach. How did you, I mean, it’s very difficult to convince a big company to work with a small startup.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah, so I mean, at the end of the day, what we didn’t, um, what we did that worked really well was we pivoted to a direct to consumer sales model, and we built a freemium product and we built a really, really high quality product. And at the end of the day, you can have the best quality product, but if you show up.

To a large company and you don’t check these boxes that they have for like SOC two compliance or what have you, then you’re not getting in no matter what. Like, it, it’s just they have certain needs that you can’t meet ’cause you’re too small really to logistically feasibly meet them.

Track 1: Hmm.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Um, so we went direct to consumer instead, and through that we were able to build.

A reputation in the consumer market, particularly, you know, in places like Reddit and elsewhere, people really, really like our courses and that created a bit of a snowball that has been growing, you know, has really led our growth ever since. Um, in addition to that, we also then were able to start winning business deals through bottom up sales.

Um, so you know, Tim Zang, the founder of Apollo, which is I think the best sales tool in the market, followed a similar approach where. They would basically win over individuals within large companies and then have those individuals kind of sell the product to their immediate manager. The immediate managers would look at it and start to work your way up the chain.

And we’ve had a couple of success stories like this already that have led to us being in some very large corporate clients, like the kind of people that advertise on NFL games. Um, and so. That it really all comes back to just having actually product-led growth with a really, really strong, high quality product.

And it’s not the kind of growth that maybe venture capital invested Jewel over, which I hear nowadays is something between 200, 400% year over year. Um, but it’s just really been very durable for us and it’s anchored and it’s been like. Arguably free, right? I mean, obviously creating a great product is not free, but we’re not paying for ads, right?

We’re not doing things like hiring a sales team and hoping they can continue to sell, like it’s just the product sells itself to kind of use that term.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: What was the ramp up like in the beginning? Like, did you invest some of your own money? Did you get investment from somewhere else? I mean, was it really just the two founders investing their own time and resources to get it, uh, started and how long did it take Yeah.

For you to kind of make your first dollar?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah, I mean, we basically were by ourselves, uh, working on it for the first two and a half years and we. I went into a lot of credit card debt, right? Like we eventually had to go back to work actually just to be able to pay our own bills. But then we worked on it nights and weekends throughout, which is why if you go to my LinkedIn, you’ll see that there’s like kind of a gap there.

Um, and really once we started to see a lot of traction and success was during the pandemic, right? It’s when a lot of services went digital. Hmm. It’s when a lot of, um, you know, digital learning became more common. And that was where the business picked up to the point where we felt like, okay, not only can this pay for us, right, but it can also, uh, potentially grow into a really big business.

So towards the end of 2021, we raised a small angel round. It was $650,000, um, led by acquired Wisdom Fund and with Good Water and a few others participating, but mostly angels. And basically that’s the only money that we’ve needed to raise. For better or worse test prep is a very good cashflow business.

Track 1: Hmm.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Once you get to a certain size like your ba, you know, we are profitable today. We’ve been profitable for over a year. Um, and we’re going to continue to be profitable for the foreseeable future, even as we grow the team and continue to invest in new projects.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: That is, that is so interesting. Um. I mean, I would assume that you, you, I mean, a margin and, and this kind of business is pretty good.

Mm-hmm. And, but I’m curious, like 650,000 is still a lot of money. Like what was kind of, is it mostly, is your investment mostly into marketing? Like, I mean, you created a course one, a high quality course. Once it’s there, now you basically have to populate it with students, right? What, what is your biggest kind of investment?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Uh, it’s in talent on the team, right? I mean, our biggest expense is paying our authors. And then, you know, right after that is our own team. Um, the, that is the thing that is going to be, you know, what differentiates sales from everybody else is whether we have a really high quality product and a really high quality user experience.

Um, and content and the tech side kind of combine to form that, right? Um. We do quite a bit of marketing now, but you know, paid marketing was not how we grew initially. And so, um, you know, for us now, kind of paid marketing is like bonus. You know, it’s like, okay, sure we can probably grow a top line revenue by another, you know, X percent by investing in paid marketing.

That’s great, right? And our paid marketing is profitable, which is also great. But I don’t think the business model of raising a bunch of money and then dumping it into marketing. Necessarily always works very well. Um, I think that, you know, you’ve gotta kind of think about what is it that really is the core reason your company is growing and for us it is a product.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hmm. And, okay, uh, I mean that makes a lot of sense. Um. So, I mean, what, what’s, what’s your biggest, I’m assuming now you are, I mean, you’ve been in business 10 years, your brand is out there, you know, people who are looking for these kind of courses. I mean, there’s some brand recognition. Um, what is your biggest customer acquisition channel?

Is it word of mouth? Is it coming from Reddit? Like, what’s, uh, where are you getting most of your customers?

Tyler York of  Achievable: It’s still word of mouth. Um, and it’s, you know, Reddit, I consider a part of word of mouth at this point. Maybe it’s sort of the, the town hall, digital town hall, if you will. Um, a lot of people talk in a lot of Facebook groups about these tests too.

Um, and as far as I can tell, we’re pretty well regarded in those. And yeah, at the end of the day, you can’t control word of mouth other than controlling the experience that people have that they tell their friends. Right. Um, so that is again, why I consider it to be pretty much all product-led growth.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: And I would assume, like with, with a course like this, you know, if you have a success rate associated with a course, if you can say that, you know.

If you take the scores, there’s 90, 90%, 95% chance you’re going to pass this. I mean, that’s, that, that in a way kind of sells itself, right?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah, for sure. I mean, to be honest with you, um, since we’ve started publishing our numbers, we’ve seen that our competitors have started to publish similar numbers, which we find funny.

Um, but those, those are the real numbers, right? We’ve had tens of thousands of students per year use our platform. And we ask everybody, you know, how did it go? Like, did you pass? Like what were the things that you learned? What were the things that you feel like we fell down on that we could improve?

Right? And when you collect tens of thousands of those data points over time you can figure out what are the things you need to address and then improve that, right? And so that kind of flywheel of like getting customer feedback and then improving the materials, improving the product, um, I think is a big part of our success.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So you have a co-founder, your, your two co-founders, I guess. Um, are you always aligned in your vision of the business? Is there any challenge, um, working with a co-founder or do you think that it’s easier for you because you knew your co-founder for a significant amount of time and so, you know. You had the friendship and which helps with the, uh, I mean, I would assume, like if somebody starts with a co-founder, like you never know if, you know, after one year the, the person just loses momentum or inspiration, you know, that’s, that’s a big challenge then.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah. I mean, I would always say do founder vesting, like never just give the company away day one. Right? Like always do founder vesting. Um, I also think, you know, controversial or not, I think it’s important that one of the co-founders has more than 51% control, so that at the end of the day, there’s no log jam with decision.

Um, and at the end of the day, you know, for us, that’s Justin because he’s the one who, this was his idea and his brainchild. And also again, as a product led growth company, you know, the product’s super important. Working together I think has been easier because we knew each other beforehand. We, you know, we’re really good friends in college and basically remain really good friends now and we can turn off work and just hang out and it’s like, you know, just like old times.

I think that’s really helpful. I also think it creates a lot of trust, right? Like, I don’t think either of us would, are ever worried about, you know, some of the stories you hear about other co-founders like. Stabbing each other in the back or something like that. We, we would never do that. And I also think the, it’s so important, like, and I see a lot of people that are looking to start companies, they are kind of like, you know, oh, especially people that need a technical co-founder.

That’s always one of the people that are most likely to fall into this trap because they’re the neediest. Um, they’re just willing to pick somebody based on their pedigree and, you know. At the end of the day, I, I think you kind of do need to do this with somebody that you know, like you’re going on a survival mission, right?

Like, it’s almost like you’re going camping in the desert for three years. You, you are gonna go through some hard times and you’re gonna go, it’s not just going to be all smooth sailing and, um, you know, success kind of papers over a lot of conflict, but going through hardship magnifies a lot of conflict.

So even people that you think you, yeah, I could get along with them, but you’re kind of iffy on it, you know, when those hard times come and those, that’s going to go from being kind of an okay thing to a not okay thing. Um, so you really, I really think you should start companies only with people that you really, truly know well, or you should have an arrangement in place or, you know, you should do both of these things.

But like have an arrangement in place where there’s like a clear, like, you know, decision maker or sort of like the buck stops with somebody. Um, usually the person that has like division so that you can, you know, resolve conflicts and not just end up kind of in a situation where you’re stuck.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah. And I don’t think everybody is built for to be a founder also, like even especially technical people, you know, if, if somebody has a decent paying job and they’re kind of, you know.

Uh, attracted by this idea of founding a company and, you know, one year down the road, they realize it’s just too, too difficult, right? It’s not, I don’t think it’s meant for everybody.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah. I mean, it, that’s a very, like, that’s such a broad generalization. I don’t know if I wanna sign onto it, but, um, I certainly have heard that story before.

Um, I think that a lot of times. You know, the best kinds of founders are the people that are just obsessed with doing it regardless. Um, because if you’re choosing between starting a startup and working at Google, working at Google, like the net present value of that decision is a lot higher, right? You’re gonna get paid three times more right away, and you’re gonna have really high job security and you’re, you know, depending on what you’re doing, you’re probably not gonna be working startup hours.

So a lot of times the people that are doing startup stuff are doing it because they really love whether it’s the vision that they’re trying to pursue, the idea that they’re gonna be so they themselves important and impactful. Um, you know, the, essentially like the glory I guess, of like doing startups at all.

Like some people really like that. Um, or just some people just really like to create. Like, and then there’s also people that just really enjoy kind of being very independent, right? And those people are often great to start companies. Some, depending on how they go, they might not necessarily be the best to stick with the company, but like those are all types of people that are more naturally inclined to be a startup founder.

Somebody who, you know, has spent the last five years of their life at a very cushy job at a very large company. Um, it is a culture shock for them. Um, I’ve seen people do it successfully, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not, you know. Yeah. Different. Yeah.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah. A a person has to be hungry in some way. Either it’s hunger for freedom, you know, controlling their own time.

It’s hunger for creating, it’s hunger for changing the world. Like there’s something has to be driving a person to like, take on the startup work, I think.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah, and I mean, I, there’s nothing wrong with. Working at a big company and being paid very well for it. Right? Like that’s what probably your parents and my parents told us was the American dream growing up.

Right? So I don’t really blame anybody. Um, yeah, I just think that, uh, it’s, it, it really, I think if you’re considering it and you are working at a big company, I think just start working on it nights and weekends already. You probably have time, right? Yeah. I mean, I think that like, at least from my experience working.

At larger companies, I was still able to, you know, do kind of two hours in the evenings every day, few more hours on the weekends. You get between 10 and 20 a week. You can still do a lot with that.

Track 1: Yeah.

Tyler York of  Achievable: And so you can do that now and then you can say, okay, if I were to work on my startups full time, it would be all of the time that I worked on my day job and all of my extra time every week.

How would I feel about that? Right. And getting paid very little for for it.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah. Um, is there a mobile component of your business or it’s completely web-based experience?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah, so we have an extremely strong mobile ui. Um, our mobile UI is actually all on mobile web, uh, which is a little bit of a departure from your typical business.

But basically we looked at building an app very seriously. There are other companies that do it like pocket prep, that do a nice job. Um, the thing is. That basically there’s like a couple big reasons why we decided not to do it. The first is just from like a product point of view, you have to maintain multiple code bases.

It starts to become a very expensive endeavor very quickly. Um, you also have to pay Google or Apple 30% of everything you make. Um, and so at the end of the day, you’re basically like, how much effort am I willing to spend for the marketing footprint of having. In the app store when you type in series seven, right?

Like that’s more or less what you’re paying for. Um, and we felt like that trade off wasn’t there for us, and then we haven’t felt like that since. I’m sure that we’ll eventually have to do it, but we’re not doing it right now because the mobile web experience that we’ve made is world class. The entire product works really well on your mobile device.

It works really well on any device. The nice part about that is that we don’t have to worry about somebody being on a old Android phone that nobody supports anymore. We don’t have to worry about, um, you know, it security issues around apps. When we work with our corporate clients, a lot of them have a big laundry list of app related security checks that we just can skip, which is great.

Um, so mobile web has been really good to us and it’s provided an app like experience just from your browser.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: I, I know you mentioned you have a technical team. Um, can you share, share a little bit about your team, your, uh, um, developers and marketing and so forth?

Tyler York of  Achievable: I mean, so our team is 15 people now. It’s a mix of contractors and full-time employees. Um, I basically run the sort of marketing and business development team.

And then, um, Justin runs the technical team and product team, and that includes content. So that’s kinda how we have things divided today.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Okay. What is your future vision for the business? Let’s say five, 10 years down the road? Do you just want to continue growing, um, add new courses, continue adding more, uh, students and so forth?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, if you look at the types of tests that we are working on, which we call opportunity gating exams. We call them that because literally they are standing in between you and some kind of opportunity, right? Whether that’s getting a job in finance and keeping it or getting into the next step of medical school or getting into college or getting into graduate school.

Um, and so almost all of these tests, they are standardized tests. Um, it is a matter of just your preparation levels. Like they, you don’t have to be a genius to get a perfect score on the SAT. You just have to be really, really well prepared. And so that is our goal, is to make it so that anybody, for any of these exams, regardless of their background, their educational experience, their, you know, like basically where they come from, whether that’s, you know, like societally or like literally what country they’re from or things like that.

Anybody who puts in the work. Can get the score they need on the tests that is important to them in order to reach their goals. And so that is our guiding vision for the company.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Awesome. Um, in every entrepreneur’s journey, there’s always mistakes, lessons learned, failures. What has been like a big mistake over the last.

I’m sure there were a few, uh, because you’ve been doing it for 10 years, what has been, what is something that comes to mind, which you consider like a mistake or a failure? What did you learn from it? What can other entrepreneurs learn from your mistakes?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah. Um, two big ones, right? Um, the first one was actually in choosing our market.

And it’s funny because, you know, we talked about how the FINRA market has been very good to us. Uh, it’s our largest market today, and it’s also one that you would say we were successful in. But we actually missed when we were doing our search, um, another market that another company has done very well, what’s called Aceable.

Um, that was driver’s ed training.

Track 1: Hmm.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Uh, and, you know, we were, we missed it because we were looking for tests that were high stakes in terms of like the dollar amount of the outcome. Right. Um, and we were looking for tests that we felt. Like, we’re just basically, you know, a good fit for the type of material that we felt like would fit into the platform well.

Um, but Aceable in becoming, you know, this driver’s ed online platform, um, actually grew a lot faster than us. I mean, I don’t know about recently, but certainly for a long time. Um, because they found a market that was more ripe for disruption. And again, it was a market also that was B2C, which we later found out was a much better fit for the type of company we were trying to run.

Um, so we, you know, I think that when I give advice to other entrepreneurs, I say like, do a lot more market research than you think you’re gonna be working on whatever market you choose for years. It’s worth investing one to three months, making sure you’ve really got the right market. And we, you know, we probably invested one month and if I would go back and do it again, I would’ve invested three.

Uh, the second mistake was that, you know, I told you all about the benefits of space repetition and how base repetition is kind of this amazing thing that can train you to memorize the material that you’re trying to learn. Um, and that’s all true. We focused all of our sales picture on that because to us, that was our unique differentiator.

Um, it turned out that the customers didn’t really care at all. I mean, they basically didn’t even know what it was. It was too much to try and teach them. Um, even when I say train you to memorize things. That’s a way of explaining it that’s very succinct that we’ve only gotten to after many years of, of working on it.

Um, and so it was just, it was too much jargon and so the customers didn’t connect with what we were selling at all. Um, so it turned out that what do customers want? They want to get through the test easily, quickly. Like reliably. Hmm. Um, and preferably like have a little fun along the way. Hopefully at least not have it be completely dry and dull.

Um, which arguably is what everybody can claim and everybody can sell, but I. I think it’s just really leading, again, it’s almost like a corollary to the first one. It’s like leading with more research, you know, having real conversations with customers and trying to understand what their motivations are and what their motivations are, what you should sell against, not what you think your product does.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So to me it seems like spend more time upfront just finding the right product market fit, because yes, I, I completely agree with you. Like if I were to pay. A company for, to help me prepare, uh, prepare for this exams. You know, basically I’m thinking, I’m going to pay you money. Just take my hand, help me pass this exam.

Right, right. That’s what I, I don’t, I don’t want to know about space repetition. I don’t want to know all, all these things. I’m not here to learn space. Re just help me, you know, take my money, help me get through this. So, which you said, you know, which helps them get to the outcome that they’re looking for.

Right?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Right. Yeah, exactly. And it’s like, it seems obvious, right? But you know, our, we were so like, oh, this is revolutionary and we’re gonna, you know, we thought it again, it’s like we had made something that we were really proud of and we thought was different, and so we wanted to tell everyone why that difference was gonna help them, but they didn’t care about the whole, all that background, right?

They just wanna know about the brass tacks.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Correct. Uh, I’m going to move on to our rapid fire segment. In this segment I’m going to ask you a few quick questions and you have to answer them maybe in a word or a sentence or so. So the first one is one book recommendation for entrepreneurs and why.

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah.

I feel like this is probably a common one. Um, but I really liked Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris. Um, basically because it’s not just one person’s opinion. It is a lot. Um, essentially everybody that he’s interviewed in that book has been successful in what they’ve done at some point. And so it’s a lot of different perspectives.

It comes from a lot of different fields, but it’s a lot of good advice and I think everybody can take something away from that book.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Awesome. And innovative product or idea in the current e-commerce retail or tech landscape that you feel excited about?

Tyler York of  Achievable: I mean, this one’s I think gonna be everybody’s answer nowadays, but AI obviously is very interesting.

Um, for me, I think when I think about ai, I think about self-driving cars and how in 2017, the lingo is that everybody was going to use self-driving cars by 2023, it’s 2025. That has not taken place. Right. And what I, the reason why is what I call the last mile problem getting from. A car that can drive well 90% of the time to a car that can drive well, 99.999% of the time is probably half of the work, if not three quarters of it.

And I wonder, I don’t know because I’m not an AI expert, but I wonder if AI is the same thing, right? Like to get from, let’s say, an AI tutor that can answer questions 90% correctly to answering questions. 99.999% correctly. Arguably could be another 10 years. Um, so that’s gonna be interesting to see whether I’m wrong.

Uh, ’cause and I mean, certainly we are, we are looking right at it and we look at AI stuff all the time and already we like, you know, use it internally for different things. So it’s good to. Um, it’s good to stay on top of it, but I also think that, uh, I, I have a feeling that all these AI predictions about how no one’s gonna have a job in 10 years, uh, I say there’s a decent chance they do not come true.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: I mean, it’s, it’s quite exciting and, you know, nobody really knows what’s going to happen in the next 10, 20 years. Is it going to be the, the invasion of the robots? I mean, nobody knows, um, a business or productivity tool or software that you would recommend or a productivity tool.

Tyler York of  Achievable: I mean, we use Asana, um, to do our task tracking.

It kind of doesn’t matter. You can use Notion, you can use Google Docs, you can use whatever you want. But the, the real point of it is to catalog everything that you need to do and all of your tasks and all of your ideas, and write them all down. Um, basically in startup land, you’re always gonna have a million things that you could do, and you’re not gonna remember all of them, but.

It might still be a good idea. There might be something you want somebody to do in three months when you hire an employee in that area. It’s really important to catalog all this stuff so that you can always keep your business moving because you always have something that you can work on. Yeah, and also obviously to just like make sure you’re not dropping the ball with stuff, you know, you don’t wanna be forgetting to do the thing that this your, you know, your client asks you to do, or anything along those lines, even if it’s small.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah, I think AI has a great role to play in that, right? It’s, it, it, it can become a great repository for, uh, your business and you basically, uh, talk to it, right? If you want to create a new FAQ, you can basically ask, give me a FAQ, and it’ll give you, um, another startup or business that you think is currently doing great things.

Tyler York of  Achievable: I mean, I think, like, again, my, my, I’m so focused on my corner of the world, right? So my answers are gonna be related to, uh, to online education. Um, but I really have been impressed with a company called Test Prep Insight. Um, they’re actually, they’re in a very similar business to ours. Um, but they are an affiliate.

So they essentially review test prep courses, and then they tell people what they like about ’em and what they don’t. Um, and that was a crowded market when he showed up and started doing it a few years ago. And they’ve basically become the biggest and best player in the market that I know of because they focused on having really high quality reviews that were not just based on who was going to give them the highest commission check, but actually what they really believed about the products.

Um, and I do think that in, you know, an age where. Anybody can write an AI article about anything in about 20 minutes. Um, there’s gonna be a flight to quality. So the highest quality content is going to be what Google’s trying to award, and it’s also going to be, I think what makes you successful in the long term.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Correct? Yeah. Um, a peer entrepreneur or business person whom you look up to or someone who inspires you?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Somebody that inspires me, and again, these are all people from my little corner of the world. Um, there’s a guy named Sasha Chadda who created a tutoring business called Ivy Scholars and Sasha Chadda started its tutoring business after the tutoring market has been.

Mature for like decades, right? Like SAT and a CT tutoring are not new. Um, and he has grown his business into one of the largest and most successful ones that I know of, and, you know, works with really high quality clients, let’s say. And he’s done that again through this like relentless focus on quality.

And in this hyper competitive market, he was able to stand out by just having the highest quality services.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Awesome. Final question, best business advice that you have ever received or you would give to other entrepreneurs?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah, I mean, other than what I already, I mean as a corollary to what I already said about like market research, the most important part of market research that I think a lot of people really are afraid of doing, and I think that them being afraid is probably the reason why they should do it.

Um, is talk to your customers like. Actually talk to them like this. Like don’t just like do surveys and don’t like hire a user research firm or don’t, you know, like go like put up a thing that’s like, I will pay 20 bucks to anybody at this coffee shop that talks to me about how they use an AI note taker and then like sit there and talk to people.

It is incredible how much more you’ll understand. I. By doing that. Like, and I say understand as opposed to learn, right? Like, because arguably you could go check GBT and ask what are the top 10 reasons people use an AI note taker and it will give it to you. And you’ll be like, that took five minutes. I’m done.

Track 1: Hmm.

Tyler York of  Achievable: But in order for you to really break into that market and understand what is going to be the, the gap that you can exploit with the current offerings or you know, what are, what are the pieces of it? Let’s say it’s a market where it’s very, it’s more mature. What are the pieces of it that you can really focus on to stand out?

That’s gonna come from talking to real people and talking to a good number of them, right? At least a few dozen of them. Um, so that’s my advice. It’s really like if you’re starting a company, do a lot of homework because you’re gonna be dedicating your life to this. So, uh, the more prep you do, the more the better off you’ll be.

And it, it all has like compounding returns in the long term.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Yeah. No, I think that’s, that’s great advice and, and that can reduce, uh, business’ kind of, you know, uh, trajectory of getting that product market fit and, you know, everything else. So. Great. Great advice. Well, Tyler, those were all the questions I had.

Thank you so much for sharing your story, for sharing your business advice, strategies, uh, failures. And, uh, if anybody wants to, um, check out your courses, what’s the best way to do that?

Tyler York of  Achievable: Yeah, just go to achievable.me. Um, and you can get a free trial of any course. So go check it out and see if it’s right for you.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Awesome. Well, Tyler, Tyler, thank you so much again and wish you all the very best. Thank you. Take care.