Ankur Nagpal Sells Teachable.com for $250 million
The Our Future Podcast is new and amazing. Its hosts Michael Sikand and Simran Sandhu sold their media startup to Morning Brew and now do pods focused on young entrepreneurs.
It’s an interesting pod as everyone they cover has done great things in a small amount of time.
Episode #8 covers Ankur Nagpal who sold Teachable.com for a quarter of a billion when he was 31 (he owned approximately half the company at the time)!
Here are the highlights:
Went to Berkley and met lots of people in Silicon Valley, said it’s easy to meet people when you’re young
Created Facebook apps which provided enough money for him to take some time off
Tried around 10 different ideas but only one worked “Shit’s just hard”, thought a 1 in 10 batting average is fine
Had a course on Udemy and was making $2k/month but didn’t like it so started Teachable
Udemy was a marketplace like Amazon, but Teachable was a platform like Shopify where creators drove all the traffic but only had to pay a flat fee
Teachable was the only business he had that continued to work and grow, he wasn’t passionate about courses, just enjoyed building the business
Raised $12 million in funds, including from Naval, but had $9 million in the bank when they sold (capital light and conservative)
Thinks people should try more things and kill ideas that aren’t working
Took three years to get to $1 million in annual recurring revenue
They could never get paid ads to work well so they didn’t spend a lot of money on ads
The payment processing part of the business was larger than the creator monthly fees when they sold the business
Thought courses are super saturated now and noted sales are down year over year
1/3 of their customers never made a sale
Best growth hack early was figuring out how to use people’s user name and password to log into Udemy and grab all their courses so it was easy for them to transfer over
Biggest competition was crappy WordPress sites
Didn’t even know Kajabi (major competitor who started before them) existed until 2-3 years into the business
Ankur is now growing his next company Ocho.com where he is democratizing finance and tax advice for founders:
A solo 401(K) can defer $66k per year in taxes
Qualified Small Business Stock where you register as a C Corp and hold stock for 5 years can allow you to not pay tax on your first $10 million when you sell
Strategies exist to grow this to $30-40 million
Thinks the best time to start the strategy is between a Series A and B
Can help any business owner with over $200k in profit per year