What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
All right, I'm here with Ravi Mehta and Victoria Young, the founders of Scale Higher.
How's it going?
Good.
How are you doing?
I'm doing excellent.
I wanted to have you two on the show because, from my perspective at least, there's been
this explosion in coaching the last few years.
My girlfriend wants to be a life coach.
All my startup friends have business coaches.
Everyone's just tuned in and like, I need a coach.
And I think it's the coolest thing ever because, I don't know, maybe it's just people in recent
generations who are more in touch with their mental health, who are more in touch with
the fact that we all need help.
And I think an increasing number of us are very conscious about our careers, and especially
if IndieHackers are conscious about the fact that they quit their jobs, and now they're
their own boss, and they need some help.
And so I think what you two are doing at Scale Higher is very awesome.
It's like you're basically helping people find coaches.
Can you just describe to me what Scale Higher is?
So we started it about six months ago, Victoria and I met about two years ago right as I was
leaving Tinder, and Victoria was thinking about what she wanted to do next.
And for about a year and a half, we would catch up every once in a while, help each
other with the writing we were doing, talk about some of the coaching that we were each
doing.
And this recurring theme came up, which is that we just kept hearing from people that
they don't feel like they have the support that they need to be really successful.
And I think this was a problem for people.
And we weren't sure, is it really possible to solve this at a higher scale, or is this
really like a one-to-one relationship, which is more of a service industry?
And we got inspired when we started to look at what was happening with apps like Peloton
and Noom and Talkspace and Headspace and Calm and BetterHelp.
There were all these examples in a person's personal life of ways in which companies were
making it easier to get one-on-one guidance and support, whether it was around fitness
or nutritional counseling or therapy.
And so we started scale with the goal of democratizing professional coaching and doing it specifically
with a B2C sort of mindset.
Yeah, I'm curious about going back to the beginning of your story, Robbie.
The two of you met a couple years ago.
And I know that between the two of you, you've worked at some pretty big brand name companies.
You worked at Uber, Facebook, Netflix, you mentioned Tender.
How do you go from working at these big companies to wanting to start a startup?
What does that interaction look like between the two of you, where you're having these
meetings and you're catching up, because I think a lot of people want to find a co-founder
and they want the confidence to quit the cushy job and go do something adventurous and a
little bit risky and rewarding.
How did the two of you navigate that together?
Entrepreneurship has been really glamorized in the last, I think, five or so years.
And so it sounds like something a lot of people want to do.
But one thing I did before I jumped in was I spent a lot of time looking at solopreneur
communities, reading stuff on indie hackers, reading stuff in other areas, because I knew,
especially in this early seed phase, it can be lonely, it can be really anxiety inducing.
It's just you and maybe another person and an idea and not a lot of money in the bank
and not a lot of things going on.
And so I wanted to get close to it and figure out, is this something that I'm ready to do
as far as my next step?
And the thing that kept me coming back was, one, the opportunity to work with Victoria,
and then two, the opportunity to work on a problem that I'm really passionate about solving
and I think needs to be solved.
So if you can work with people that you really enjoy working with day to day, if you can
work on a problem that you're really passionate about, it makes those early days, which are
really anxiety inducing, a lot easier.
Yeah.
And Victoria, you have a recent tweet that true wealth is having freedom to live a life
of your own design.
And so I think that's a lot of what goes into glamorizing entrepreneurship, right?
It's this idea of freedom.
You can do whatever you want, right?
You don't really have a boss, you can take the day off if it's a Wednesday if you want
to and it's kind of fine, right?
But it's also like the parts that you said, Ravi, it's like scary, it's nerve wracking.
You kind of get paid well these big cushy companies, you start your own company and
suddenly you're not.
And so I think having a partner like Ravi and Ravi having part of Victoria, it makes
it easier to take that leap for a lot of people.
It's not just me by myself, there's someone else, it's just kind of real.
And I think by comparison, for people like me who do it on my own for the most part,
it's kind of nice to have a coach.
I have a series of people who are considered to be my coaches and my mentors.
And it's almost like they're like my bosses in a way, like Ari, like my podcast boss.
She's like my podcast producer, technically she works for me, but I kind of work for her.
She's like, Kourtline, I need this, I need this, I need this.
I'm accountable to her.
And she'll listen to my episodes and tell me how to do better, et cetera, et cetera.
And it's like, this is like a huge hack if you're going to take the leap and be an entrepreneur
to have a coach.
So I kind of want to start by talking to you too about coaching.
How would you define coaching and how would you differentiate it from something like management
or leadership or therapy?
What even is a coach?
You know, coaching can feel very vague, especially if you've never experienced it before yourself,
right?
And that's totally fair.
The way I got to coaching was as I was moving up in my career, I was at Netflix and had
an expanded scope of responsibilities.
At the time I was trying to navigate it entirely on my own.
I was reading books like, you know, what got you here won't get you there.
Like I was trying to really sharpen my skills.
But when you're in that phase of moving from, you know, a smaller scope, that's more I see
it to one that's more of leadership, you know, really being able to navigate the nuances
of managing up, managing across, managing down.
Those types of challenges are not easily solved for just by reading a book, right?
Because when you think about athletes, coaches really help athletes by reviewing and going
over specific things they're doing each time they go out and practice.
It's a very active, ongoing, collaborative relationship, right?
There's a lot of engagement, there's a lot of feedback, whereas, you know, reading books
and stuff, they're filled with great ideas, but it's very passive.
And when you try to apply it yourself, you don't get that full feedback loop.
And so one of the women on my team, she used to do figure skating.
And so for her, she really saw her manager as a coach where they would, you know, she
would lead a meeting, her manager and her would like watch the playback, you know, in
their minds and go over step by step where she went, where she did well, where she didn't
do as well.
And for me, you know, I wasn't an athlete growing up that relationship didn't come naturally
to me with my manager.
It felt more like I had to just make sure I was performing well, and I was always just
trying to do my best.
But I didn't see it as, you know, that kind of feedback loop that I could grow in.
It's just a different type of relationship.
And as a leader, you really, you know, need to be tuned in to other people.
It's dynamic.
And just because you did well yesterday doesn't mean you're going to do great tomorrow, right?
And that's okay, but you need to have some sort of feedback loop to maintain high performance
in an ongoing basis.
And when I came across coaching, it just, you know, really transformed how I viewed
myself and my performance, and also gave me the tools, gave me the feedback loop to really
improve in the areas that I needed more growth and support.
And so coaching is very active.
It's different from, you know, talk therapy.
Sometimes it's much more just about sharing your feelings, maybe going into the past,
whereas coaching is much more about in the moment, kind of, what can you take as learnings
and how can you improve tomorrow?
Yeah, that's an interesting way to put it.
Like, I remember watching this movie as a kid, it's called Angels in the Outfield.
And there was like this baseball team and there were like these angels were like helping
them and this kid could like see the angels.
And I always thought it was like so cool to like have like this idea of like a sort of
invisible partner who's like going with you, you know, like you're trying to do this like
hard thing and they're like helping you out.
Like most people don't really have that.
And so like with a coach, that's kind of like what you have, right?
It's like, it's not just you against the world.
It's like you and somebody else against the world.
And I think even like in like day to day life, like everybody does like a little bit of coaching.
You might have to coach a partner through a tough, you know, conversation they have
to have at work with a family member.
You may have to coach your friends.
What's the difference between like a good coach and a bad coach?
The thing that I think really good coaches do is they create a safe space.
Like I think there's so many relationships that people have, especially when it comes
to work that are pressurized in some way, like you want to show up in a certain way
to your boss or to your boss's boss.
You have your team that's counting on you.
Even if you have a mentor that, you know, has taken you under their wing, there's some
pressure in that relationship in the sense that you want to impress their mentor.
You want to make that person feel like they've done a good thing by investing their time
into it.
If you're part of a peer group, there's some pressure and I don't want to ask too much
of the group without giving in return.
And I think a good one-on-one coaching relationship is one where there's none of that.
Like there's no pressure going in.
It's all about what do you need in order to get support to overcome the challenge that's
in front of you.
And a really good coach will create that space.
So you're not only comfortable with them, you're actually comfortable with yourself.
So I think a lot of people, because they never have that third-party perspective, they start
to filter themselves internally as well as filter what they're saying to other people.
And a good coach will say, you know, let's wipe all that away.
Let's actually talk about the things.
Let's have you say the things to yourself that you may not be comfortable saying because
you just haven't had the space to say it.
Right.
I like that point you made about like when you're part of a group, whether it's like
a class or anything, it's like, there's just all these other variables to go into.
It's like, I don't want to ask questions.
I don't want to sound dumb.
I don't want to waste everybody else's time.
And you just like don't, it's not as effective.
And even in education, there's just, have you heard of Bloom's two Sigma problem?
It's like this concept of educational researcher and like the 70s or the 80s, like doing studies
on education.
And he found that like students who are tutored one-to-one perform like two standard deviations
higher than students who like learn in traditional classrooms, which means like they're better
than 98% of people.
Everything else being equal.
It doesn't matter how smart you are.
It doesn't matter anything.
If you did like one-on-one tutoring, you were instantly better than 98% of people.
And like, that's a huge difference.
It's massive.
And so coaching like kind of feels like, okay, it's capitalizing on that realization.
It's like, how do you, how do you bring that to like everybody?
Because like we live in a society where like, you know, most people don't have coaches.
Most people can't afford one-on-one tutors.
And so I guess that's kind of what the two of you are trying to solve a scale higher
to some degree.
Absolutely.
I think the tutor example is a really good one.
People grow up learning to learn in a very specific way.
You have people around you like teachers and teaching assistants and parents and tutors
that are there to help you learn, help you practice, provide you with feedback, provide
you with feedback in a personalized way.
That even extends into college where you have TAs that you can go to.
If you have really good professors, they're open, you also have like small groups that
you're part of.
And then all of a sudden you get your first job and that goes completely out of the window.
There's nobody that you have that's similar except for your manager.
And some managers are really good at being coaches and that's an incredible gift to have.
But most are not.
And now I think more than ever, like learning doesn't stop when you get into the workforce
of anything.
It just amplifies.
There's more things, you know, things are changing really quickly.
There's more skills that you've got to learn how to master.
And the ability to get one-on-one feedback through an executive coach has just been inaccessible
to people both because they don't know how to find the right person.
They can't afford the right person.
So a lot of what we want to do is change that.
And I think one of the things that we're seeing is individuals are a lot more open to it.
Like individuals are now open to talking about, you know, I had a conversation with my therapist.
Here's what I was talking to them about.
I had a conversation with my trainer.
And so there's this desire, I think, especially amongst Gen Z to want to have those one-on-one
relationships in their lives.
And so I think it's a combination of there's a really interesting need.
There's also a cultural shift that I think will hopefully mean that those tutoring relationships,
those one-on-one relationships that you have when you're younger can extend into a person's
career.
I'm smiling when you say that.
You know, some managers are good.
And some managers are not the best coaches.
I'm like, I'm a bad manager.
If I'm a manager, I'm not a great coach.
That's not a skill set that I have.
What do you guys think about, like, the efficacy of, like, coaching, like, digitally versus
in person?
Like, I mean, traditionally, you know, you would, like, meet a coach one-on-one, like,
in person.
They would be able to, like, see your expressions.
They could touch you.
You could, like, peek over your shoulder.
Nowadays, it's like everything's, like, done through apps or Zoom or, you know, like, internet
calls like this one.
Like, how does that impact coaching?
Can you have as good of a relationship with a coach over the internet as you could in
person?
So I think that's the biggest question that we've been wrestling with over the last six
months.
That's a question that a lot of investors asked us.
That's a question that we asked ourselves.
There's some really good signs that you can have as an effective relationship, if not
more effective in a relationship, by productizing coaching into a really good format.
But what we needed to do is figure out, like, what does that format actually look like?
And what are the important parts of that human-to-human relationship that you can't productize?
And what are the parts where you can start to enable it or amplify it through a mobile
experience?
And so we started originally with the idea that a really interesting way to approach
this problem is approach it like TalkSpace, and TalkSpace did a lot to innovate around
text-based therapy, making therapy more accessible, making it more real-time, making it more affordable.
And so our initial prototype that we built entirely no code was a text-based coaching
platform where people could get matched with the coach and have that coach be available
to them at any time to talk to.
And we found that our hypothesis around text-based coaching didn't work.
People didn't know what to talk about.
People are not used to having a coach.
They might have some really good, interesting conversations, but then the conversation falls
off.
And so people that had had coaches before and sort of knew what that relationship was
like, they would even churn.
And so we knew relatively quickly within a few months that this didn't have the retention.
It didn't have the value that we needed.
So our second prototype was around creating these things that we're calling guided sprints,
which are structured programs where each week you have some content that you go through,
you have exercises that you go through, and then you talk to your coach about what you
learned, how you're planning to put what you learned into practice.
And the time that you spend with your coach is really focused on feedback and less on
learning and less on practice.
And so it really amplifies the time that you get with the coach.
We found that that worked really nicely, and we were able to see some early signs of product
market fit, and that gave us the conviction to start investing and really taking that
very rough, no-code prototype and starting to build an MVP out of it.
Yeah.
If you think about the metaphor we had before, which is around athletes and performance,
especially in a digital asynchronous environment, if there isn't material that you can both
review and analyze and go through together, then it can become too unstructured.
And on top of that, you don't have the human connection.
So you're missing two pieces of things.
You're missing the human connection, and you're missing the actual piece of content to discuss.
And so that was a huge breakthrough for us, was just figuring out the right structure
of having enough meat to discuss with your coach in a way that progresses and deepens
the relationship and building enough of that one-on-one connection that felt like there
was true care in the relationship.
That's one of our core values is care.
If you don't care about the person on the other end, if you don't have a foundational
relationship, then that makes the vulnerability difficult.
That makes authenticity difficult, which blocks the whole purpose of coaching, which is getting
to the root cause of what a lot of challenges are facing, right?
Right.
So I want to understand, it didn't work when it was just texting back and forth.
And part of why it didn't work, you're saying, is because people don't even know what to
talk about.
It's kind of like the coach has to be good, but as the coachy, you got to bring something
to the table to even discuss.
And if you've never had any coaching, it's like, I don't even know, what are we doing?
Just kind of like texting someone, you don't really know what's going on.
I like this idea that like the sort of the solution you hit on, which is like this guided
courses type thing where you actually go through some content and you do something that like
maybe the coach has assigned it to you.
And so now you both know about what was done because like in any sports team, like of course
the coach on your sports team knows like, okay, like, you know, you didn't hit well
in last night's game.
Let's work on that.
But like with the business coach or an executive coach or career coach or something, it's like
they don't know what's going on.
And so then you reconvene after that and you talk to your coaches.
It sounds like how it works.
And that's awesome.
Like that's something I wish I had for everything.
You know, like, for example, if I'm like reading a book, you know, I might like read half of
it and I've known to talk to you about it, like, you know, I talked to you about this
book, right?
But if I could like talk to the author for like an hour after every chapter I read, like
I would learn way more about that book.
But I think one of the challenges is like whenever anyone's selling any sort of like
course or material, it's like what I found is it's really easy to just not do it.
You know, I like pay for courses and not taking them.
I bought lots of books and they're just like, I see on my bookshelf right now sitting there
staring back at me unread, you know, was that a challenge for like people who take who go
through scale higher?
Like, how do you ensure that people actually do the coursework and have something to talk
to the coach about?
What's really nice is when you have someone one on one who is there to give you feedback,
that adds a very clear level of accountability.
And so as a result, you've got a partner that's going with you.
It's like being part of a book club, right?
If you're part of a book club, you're more likely to actually finish the book because
there's some accountability to the group and accountability to a coach.
Exactly.
You don't want to be the guy who's making it up or saw the movie instead of the book.
It's the same thing with coaching.
Like you've you made this commitment to yourself and you have someone who's there for you who's
there to hold you accountable.
You have a structured program that you're going through.
So it's really clear.
One of the things that we've done is rather than having these programs be really deep
where you're spending hours and hours going through content, the programs are really lightweight.
You have, you know, maybe kind of 15 to 30 minutes of content that you're going through,
maybe 15 to 15 to 20 minutes of exercises that you're doing.
So about half an hour, 45 minutes to prep for your session that week with the coach.
And then you get this really nice one on one personalized feedback.
The other thing that I think is really important, important here is you have the expectation
that either you're getting coaching via email or you're getting it for your live sessions.
So you have something that is a stake in the ground each week that you're optimizing for
that really encourages people to go through the programs.
One of the things with with cohort based courses versus on demand courses, you got a much bigger
completion rate with cohort based courses because you're going through live with a group
of people and there's some accountability there.
Another thing I'd add to that is just like relevance, right?
Like when I was at Netflix, we saw that it was so key to present the right content to
the right person at the right time.
And so even when you think about the books in your bookshelf, part of why you're not
finishing them is most likely because they're not that critical to your life in this particular
moment.
They're like a nice to have, you know, maybe when you're curious and feeling ambitious,
you'll read the whole thing.
But otherwise, if you don't need it right now, then you may not ever get to it.
Right.
And so what we want to do with scale is really be able to provide the right useful frameworks
and mental models and coaching in the right moment for people where it's actually going
to be actionable and helpful.
So much content is an actionable in the moment, right?
And so, you know, that's a huge reason people don't finish it.
It's it's just not relevant enough.
And so we are designing our guided sprints and our content to help people in the particular
situation they're in at the moment to really take it to the next level.
Yeah.
That's so true.
Because it's like most of the books, like the last three books that I finished that
I got through, like, for example, I read The Cold Start Problem, which is all about like
figuring out network effects with your company.
And it's like I read that book because I'm like trying to figure that out with indie
hackers.
It's like this is solving like the exact problem that I have like right now.
And like it's going to immediately skip 50 other books that are on my list of books to
read that have been on there for years and become number one because like it's exactly
what I need right now.
And when I look at your sort of guided sprints at scale higher, like they're very problem
focused, right?
Like level up as a product manager or reaching peak productivity or like the proven guide
to getting promoted or how to manage a high performance team.
Like these are problems.
Like if you have the problem of like you need to get promoted, like a buddy of mine works
at Slack and he's like very frustrated that he's like stopped getting promoted, right?
Like that's like, okay, it's like I need this right now and everything else can like fall
to the weights.
I think this is top priority.
So I like the fact that you've like modeled it after the problems that people have.
And that was another discovery during our initial phase of prototyping is a lot of coaching
companies are solving the problem of I want to coach, but it turns out like people don't
wake up in the morning and say, I want to coach.
Yeah.
It's not a real problem.
Yeah.
And so they wake up and say, I'm not getting promoted.
Why am I not getting promoted?
And so by taking more of a structured program oriented approach, we were able to say, let's
actually help people with the specific problems that they have rather than help people just
match with the coach without that, that structure and without that guide.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just want to say, I saw this great quote on Twitter the other day and it was, you know,
you have a nail on your foot.
You can practice mindfulness about the nail.
You can go to therapy, talk about how bad the nail feels.
You can gratitude journal about how other people have more nails in their feet, right?
Or you can take the nail out of your foot.
And so what we want to do with scale is help people take the nail out of their foot.
We want to go right to the root cause, address the actual obstacle and how they can overcome
that specific obstacle.
And you know, that is often the biggest anxiety reducer, right?
Like I've tried everything in the past when I was anxious, like I've done hypnotherapy,
acupuncture, journaling, meditation.
But if you're not addressing the core problems, you're not taking that nail out of your foot,
you know, you can only manage that anxiety to some extent, but the core problem is not
being addressed.
And so we need to help equip people with the skills to address those problems.
Right.
And I think this is like a broader concept that's helpful for probably like all startup
founders.
Because like, if you look at why people take action, at least like the way that I look
at it is like every action that I've ever taken is because I wanted to like solve some
problem or fulfill some like desire, right?
I don't just like sit around and stuff like ideas randomly pop into my head.
Like I have a coffee that I've been drinking because I was walking down the street and
I was like, I'm really thirsty and a little bit tired and it's cold.
And so it's like, all right, solution to like those problems, like coffee, right?
And every startup is kind of the same, right?
Like no matter what startup like you build, if it's not solving a problem, it's like someone
has that pain.
Now they're looking for solutions.
It's going to be really hard for them to ever like find you.
And so I want to talk about like how you guys come up with the idea for scale because a
lot of people get stuck at this step.
They're like, okay, I want to, I want to do a startup vaguely, but like, what do I do?
And I don't think everybody's necessarily driven to start by trying to like focus obsessively
on a problem, but I can tell like the two of you are right.
Like the fact that you even had an idea and it didn't work out and then you pivoted to
something else.
Like it didn't seem like it was that hard for you to pivot.
Maybe it was we'll get into that, but it's like, it seems like you're probably like focus
on like a problem and the solution like come second, you're not like, I'm going to build
this app.
And if it doesn't work out, you quit.
You're like, I'm going to solve this problem.
There might be a hundred ways to solve it.
So how did you come up with the idea for scale and how did you, I guess, pivot your way through
different solutions to try to solve the problem that you're solving?
I think a lot of it started with having conversations with, with people.
Um, and one of the benefits of, um, you know, the time between when I left Tinder and started
scale was I was a executive in residence at reforge.
So it's helping a lot of people learn how to be better product managers and better product
leaders.
And so I got a chance to talk to literally hundreds of people and hear what they were
struggling with.
And inevitably the thing that they weren't struggling with was I don't understand this
reforge framework.
I don't understand growth loops.
People got that stuff.
The, the content at reforges is really deep.
Um, and when well articulated the area where they struggled was I don't know how to actually
bring this thinking into my organization, or I don't know how to influence my boss to
get more head count for me to make more, more progress.
Um, and so this pattern emerged as I was talking to people.
And then in talking to Victoria, she was seeing similar, similar things to the coaching and
conversations that she was having.
And I think that's step one of finding a really interesting problem space is like, uh, I think
a lot of people try to do it within their own head.
And if you just go and you talk to a hundred people, like that's a lot of people, but if
you just say, I want to talk to a hundred people kind of about this, but also about
other things that they're doing related to this, you'll start to suss out like whether
or not there's a problem and what the shape of that problem looks like.
And how do you assess like whether or not a problem was worth starting a business to
solve?
Because like, there's so many things that people complain about.
People want to be like, Oh, it's so hard to find a co-founder, but like, I don't know
that many businesses that successfully connect people to co-founders.
Like for whatever reason, not a great business or people say like a slack is so noisy.
You know, it's just like, it's distracting me constantly, but like, I don't know any
successful businesses that are solving that problem for people.
So why like, how do you go from people are complaining about this to like, this is something
that we should quit our jobs and, you know, work on full time to like try to make a business
that's going to make money.
You know, one of our principles is learning from other domains, right?
We saw that across a lot of different areas, whether it was like new or future in fitness
and nutrition, like there was this model that was able to take kind of a content piece and
like a one-on-one coaching piece and combine it successfully.
And learning from those domains, you know, really inspired us too, because the fundamental
like problem solution that you're working with is very similar, right?
And we're just applying it to work in a way that, you know, addresses the same types of
problems that people are coming to future and new with nutrition and fitness.
And so we just need to then figure out the best experience for people who are trying
to solve it for work.
Right.
It's kind of the cool thing about like the explosion of startups is that like a lot of
it is very uncertain.
Like, okay, I want to solve this problem, but like, how do I know who this could work?
And it's like, Oh, it turns out that there's like 50 other companies that are doing kind
of sort of similar things and like they might have millions of users or they're making tons
of money.
And it's like, okay, that's like a little bit of proof that something similar can work.
And I know like when I started in the hackers, like I had the same thing.
Like I was on Hacker News and like, do people want this content?
And I could go see a bunch of people uploading comments and posts and it's like that is proof
that people want this kind of content.
Like does that prove every part of my business can work?
Not necessarily, but it's better than just like firing in the dark.
So I really like the strategy of like looking at what's working for others and then saying,
does that apply to the problem that I'm trying to solve?
And if so, like, let's give it a shot.
Right.
And does it always work out like talk therapy works or talk space works.
Sorry, but like your sort of text messaging based approach didn't work perfectly well
for coaching, right?
So there's going to be like some differences as I'm curious about that part too, because
I think a lot of people start something and they have an idea and they get to where you
two were where they're like, okay, we've got like the prototype out, you know, let's see
how it goes.
You're super excited.
And then it doesn't work.
You know, in your case, I think what happened, like nobody was paying money for it.
We so we did an initial prototype where we just made it free.
So we had people that were close in our circle and we said, look, you can get access to a
coach via text messaging.
Victoria and I did some of the, some of the coaching and we actually found it worked pretty
well.
Like people were going back and forth.
There were some really interesting conversations.
One of the things that was interesting to us was we had the question of whether or not
people would be comfortable really sharing how they were feeling in text or whether or
not people wouldn't have that same intimacy with text.
And we found people were really willing to share very deep things about what was happening
in their lives.
And so it actually was working pretty nicely.
And we took some of the quotes that we were getting.
We put those in our pitch deck and we were feeling pretty good about the direction.
What we wanted to get like a really early read on is this something that people are
willing to pay for, especially from a price point perspective.
What we were seeing, we were probably counting for about an hour or two hours per month for
each client that a coach was going to support.
So the cost needed to be expensive.
It needed to be like a hundred bucks or a couple hundred bucks a month in order to pay
for the coaches, coaches time.
And so we added a membership at $200 a month for our early users.
We found that some of our early users, many of them didn't want to actually convert from
free to paid.
We also found that there were some people that were willing to try it out.
So we had a set of people that were paying the monthly fee, but what they found was on
like month one, it was okay.
But on month two, if they didn't have a problem that they wanted to work through, they wanted
to cancel or they wanted to churn.
And it turned out that when we added the ability to pay into the product or the necessity to
pay into the product, it put a lot of pressure on how much value are we delivering every
single single month, even amongst users that had had coaching before and knew the value.
And so that was a really good indicator for us that like, yeah, this could have worked
as a free product, but can't work as a paid product.
And there's some good products that are doing this as like a free kind of mentor service,
but we really wanted to build a business around, around coaching and make sure that we can
invest and have it be something premium.
And so that's when we decided to pivot.
Yeah, I love that, like sort of charging money as a forcing function to like deliver value.
Like if you open a lemonade stand and you're giving away lemonade for free, like lemonade
doesn't have to be very good for people to take it, but like whatever, it's free, right?
You start charging like five bucks a glass and then it's like, better be good lemonade.
Suddenly you have a lot of pressure to make the lemonade good because if it's not good,
people are going to stop buying it and you're going to go out of business.
So I like the idea of like charging from day one, which is super scary to do when you're
just like a couple people and you have it, you don't have a brand name, right?
No one's like, you don't have a product market fit.
Like no one knows who you are and you're like, Hey, come pay hundreds of dollars for our
coaching services.
And it's like, ah, it's a big ask.
It's scary.
It was a big ask.
And you know, especially of like some of the people were in our network.
So these were, these were people who were friends.
And so, you know, it was hard to ask them to start paying for a service they had been
using for free.
But the other thing that we found, which was really interesting is there's a bit of a feedback
loop, especially around coaching.
Like if you pay for something you treat it as being more valuable.
And so that increases the accountability and increases the desire for you to want to get
a result from it.
And so that helped us realize that the text based coaching wasn't working, but it also
helped us realize that the guided sprints were working.
When we charge people for those, we got good completion rates each week and, and people
really valued the feedback and where they were accountable to actually completing the
programs.
Right.
There's got to be a name for this effect where when you pay for something like you, you like
it more.
You treat it more seriously.
Like if I paid like a thousand dollars for each of the books on my bookshelves, you better
believe I would have read every one of them.
Or I went to go see Hamilton with my, uh, my ex-girlfriend years ago when it was on Broadway.
And like, I don't know.
She just like splurged.
She was pretty balling.
So she had a lot of money, but she splurged and spent like thousands of dollars on these
tickets.
And like, I thought it was just okay.
I liked it.
But she was like, it was the best thing I've seen in my entire life.
And it's like, of course you're going to say that if you spend thousands of dollars.
You don't want to seem like an idiot.
He was like, I paid thousands of dollars and it sucked.
So I like the idea of, uh, of like.
People taking it more seriously based on the fact that they actually paid for it.
There's an interesting term.
Um, I think it's called Velbin goods where, uh, most goods, as the price increases, the
demand actually goes down, but these goods are ones where, as the price increases, demand
goes up.
Um, and so like Rolex watches fit into, um, this category of goods where as you raise
the price, people want it more and people get the utility out of it.
A Veblen good is a good for which demand increases as the price increases because it's exclusive
nature and appeal as a status symbol.
So yeah, that's exactly right.
It seems like a good business to be in.
That is not what we're building, though, to be clear.
But, um, tangentially related to the ideas, there's, there's definitely a lot of cognitive
biases at play when it comes to, you know, and, and psychological effects.
I'm not sure exactly what that term is, but you know, it, it does increase that upfront
kind of commitment, right, which is what we are playing off of, but the value we deliver,
I think that's another point to make when you think about like what actually is worth
building a business around is can you create enough value with whatever solution you're
designing where you're delivering hopefully even more than what you're charging, right?
Like the total value should be so compelling.
That's when you know you have a real business.
That's when you know you are actually building something that isn't just like a slight variation
of like Slack's, you know, improvement to Slack's noisiness, right?
You're really creating something where ongoing true value is being created and delivered
and people are happy to pay because they're getting that value.
Was anybody not happy?
You two sort of charging, okay, let's do this differently.
Let's, let's actually put a price tag on this.
Did you ever have any of your early friends and customers like, you know what, I want
a refund.
This actually wasn't good.
Yeah.
We, uh, especially with the tech space coaching, we had a number of people who said, look,
I'm just not getting the value here.
They were very nice about it, but they were like, you know, it's a lot to spend every
month.
What was interesting though is that they were, they were getting like a lot of value in terms
of the coaching and the amount of time that we were spending or coaches were spending.
But there was a thing around like paying for it monthly.
They didn't actually treat the value the same as if they had paid for a session.
So session with the coach might be $200.
And that's like 45 minutes or an hour.
But if you charge a person a monthly subscription, that's $200.
They value it at like $2,400 a year or $2,500 a year.
So they think about the value very differently.
So it was interesting as well.
Cause we learned like the pricing model in addition to the actual cost, I think influenced
how valuable people found it or didn't found it, find it.
Whereas people were willing to pay, you know, hundreds or thousands of dollars for cohort
based courses.
Right.
That was something that they could frame within their mind.
And so when we introduced that, though, the willingness to pay was high, the way in which
they were thinking about the value was high.
Right.
Yeah.
I love education, like in general as a sort of market for doing like consumer focused
startups and businesses.
Cause a lot of people are like, Oh, never started startup selling to consumers.
It's so hard.
Consumers don't have money.
But like one of the things that like people are proud, comfortable spending a lot of money
on is education, like our coaching or anything that like makes people better at their careers,
especially like they see, okay, you know, maybe I'm going to go into $40,000 of debt.
Right.
But I'm going to get way better jobs throughout my career.
So it's worth it.
I'm willing to pay an extreme amount of money because it's extremely helpful to get education
or coaching.
And so I think it's like a really good arena to be in because you can charge a lot out
of the gate and you don't have to be afraid that it's not valuable to people because like
they're willing to pay for it.
Oh no.
Yeah.
I was just going to add that, you know, when you think about something like getting promoted,
right?
Like for 399, if you do a four week guided sprint, you can get promoted and get like
a $30,000 raise or, you know, something that is really career changing for you.
That value is for sure being delivered right in that, that time spent and that investment.
And so that's really, if we stay true to solving the problem and staying focused on, you know,
helping people achieve their goals, that's, that's where, you know, it makes a ton of
sense where the value will automatically show up.
Yeah, exactly.
Cause I think every business has like kind of obvious levers where they're like, if we
pay for like, you know, marketing or you pay for ads, we can make more money.
So it's like worth paying for that.
But like the average person, it's like harder to find like, what can I pay for in my life
that will make me more money?
Like if I buy this to-do list software, like I become more effective, it's a kind of vague,
it's like, I don't know, maybe, but it's like, okay, like certain things like getting promoted,
like you're, you're a guided horse for that salary negotiation, right?
If I pay a thousand dollars for someone to help me negotiate my salary and I up my salary
by 20%, like that's easy money to justify.
Learning to code or like developing new skills are going to like put you in like a new job
that pays you more.
Like these are just like easy things for people to justify paying for.
So I'm like always bullish when people start education based businesses.
I think the things people are willing to pay for too is changing.
It used to be like people were really willing to pay for products that were tangible.
And now people are willing to pay for experiences, they're willing to pay for advice and guidance.
And I think that's only going to continue to change.
Yeah.
So where do you go from here?
I mean, with scale higher, like ironically, it's like, it's tough to scale because you
are like so dependent on like this actual one-on-one connection with these coaches.
Like to be huge, presumably you'll have to have like tens of thousands of coaches eventually
at some day in the future, which honestly, I think is pretty cool.
Like I hope we live in a world, you know, 10 years from now where like everybody has
multiple coaches for different parts of their lives because everybody would just be better.
Plus like that's a lot of jobs for a lot of coaches and coaching is a pretty cool job
to have.
How do you scale scale higher?
Like, how do you make it bigger and more successful?
What even are your goals with a business like this?
Yeah, it's a really good question.
We spent a lot of time thinking about it in the fall based on everything that we had learned.
And we got a lot clearer about what the model looks like in terms of us scaling it.
And today we're building the product around a three-sided marketplace where you have members
who are looking for advice.
You have program creators who are creating these sprints, and then you have coaches who
are coaching people through the sprints.
We think there's a lot of cross-pollination between each parts of the market, including
the members.
Like there are people that are, you know, mid-level professionals today, but they want
to start, you know, helping other people.
And so they might actually want to become coaches, especially if they can take an off-the-shelf
program and start coaching a person through that.
Like if you're a GPM or a director at a well-known tech company and you want to start helping
other PMs who are earlier in their career, but you don't know exactly what to cover.
If you can come to scale and say, oh, I want to start coaching people through the leveling
up as a PM guided sprint, that's a really nice way to get into a side hustle, to start
to help people do something that you're really proud of.
And it creates this nice marketplace effect, a sort of cross-pollination between members,
coaches, and then coaches, as they build up their practice, they may not need more clients.
What they need to do is actually get more value from their time.
And one of the ways they can get more value from their time is by creating programs.
And so part of what we're building right now is a session builder that individual coaches
can use to create their own programs.
And then my next challenge is like, how do I become more productive?
Those are all things where different coaches, different content could play a really important
role and we want scale to be a place where you can get all of that in one place and move
from coach to coach and from topic to topic as you're leveling up.
Yeah, it's interesting listening to that whole process.
So number one, you guys are playing on hard mode, like two-sided marketplace, hard to
play, you have three-sided marketplace, you've just dialed the difficulty up to expert level,
good luck.
But you're doing it.
I think one of the coolest things about successful startups is that they usually don't look the
same in the very beginning as they do later on.
One of the classic startup mistakes is to just say, this is what I want to exist.
And then you just immediately try to build it.
And it's like, no, you don't have the scale, you don't have all the pieces in place.
You kind of get there one step at a time.
And so right now, it's like might not be this fully automated, three-sided marketplace.
And that's probably for the best, because you can't just start there, you have to work
your way there.
There's all these broader trends that your store reminds me of, too.
So for example, I've been just reading a lot about capitalism and just business the past
four or five years.
And there's this effect called the Matthew effect, which is the rich get richer.
And it's such an interesting challenge, because going back to what we were saying earlier,
the best business to start in terms of business model is you want to target customers who
have money.
And you want to solve a problem that they find valuable enough to pay for.
Which ends up pretty much being that the best businesses target people who already have
a lot of money, kind of like rich people.
And so the best, if you want to start a successful company, you really want to target people
who have money.
So in your case, that might be the proven guide to getting promoted.
You're targeting people who are already highly paid tech employees.
And they might be making $200K a year, and you're going to help them make $300K a year.
And that's huge.
And that's what enables you to get your business off the ground.
But then the challenge is you get this rich get richer effect, where all the best and
coolest communities and products and services get targeted at people who are already kind
of killing it, right?
I totally hear you.
And that kind of trend can feel really disheartening and overwhelming sometimes, especially when
you think about the top 1%.
I would say one thing that we've observed in the people that we're serving is a lot
of women and minorities are underserved, especially when it comes to coaching.
So there's a lot of kind of informal coaching that can happen, often for white males, frankly,
and for scale to be able to provide that nuanced additional layer of support and guidance for
people who are underserved in the workplace environment helps bring that level of insight
around, hey, how should I influence this executive on that other team over there, right?
That kind of conversation does not always happen for women and for minorities who don't
culturally have that kind of insight.
And so that's part of what we're tapping into with scale is providing that layer of guidance
and support for people who are underserved.
And yes, maybe they are already pretty successful in their careers, but they're still hitting
that ceiling, right, when it comes to continuing to move upwards and succeed, it becomes much
more about the emotional intelligence, the informal leadership, influence, all these
areas that often you don't get that training in school, right?
And you kind of need a mentor, you need that insight into what might be the best way to
deal with those more nuanced scenarios.
There's also this, on the flip side of things, they're the coaches themselves, because being
a coach is a job, right?
And it's a pretty cool job where you get to set your own hours, you get to work with people,
you get to be helpful and have a direct impact, and you get to charge a lot of money.
It's kind of a really awesome liberating job that I think more and more people are going
to be able to do as there are more, I guess, platforms like yours.
And you have the gig economy with things like Uber and Instacart or something where it's
like, everyone has these on demand jobs, they're a little bit dehumanizing, you don't really
get to bring your passion.
My friend Lee Gen is really big on the passion economy, and none of these are passionate
jobs.
No one's passion is to drive people around all day or shop for groceries.
There's no individuality.
And then you have other jobs like, I'm going to be a YouTuber, or I'm going to be an influencer,
and it's like, well that's cool, and you get to bring your passion, but those are kind
of like winner-take-all markets, where one YouTuber is captured 80% of the market, and
the next person is like 20% of the market, and everybody else is competing for scraps.
And then you have these one-on-one jobs like coaching, where you can't be a one-on-one
coach who takes 80% of the market, you know?
If you guys scale really big, it can't just be one coach who just dominates all the... It
has to necessarily create a ton of jobs for a ton of people, because one coach could only
handle so many people.
So I like looking at this future that you're probably helping to create, where there's
a lot of people who have this really cool job, and even though it doesn't scale like
to a crazy amount per person, that's actually better for the world, because there's more
people who can do it.
It's been really key for how we're thinking about building the product.
A lot of the companies that are currently in the space around coaching, they sort of
hide the coaches behind their product, and so you can't actually tell who's on the platform.
The people that are on the platform can't build an audience, they can't build a following,
they can't figure out how to scale themselves.
And so we think a really important thing that's missing right now from the coaching space
is the ability to have a creative-oriented platform or a passion-economy-oriented platform
that enables them to build their brand, build their audience, figure out how they want to
grow their business.
All of that feels like it's missing today, and if we build this three-sided marketplace
in the right way, we'll be able to provide that platform to coaches and help them grow
their business based on the phase that they're currently at.
Cool.
It's kind of, if you don't go that way, you'll probably eventually be out-competed by someone
who does.
If you're a coach choosing to join, do I want to join this platform where I'm like this
faceless cog in the machine that no one gets to see and I have no individuality and no
ability to grow?
Or do I want to join this other one where I can be rewarded in proportion to how much
I put into it?
And the obvious answer is the second one.
Well, that's super inspiring stuff, and I'm going to follow your story to see where things
go, and maybe I'll have a side gig as a coach at some point in the future.
To close out here, I would love to hear one piece of advice each of you has for the struggling
beginning entrepreneurs listening to this podcast.
It could be anything.
It doesn't need to be the most important piece of advice.
Maybe something specific to you that has helped you that you think other sort of aspiring
founders would benefit from hearing.
I think one piece of advice that I've learned doing this and going from managing a big team
to just me and Victoria in a room trying to figure this out is being at that early stage,
it's definitely challenging.
There's definitely anxiety associated with it, but it's also an advantage.
If you plan it out in the right way, you can move really quickly.
If things change, if you get new information, you can change direction.
There's so many no-code tools now that you can build really fast, especially for people
that are coming from a larger company and going into you for the first time, just reminding
yourself every day that the phase that you're in is not a disadvantage.
It's actually an advantage.
Some of the constraints that you have give you the ability to work a lot faster, to be
a lot more agile than the bigger players in the space, and just being grateful for that,
being cognizant of the advantages there has been helpful for me as we think about how
do we want to approach this to make sure we're making the right decisions and not trying
to scale, trying to spend, trying to hire before we're ready because there's so much
pressure.
Both there's internal pressure, there's pressure from investors, there's pressure just from
going on Twitter and seeing that someone raised $100 million and now has 200 people at their
company to actually grow, but when you're at this stage, being small, being nimble is
an incredible advantage and it makes sense to try to take as much advantage of that as
possible before you start to scale and you have more momentum and it becomes harder to
actually turn the ship.
I think that's such an interesting point and there's so much that's tempting to copy from
people who are ahead of you.
You see the big companies or the people who've raised more money or who have more customers.
They're doing this.
I want to feel all grown up and do that.
You don't realize that that thing is actually worse than what you do as a startup.
For example, they have all these processes to scale the fact that nobody at their company
has the time or it's not efficient for them to talk to customers one-on-one and so they
just do those automated surveys and stuff like, I should have automated surveys.
It's like, no, that's way worse than you talking to customers one-on-one and they have to do
that because they're so big that they can't do the thing that's advantageous and so nine
times out of 10, it's a mistake to copy what you see people further ahead of you doing.
Very cool.
Maria Ravi, thank you so much for coming on the IndiaX podcast and talking to me about
your journey and your business.
Thank you for having us.
This was so much fun, Cortland.
Thank you.
I would love it if you'd tell listeners where to go to find out more about what you're up
to at Scale Hire.
I know each of you individually, blogs and tweets and stuff, so where can people find
out more about you?
You can go to scalehire.com and we have information about the guided sprints.
We're currently taking applications.
We have a wait list, but we're accepting people off of the wait list as we grow the programs
and add more coaches to the platform.
You can also find us on LinkedIn at Scale Hire.
We're running live coaching sessions for people who want to get a taste of what coaching looks
like to people who want to learn more about the coaches that we have at Scale right now.
You can stay up to date by following us on LinkedIn.
We're also on Twitter at Scale underscore Hire and then Ravi and myself are on Twitter
as well.
You can find us at Ravi underscore meta and the HTA and then Victoria H. Young, Y-O-U-N-G.
All right.
Thanks a lot, guys.