Hey there! I'm Ankur Nagpal, founder of Teachable. AMA 👇

@chrismessina Tbh, since we're distributed (a la Shopify) vs a centralized marketplace, we don't spend a ton of time dwelling on what other topics we "need" to have a well rounded repository of content What I will say though is I've been blown away by the long tail of profitable content -- we've had an instructor make 6 figures+ teaching on how to solve copper deficiency in goats !

@sarahadowney Hard to pick a single controversial course -- some have been truly awful but not controversial since they promoted violence against minorities etc. but as an organization we've had the hardest time with the entire genre of pick up artistry / "seduction" In general, we've tried to operate with the guiding principle of "lets not make this a platform for the thoughts and opinions of people we agree with" since that's a super slippery slope -- at the same time, when you have content that is triggering violence against a minority group, history also isn't too kind to that so we take action in those cases. And then there's rules that our 3rd party providers have -- for instance, we have to take down courses with nudity because Wistia / Stripe / other people we rely on require us to, but we're totally fine with any kind of sexual content without nudity. We've operationalized this by : 1 - Everytime there is a sale, it's reviewed by our Fraud team -- honestly, most checking to see if there actually is content - it's not money laundering etc 2 - If questions have been asked / there are questions about the content, it goes to a Content Standards Committee comprised of different parts of the co. who end up taking the final decision

@g3mo I have actually! This thread is best for it : https://twitter.com/ankurnagpal/...

@jpmarindiaz Twitter DM is best ! I read almost every one (even if I can't reply to every single one)

@pitchprof Our first investor ever was @brezina who I met in person + along with I'd estimate a third or so of our first round investors -- then again, this was in 2015 I don't think it matters too much today -- particularly for your first round of funding Now being on the other side of it, I almost exclusively end up investing in companies before meeting them BUT I'm an old school kinda person so I try pretty hard to meet up with the founders in the next year or so after investing in person make everything feel real

@marcaime We already support Zapier -- and via Zapier you can connect to almost anything else ! In fact, we already have many thousands of our active customers using our Zapier integration Any requests for future integrations ?

@ankurnagpal Sorry, I forgot you had it, just was frustrated with the limited abilities of it (I was hoping to being able to do more advanced email automations) and so disregarded it. Any timeline for bringing email automations whether directly or via Zapier?

@garzuaga outlined a lot of our thinking here: https://medium.com/teachable/tea... the TL;DR is we thought our opportunity by partnering together was far greater than by going solo and Hotmart was really the only company where it made sense since we had so much in common and nothing but massive respect for the founders JP + Mateus

@ankurnagpal thx for replying. Interesting that from Latinamerica they grew larger, lots of food for thought when it comes to new opportunities. Cheers,

@mgaffneyny Maybe I'm a boomer but we always operated Teachable in a way that we were ~3-6 months away from not hiring anyone to be profitable -- so never profitable, and being profitable wasn't our goal but being within touching distance of it allowed me to sleep well at night It isn't realistic for every single business -- but for us, it was the right balance between raising venture money when we could but having full control of our destiny As a result, it allowed us to have minimal dilution while raising rounds (our most recent round ~2 years before acq. was $4M on a $130M premoney) and having full board control

@benadamsky Came to ask the same. Do you think we'll see a lot people leave traditional jobs to become full-time creators, or will it be a passion project / side hustle?

@benadamsky Very optimistic Never before in history have so many people (50M+) started to earn a living in a somewhat similar manner... in this case, building an audience online and directly earning money from it. This is happening across geographies too We're in the first innings here, and this space we'll keep evolving as these creator businesses start to look more like businesses, and the entire suite of tools and products have to be reinvented

@benadamsky @namehra Yeah I think this whole idea of full time employment, 40 hour work week, going to the office etc etc is a relic of the industrial age 1 job is as arbitrary as 0 or 2 -- it's just the default standard we've settled on today, but will become less of a standard with time

@ankurnagpal Couldn't agree more! :)

@jerrin_joy1 First ~100 -- manual hustle, cold outreach, copying and pasting the same message to lots of people, largely from Udemy Next ~900 -- lots of direct response marketing , particularly leveraging our customers who also ended up being influencers to use their audience to get us more customers. We got very, very good at live webinars Wouldnt change a thing -- in fact, help a lot of portfolio companies do the same thing

@jerrin_joy1 Broke down the strategy in more detail here: https://twitter.com/ankurnagpal/...

@jerrin_joy1 That's always the hard part isn't it? Starting out. Without clients, how do you attract others to come for the network effect. Teachable is a great product.

@alexharris Very old school! Customer #1 was @conradwa who sat next to me for the first 2 years. Customer #2 came to our NYC office frequently to talk about the product. etc. Most early customers had my cell phone number (many still do!) and we had a super small active Facebook community that our team spent most of our time in. We had Friday happy hours where our customers were invited to come in and hang with the team, and we really did as much as we could to maximize surface area

@conradwa @ankurnagpal Sounds like you were "doing things that don't scale"

@share9app We invest 100% on vibes, jk We've shared a lot about what makes us different on our website: http://vibe.vc Strongly believe that small, operator funds will outperform -- and we've tried to do everything we can to rig the odds in our favor (for instance, charging 0 management fees and investing ~everything~ into companies) We'll see where it lands but our current fund is already at a 2.29x TVPI and candidly, I'm optimistic for 5x+ but who the hell knows where these things end up

@share9app I'm hugely bullish on businesses that help people create communities - every one of our successful creators was creating a community along with their business. I'm very biased re: the community company that has the most upside as I was was the first investor in Circle (http://circle.so) and have continued to invest at every opportunity since then (3 times) -- @sidyadav and team have been executing brilliantly Will answer the Creator Economy q somewhere else as its come up there as well

@share9app I wouldn't deviate from the already established norm -- which is typically a ~10 year fund (extendable by 1-2 years) This is a very LONG time but it's designed like this for a reason. YMMV on what the right % to allocate to it is but it would be money I wouldn't need for a decade or so -- which for a lot of people is 5-10%. For me, it's much higher, but that's largely due to my personal life circumstances For what the benchmarks on percentiles area, I'd look up the data available for the entire venture fund asset class and benchmark against that -- the first thing you'll learn is it varies a lot by "vintage" i.e. the year the fund was started as the macroeconomic conditions play a huge role

@vibe_cap Come to CDMX and we'll do it this weekend

@vibe_cap @ankurnagpal you know very well as a non-corporeal entity we can't travel outside the united states. let us know when you're back stateside