404: The Most Creative Teaching Business That I’ve Ever Seen With Kalyan Mazumder

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You’re listening to the My Web Creator Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today I my friend Kalyan on the show and every now and then I interview an entrepreneur who has a truly novel and amazing idea. Now don’t get me wrong, everyone I interview is special, but Kalyan’s company Prep Medians is fricking amazing. And you’ll know what I mean as soon as you check out his business, enjoy this interview. But before we begin, I want to thank Clearview for sponsoring this episode.

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Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my e-commerce store and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who is shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customer depending on what they bought, piece of cake.

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and there’s full revenue tracking in every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Posts Group for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source in my e-commerce store,

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and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce, and e-commerce is their only focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too, and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

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And then finally, I want to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I’m happy to have Calion Ray Mazumdar on the show. Now Calion is someone who I recently met at a mastermind meetup and I’m really happy that we met. He runs prepmedians.com where he helps kids crush the SATs and ACTs. And when I heard about his business, I was all over it because I want my kids to do well in all standardized tests. So here’s a quick confession. I’ve been having my kids study vocab and math.

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for the SATs since the fifth grade, but they hate it. And my attitude for the longest time was just tell them to suck it up because I started studying for the SATs in the fourth grade. Now, Calion on the other hand, teaches SAT and ACT skills in a wildly entertaining way. He uses sketch comedy videos with real Broadway actors to help kids master every topic. And it is literally the most creative way to teach that I’ve ever seen.

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And I love it. They’ve helped millions of students around the world achieve dream scores. And today we’re to talk about how he started this incredible business and how he’s grown it. And with that, welcome show, Calion. How are doing, man? Thanks so much for having me, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be here. You know, what’s funny is, yeah, I mean, when I grew up, like my parents forced me to do this every day. So, you know, a little bit each day. So I’d study vocab during the week and then they test me on the weekends.

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And then I didn’t get a chance to go out to play with my friends sometimes. And I just hated the whole process. And I just think your system is so much better. But what I want you to do is I want the background story. How did you get into this business and what is your background actually? Sure. And I completely agree with you. It’s some kind of rite of passage hazing procedure that most kids have to go through when they’re young. know, my mom used to…

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make me do summer workbooks when all the other kids were out there playing. And I guess in the end it paid off, but it was definitely a form of torture at the time. But yeah, so I had basically always been fascinated by the interface between education, entertainment, and psychology. And so I started studying theater and psychology at Yale University for my undergrad.

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And then when I graduated, I went out to New York City and started acting off Broadway and independent film, television. And at the same time I was tutoring. And the tutoring was way better than what a lot of my friends had to do to pay their bills, which was serving. And that industry is really, really difficult. But for me, I was able to sit with students who were high school students. know, I wasn’t that much older than them and kind of lead them through some of the different

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strategies and skills and things like that, and kind of become this role model for them, older brother of sorts that that helped them do really well on their test. And there was an interesting thing that happened in both my acting and my education career, where there was an overlap as well as a parallel time for divergence. And so the overlap was that

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I found that students were actually becoming more engaged when I brought my acting to the classroom because you had these students who couldn’t memorize a quadratic formula or grammar rule, but they can memorize a Drake song or a scene from their favorite Seth Rogen movie. So I figured why not put the two together and then lo and behold, they would learn it. And so I taught the quadratic formula as a Drake rap and they learned the quadratic formula.

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And that translated to incredible success on their SATs and ACTs. And I loved education. And at the same time, what was interesting was in my entertainment career, I was starting to progress and was doing some cool work. But I found actually that as I got an agent and a manager and was auditioning for more mainstream television, I was being typecast. I was actually

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continuously getting auditions that I’d be really excited about. And I would find out it was a terrorist audition. And so as a brown actor, I was not really looking to continue to propagate that stereotype. So on the education side, I was also starting to hit a little bit of a ceiling. And what I found was that I loved the work I was doing, as I mentioned, but I was contributing to inequity in the system because I was working with one type of student who had

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a very, very high income. And as it stands, on average, a higher income student will perform 29 percentile points higher than a lower income student on average, again, as I mentioned on the ACT, for example. So it was something that I was making good money, but I wasn’t feeling fulfilled. And I felt like there was just a handful of different problems in both realms. So I wanted to figure out a way that I could democratize test prep.

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access and then also bring my background as an entertainer to bear to help more students. And so I left New York City. I went to Chicago where I got my MBA at University of Chicago. And the goal was to build a company that did exactly what prep medians does, which is it’s founded upon the principle that all students deserve to laugh and learn. And when I was in my second year out of two of my MBA,

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I launched this company with an incredible team of people and we’ve hit the ground running ever since. It launched in April, 2019 and we have a few different channels that we can talk about, but basically we’ve been able to actualize that goal because we work with nonprofits and public schools where low-income students can access our resources. And we work also direct to consumer through various social media channels. And so students who may have more income, but may have felt

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disengaged by traditional means of learning like books and things like that can also access our materials and do really well. So it’s been a dream come true. I love that. I’m just kind of curious. So you would literally sing and dance for your people that you were tutoring? Yes. Yes, I remember it was not only a means of getting them to learn, but I also remembered that if they performed well, one of the carrots I would use was I would learn their favorite rap.

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And I would perform that for them. That’s awesome. I am curious, and this is kind of random question, but did you feel like getting an MBA was necessary? It’s actually a really good question. So for what I’ve done, it was necessary, but I don’t think it’s necessary for all entrepreneurs. And I’ll dive into that a little bit more detail. So for me, it was really necessary because I needed seed capital.

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to be able to build this company. And thus far we’ve raised a million dollars in seed capital. And where I was coming from in New York city, I didn’t have a network that I could rely upon to draw that seed capital from. So the biggest boon of getting my MBA was having this incredible network where I could reach out to different people and raise that capital because our platform, as you can imagine,

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from the software to the high quality videos that feature Broadway actors and Hollywood production, it was an extremely high upfront fixed cost. And so I needed to fund that in a certain way. And that was one of the biggest things. from, you know, the aspect of the actual learning of the marketing and strategy and finance and things like that, I think there are ways such as with your podcast that people can learn marketing and they can watch YouTube videos. And there are much, much

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lower cost ways, many more lower cost ways that people can learn this that without getting MBA. I think my advice is always to entrepreneurs when they ask about the MBA, I say, what do you want to build and what are you trying to get out of it? Because if you need to raise capital, you want to build a network. I think it’s a really great way to build one. If you’re going to go to a top MBA program, if you’re just looking for the skills, I think that there are lower cost ways to do that. If you’re looking to switch careers,

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And you want to go into a more corporate America role or a consulting role or a banking role, then I do think that an MBA is really necessary. So it ultimately depends in my particular situation. I’m really glad that I did it. Of course, the student loans are still sitting there. Right. But yeah. I was curious then, what was your biggest expense in starting this? I would say certainly the content library. We…

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spared no costs when it came to making this as engaging as possible. I think one of the things that’s interesting about what we’ve built and that I’m particularly proud of is there are many different companies that try to make learning fun for students. And I think a lot of companies do to varying degrees. But the truth of the matter is that especially with the

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school, the teenage demographic who are probably the most critical demographic on the planet when it comes to what’s entertaining or not, there really needs to be an investment in creating high quality, funny material for them. And I’ve actually spoken to really successful entrepreneurs who focus on the K through six market, kindergarten through sixth grade. And I’ve asked them, why haven’t you gone into high school? And they’ve said to me,

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It’s too difficult. It’s not easy to get a teenager to laugh and to find what you’re doing funny. Most of the time they find it corny or cheesy or so forth. So what I thought was, okay, the way that we’re going to build a competitive mode is by having a brand that really resonates with teenagers. And the best way to do that is to build high quality content that is culturally relevant to them. And that was something that we invested a lot in.

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So did you write all the scripts yourself? So the first flight of content, which was the English content, I did. Yes. I got feedback from my wife, who’s actually a creative producer and the director was also helpful in shaping a lot of it. But it was pretty much me after class going and sitting in my office or, I I say office, I mean, the living room of my one bedroom apartment.

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and or the upstairs area in the building we were in and just grueling, just driving away at typing and typing and typing and trying to make this work. that many, many sleepless nights building the content of the library. The second time when we built the math reading and science, then I hired both a former tutor from the company I work at and also a math comedian, a professional math comedian who helped.

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There’s such thing as a math comedian. That’s amazing. Yes. It’s really funny. Also, it was someone who was introduced to me by someone in my MBA network. I guess another, another way that that came to fruition. I’m just wondering if you could have pulled this off without taking funding is kind of what I was getting at. You know, I couldn’t have built the tech software.

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without the funding and that in itself was six figures right there. As well as I couldn’t have paid it. Basically what it would have looked like without funding was repurposing a Wix or Weebly that was basically just a library for video, maybe even just making a YouTube channel page and filming a lot with my iPhone of just kind of me.

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maybe wearing some different wigs and things like that, which is a far cry from what we were able to build. And I think truthfully, there are other people in the marketplace doing the former thing I described, which was the, or the, the, doing it. And, I’ve seen them try to monetize on tick tock and other platforms and it doesn’t end up working. And so they, they kind of pivot. So yeah.

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And for everyone listening, like the production quality on Calion’s videos, it’s just amazing. Thank you. And the quality of the actors is just amazing also. mean, clearly they’re all professionals, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Broadway actors and sketch comedians. mean, there are times on set where, because the second flight of content I co-wrote, I was, the host, so the educational part of it, but I also do some skits and act in different moments.

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and I directed it and produced it. And I was wearing these different hats, but even then I couldn’t stop, but corpse is what they call it when you crack up. You see it a lot on SNL, you’re just in the middle of a scene and you start laughing. I mean, these people are, they’re brilliant. They’re brilliant comedians. It’s incredible. So given that it was, you raised money, how did you test your idea before you got started? Like, how did you know there was demand for this?

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Yeah, yeah, it’s great. It’s a great question. You know, I think there was definitely market research insofar as what are the different competitors out there doing. And as I mentioned, there were a lot of edutainment resources in the K through six space. And we know that high school students by and large are, especially with the pandemic, finding

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traditional means of education to be less relevant. You have this burgeoning age of digital entrepreneurship where everyone wants to be an influencer. Everyone wants to forget college and think about, and when I say everyone, being of course a little bit. A lot of people are seeing that you can create a career where, as your company suggests, one of your partners quits their job because your career is taken off and you’re

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you’re using the tools that are available to you and your personality and that’s shining through. And I think what I, where I was standing was, look, most people I know who are successful in their thirties onwards, if you ask them what the equation of the slope of a line is, they wouldn’t be able to tell you. And I think that of course, education

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and the math content and the grammar content is so important, not only from a standpoint of it shapes your mind and allows you to become a more critical problem solver, but also the grammar and things like that are useful for people for their life, even if they’re not an academics. And I’m not saying that people who are 30 plus should remember what the equation of a slope of line is, but I want to make sure that if you’re a high school student,

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that you don’t just check out because it feels so inaccessible. It feels as though the materials that are in front of you, the dense book or the person who is tutoring you who may not be super passionate about tutoring you that you’re just finding a block and you’re unable to pass that. What I want to make sure is that the students who have this raw potential and actually could do really well, or at least could do well enough to feel confident to be able to pursue a college degree or

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a life thereafter where they have to incorporate academic caliber into what they’re doing, that they have the opportunity to access this material and that they feel like, okay, wow, I’m more capable than I realized. And so for me, seeing the gap in the marketplace of high school, that there weren’t these educationally entertaining materials, talking to my students,

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whom I had tutored and realizing that what set me apart as a tutor was the fact that I was bringing my acting background to bear, made it clear to me that there was a need and a gap for something like prep medians. And then of course, the testing that came into play of is software, basically I run a SaaS company, is it going to be sufficient enough to actually impact students? And that was something that we began to test

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On our first launch, that’s why we focused on just launching the English was because we just wanted to see, it work? We built mechanisms into the platform where we able to see that based on pre-video quiz sets that, and then you watch the video and then post-video quiz sets and pilot studies that we ran with nonprofits and students that we were actually even more effective than we realized we would be. We ran pilot studies against Khan Academy where we saw we were two and a half times more effective than Khan Academy.

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We saw that there was a statistically significant 9 % increase from the pre-video to post-video question sets. So student watches a video once, automatically there’s a 9 % increase in their quiz scores. And that goes up as they review the materials, as they come back and redo question sets. So that was the moment where, you know, the million dollars, we didn’t raise it all up upfront. We raised about 300K upfront, saw that it was working, saw that there was a real appetite for it. And then we continued to raise and build.

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If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

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Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

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And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. I guess that makes more sense. So before you raised any money though, I guess your validation was the people that you tutor already. You knew that, you know, they were entertained by the way you were tutoring and you just wanted to replicate that on a mass scale, essentially.

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That’s exactly right. And I did a lot of customer discovery interviews where I reached out to students to and parents, because at the end of the day, for the most part of the direct consumer side, the parents are the purchasers, but the students are the users. So I wanted to understand buying habits. wanted to understand pain points. wanted to understand discovery and to make sure that there would be a way that we could build a marketing funnel and price it properly that it would.

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and that it would be a compelling enough value proposition that it would compel people to purchase it and that they would get value out of it. I mean, we’re going to get to that for sure, but I want to next talk about, I mean, you have this great product now. How do you get it in the hands of customers? How do people discover you? Sure. So as I mentioned before, there’s two major channels that we work with the business of business B2B side and then business to consumer B2C side. And I’ll talk

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about the business to business side quickly, and then I’ll spend more time on the business to consumer side. The business to business side, when we’re selling to nonprofits and public schools, what’s great about that is it helps us fulfill our social mission, which is that we want to be able to access the low income students, but it also is monetizable insofar as the low income students aren’t paying for it, but the schools and the nonprofits are paying for it. And what we’ve seen work the best there

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is I actually went through a phase where I built up a sales team and was trying to call schools and speak to guidance counselors. It’s a very, very difficult sales process because the decision makers aren’t always the ones that you’re actually going to be able to reach over a phone. what I found was that actually by going to conferences and speaking to the decision makers directly, that was the best way to start to get that going. then

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The same with nonprofits. found that if I had a connection to someone who was working at an affiliate chapter of a nonprofit, because these are often national nonprofits, but they have local chapters. If I knew someone who knew someone at a local chapter, that was the best way into working with the local chapter. Then we would run a pilot study. We would show that the local chapter was getting great efficacy with our product. And then they would refer us to other.

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affiliates across the nation. So that’s kind of the growth trajectory on the business to business side. Which side of the business generates more revenue? Business to consumer, I would say. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. I’m actually really excited because I’m going to some conferences this year now that we’re kind of getting back to in person. And now we have the full product built out. And we’ve also actually, beyond the SAT, ACT, we’ve built out a grammar library, built out a pre algebra library, we’re working on a geometry library.

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I think that the business of business is going to really blow up this year because now we have the full product and the last two years, most of the time we’ve been out, it’s been COVID. And so there’s just been a real disarray in the, understandably it’s no one’s fault, in the way that schools have been able to consistently purchase new products and things like that. So.

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I think that’s going be big this year. And it’s something where no longer are we just an SAT, ACT product for the schools where they have to have a prep line item. Now we can actually sell to say, Hey, you can incorporate our pre-algebra library into your classroom. can incorporate your grammar, our grammar library into English classrooms and so forth. So that I’m really excited about seeing growth up there. You know, I I’m just thinking to myself, like with your lessons, it makes

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teacher is almost, you know, it’s taking away some of their purpose. That’s the wrong way to say it, but you’re much more entertained than any teacher that I’ve ever had. I think, so I appreciate that. I think that it becomes a different relationship in a sense, right? It becomes the teachers with their incredible app is the accountability mechanism. They’re able to say, okay, this student who may not typically do their homework,

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here is this incredible resource for you. I am here if you have any questions that pop up and things like that, but this is going to be really engaging for you. And then my job becomes making sure that you fit it in to your schedule and you get it done. And my job also becomes everything around it. And so what it does, I think this is, this is what you’re basically saying is that it takes a little bit of the pressure off of them to make sure that they have to be the most engaging. Right.

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entertaining resource in the classroom. Whereas maybe what they got into teaching for with what they love about it is that they can help students because of that more personal relationship they have with the students that I don’t have with the students. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can tell you that the material that schools have grossly needs a refresh because it’s a lot of the stuff that my kids tell me about was filmed in like the 60s or 70s. Yeah, they watch so yes. And

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It’s actually a great point. mean, we grew up with schoolhouse rock. Yeah. And you know, that’s something that I mean, students still watch that sometimes. And I think what’s interesting is COVID in a way helped catalyze the transformation from print to digital. And now it’ll be interesting to see how that continues because there’s

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And this has become more hyper-specific to a specific district or school and the leadership there. If in the return, there’s more of a doubling down on what was there before, i.e. the print, that’s something that some people are doing because it feels safer, whereas others are saying, no, we really need to continue to work with virtual resources. And I’m seeing a lot more

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of that happening, which is exciting. And I mean, that’s a whole other conversation where we can get into a flipped classroom model. Well, let’s switch gears to the consumer side. How do you attract just regular people? Totally. So the coolest part of what we get to do is in a way, it’s funny, I’m using my acting in my marketing now more than I ever did when I was

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actually trying to quote unquote become an actor because one of the biggest channels for us is TikTok. So right now most of what we do and the way we reach consumers is social media plain and simple. We used primarily TikTok, Instagram and YouTube for students and Google ads for people who are typing in keywords that are specific to our platform. And then Facebook we’re starting to use for parents.

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Of those, our biggest channel is definitely TikTok. have 350,000 followers on there and our average post gets about 200,000 views. And of course, just the way the mechanism is built, it’s not that every post is getting 200,000 views. We have a lot that go viral and then others that I’ve actually now begun to design to focus a little bit more on depth of impact of the viewer rather than just breath.

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Can we talk about your TikTok strategy? Yeah, definitely. So, you know, I think what was interesting is we went through this phase of 2020 where SATs and ACTs were optional for college admissions and honestly just kept getting canceled. And so you saw this continuous element of detachment that, as you mentioned, and I mentioned when we were growing up, it’s like

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fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, you’re starting and you’re getting ready for this big onerous test that you’re going to take in 11th grade. And there was a little bit of a shift away from that. And what I thought to myself at the time was I can either be the company that keeps trying to beat a dead horse and say, Hey, you got to take the SAT, you to take the SAT, you got to take the SAT to try to get sales. Or what I can really focus on.

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is building brand equity during this time and becoming a trusted resource of what the best moves are. And so I did the latter and I focused on 2020 and 2021 really on getting Gen Z to trust prep medians and putting out content that may in the short run have hurt our bottom line by saying, Hey, here’s who should take the SAT. Here’s who should, might not want to take the SAT. Here’s

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what you should do with the SAT scores. Here’s how you should think about it. Here’s how you might want to prep or not prep for it. And just having a really honest conversation. And I think that that’s really helped because the students who saw us go through that transformation and be honest with them trusted us. And there was a really big bond that was built with the community. And now they might not have purchased, but they’re referring their friends who are younger or their siblings to our platform or to our TikTok followership.

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I’m starting to see that that’s really starting to pay off more. And I think right now what I’ve been working on with the TikTok strategy is there’s an element where with TikTok, you have to play this balance between what’s going to go viral and what is actually going to develop a loyal following that will actualize purchases. And

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I’ve danced between the two recently. And of course there’s this whole other element of like, what’s your ego and oh, you want to see all the views and all that kind of thing. But it, and it really has to be a delicate balance I’ve found because as I mentioned before, there are people who have more followers who have more views consistently and so forth, but I’m not seeing the monetization happen. And that’s because there’s not the same depth of impact of trust, of demonstrating credibility as someone who

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can teach the SAT whom you would want to have as your tutor and so forth. So ultimately the TikTok strategy right now is to grow an audience that is deeply engaged with prep medians and trusts it. I was gonna ask you, is your audience primarily parents or kids? Yeah, on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, it’s primarily kids. And this is another differentiating factor for us versus

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Kaplan’s and the Princeton Review’s of the world, those companies will spend an incredible amount of money on attracting parents. It’s a huge customer acquisition cost for parents. then the parent sees their ad or follows them on Instagram or whatever, or you Facebook, and then they go to the platform and then they try to, and then Kaplan or Princeton Review tries to get the parent to become someone who purchases their tutoring services. so there’s a greater lifetime value because you’re purchasing not

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just a program that’s online, but you’re purchasing tutoring services or classroom services and so forth. For me, I recognize that my lifetime value is smaller. So I needed my customer acquisition costs to be smaller in order to be a profitable business. And what I thought the best way to do to start off the company was, is to do organic marketing, focusing on teenagers and getting teenagers engaged. Because if teenagers come to our platform and they love our product and

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We then email the parents because we asked the teenager, what’s the email of your parent? We’ll try and get them to buy the product for you at a discount. Now the parent has an email coming from us and their kids saying to the parent, hey, this is a really cool SAT resource. And I’ve already improved my score XYZ on the free trial. Could I get this? And now the parent is like, oh my God, you’re telling me you want to prep for the SAT?

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I think it becomes a much easier purchase cycle for that regard. So that’s been actually our goal is to engage the student and have the student in a way become the ambassador, the sales rep for getting the parents purchased. That’s interesting because I cannot imagine my kids asking me to buy them an SAT prep class. that the traditional path of customer acquisition for you? Yes. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. It’s the kid.

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comes to our platform, they sign up for a free trial, they get to do a free module, it’s our partial speech module, and they take a pre-video quiz set, they watch the video, they take a post-video quiz set, and they see automatic improvement typically. And we randomize the questions before and after, so we’re not stacking the deck in favor or not in favor of success. And the students see that statistically significant 9 % increase and…

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They review the module and so we have how entertaining was this one to five stars? And we’ve typically seen a 4.8 out of five, which is wild for teenagers rating an educational resource that’s 4.8 out of five on entertainment. And then if they give five stars for that, depending on how educational it is out of five stars and then how confident they were out of five stars and they write a little what they liked about it, what they didn’t like about it.

35:56
that to the parents and we say, your kid rated our modules five out of five on entertaining five out of five on education. And they said what they loved about it was that they felt like they were engaged the whole time and that they were actually learning the material like they hadn’t learned before. And then the parents like, whoa. have no doubt that that’s true, but I’m just thinking to myself that must have that’s gotta be a really driven student to do all this stuff on their own. Right.

36:23
to go ahead and try out the platform. Try out the platform, take the test. I I it myself. It was amazingly entertaining, but it did take me like good 20 minutes, I would say, maybe longer. So I think that it’s a really good question because basically there are ways that you can kind of create a platform where it’s almost like a whimsical purchase, right? Like they haven’t tried out.

36:51
the thing, but they’re like, I guess I should prep and they just purchased it. And then maybe they never use it after that. And then there’s this where we want them to try out the module before they purchase it. 99 % of the time they’re trying out the module before they purchase it. And I think what I’ve come to realize is that again, thinking about the longer term revenue building and company building is the students who are early adopters are

37:20
in essence, a little bit more self-driven. And the platform at the end of the day is more self-paced. It’s up to the student to go through all the modules. We give them lesson plans. We tell them exactly what they should be doing and what days based on how many weeks they have until their test. But realistically, if the student isn’t able to do that, then they’re not necessarily the right fit for the platform. they have a tutor or they have a teacher or someone who can help.

37:49
and still accountability. But I think what’s been interesting also is because of the way we’re doing it on TikTok, it exemplifies the way we’d be teaching on the platform. And a lot more students seem excited by that and seem like they’re, you know, if you get a student who loves acting or singing or performing or comedy in general, a lot of students love these days, there’s something that’s engaging for them. they, and they go to the platform app to that.

38:19
And just to kind of describe Calion’s TikToks, I think I watch a TikTok of yours where you just whipped out some interesting math fact or shortcut. Yes. And it was really entertaining. And as an adult, I got something out of it. I love that. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think go back to your TikTok strategy question. It’s, it’s, I really want to make sure everything I put out there is brand resonant.

38:48
And that means it’s got to be entertaining and educational. And so one of the things that we love, for example, is I’ll use this. I’ve created this character named Thornton and I use a sound that’s trending, which is from Thanos from the Marvel movies. And he says something like, no, reality can be whatever I want. And I’ll use some kind of math back on it. And I’ll use the face effect to stretch my face. And it’s a seven second video, which means that

39:17
The student is watching and reading the text and TikTok’s biggest algorithm hack is watch time. That’s the thing that they track the most beyond likes, comments, shares, anything. It’s just watch time. And what happens is if you put a five to seven second video in there, you got text on it, the student or person reading or watching it, what reads the text and the video is playing over and over again, it takes them maybe 20 seconds to read the text. And now you’ve gotten

39:47
at least five views out of that. And the same person. it tricks the algorithm into, wow, this is a super engaging content. And now it’s going viral. And that’s something I’ve noticed a lot. I’ve seen TikToks where like the whole page is text for something that you really want to learn about. And you got to watch it like five times just to get through all that text. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah.

40:13
Presumably, don’t remember seeing any calls to action in your videos or people just looking at your profile and just finding you there or Googling you. Yeah. So this is an interesting thing that’s been going on that I’ve struggled with. And I know a lot of creators who struggle with, you go to these creator meetups with TikTok right now, if you comment on a post that you’ve created and you say something like, Hey, if you love this, click the link in bio.

40:43
And you can start a free trial on primedmunions.com. If you write link and bio as the grammatically correct and spelling correct, L-I-N-K space I-N space V-I-O. It’d be really bad if I misspelled that right now, by the way. You’re a fraud. No. If you write it that way, it’ll actually, the platform will block your content. So students won’t see it. And.

41:11
So I have to end up writing link and bio is L Y N C space I N space B one zero. And it looks really funky. It almost looks like it’s a bot or something that’s writing it, but that’s the only way that they, the common doesn’t get blocked. So I have to put that into the common in the post and inside the video itself, what I’ll do is in the caption, I’ll put a call to action that’s properly spelled. I’ll say free trial in the Lincoln bio for prep meetings.com.

41:43
And in the video, I won’t put a call to action directly because again, watch time matters so much. And what I’ve noticed is if I put a call to action at the end of a video, it doesn’t go as far. And so what I’ve done is make sure that I utilize the caption as well as the comment and pin the comment for the Lincoln bio. And I’ve seen that that has actually driven a lot of traffic towards the Lincoln bio.

42:13
I’ll also in the bio description itself, I’ll say, where the prep comedians follow to crush high school. And then I’ll put these arrows pointing down to the link. And I say 11th graders, click the link. Because if you’re an 11th grader, you’re like, whoa, I’m an 11th grader. What’s in that link? And you’re more likely to click it versus if you give away what’s in the link beforehand, I found that that’s been less. Yeah.

42:39
I’ve heard anecdotally, like if you just mention even a URL or click whatever, your video gets nerfed. Cause they have transcriptions of all the videos, right? Yes. Yeah. And what’s interesting is it’s actually, it’s pretty wild. Cause when you’re creating a video and you’re on TikTok, you’re like, Oh, I mean, maybe they can read the text that I put onto the video or maybe they can read the caption, but their search has gotten so good that you can type in words in the search.

43:09
on TikTok and you’ll actually see that the video doesn’t have those words mentioned in the caption or on the text. It’s actually just in the spoken word and the algorithm is like basically calling you the search engine is able to pick that, pick up on that. So it’s pretty cool. Just a random question. I would imagine you said you were running Google ads for your, I imagine that’s super expensive, right? Aren’t those keywords really competitive? They are. They are absolutely what I’ve had to focus on.

43:39
is focused on the ACT online prep because ACT tutoring or ACT classes near me, really expensive. again, people who are selling those services have a lot more lifetime value that they’re driving from their customer in terms of revenue. So they can afford to pay more. But what I’ve focused on is just the online segment. And I’m focusing on a cost per conversion.

44:08
And the conversion I use for that is just a free trial conversion, but I figured out because I have enough data what I need to get the free trial conversion down to so that the actual purchase conversion, which is a percentage of that is sustainable enough for my lifetime value. Can we just talk about your amazing funnel by the way? Okay. So how did you form? So why don’t you describe like the process which you signed someone on? Yeah, totally. Yeah. So starting from.

44:37
Let’s start from like, let’s start their whole journey maybe from TikTok. Sure. So TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, whatever it is that they see us on, they’re like, oh, this is a funny post that actually has a helpful tidbit about the SAT. And, oh, what’s this in the caption? It says prepmedians.com, huh? That’s interesting. And let me see, lots of people seem to have commented on it. Oh, it says here pinned at the top that I can get a free trial if I go to prepmedians.com linked in bio.

45:05
And other people seem to be saying that this is cool and there’s social proof here because there’s so many likes and so many people are commenting on it. So, okay, sure. Let me try out this, this free trial. got, got a few minutes. So I go to the bio, uh, the profile and I see that there are arrows pointing down to the link and it says 11th grader. I’m an 11th grader and oh man, the SAT, mean, that’s coming up soon. So, okay. I’ll click the link. I click the link and I get taken to a Beacons page in disguise.

45:34
which is basically like a link tree. And there’s a video on that, uh, that’s on the link tree beacons page. And it is the trailer for prep meetings. And it’s also pinned on the tick tock profile of three videos pinned to the top. One is the trailer. That’s the first one for a cold audience. There is a testimonial for a warmer audience. And then there is a, the most, our most viral video, which has gotten 7.2 million views for a hotter audience. So.

46:04
Anyway, back to the Beacons page, I see this button that’s glowing and I click that button because it says click to start a free trial, no credit card needed, boost your score instantly. So I click that and it’s taking me to a signup page. And on the signup page, I put in some information. It’s about a 33 % conversion there. So 33 % of people get to the signup page or putting their information in and they click to get going. And

46:33
Interesting. The signup page that I saw had a lot of fields in it. It did. Okay. Yeah. And what I do to make sure I catch people who are just kind of a run, a quick go, check it out and then leaving is on the beacons page. have just a little signup form for people who want to just be added to the mailing list. So it says like, enter your name and email if you want free strategies, S A T A T C C strategies and problems.

47:03
So they go through the signup page. I get the parents email. Most of the time the students aren’t actually putting their parents email in and I know that they’re not, but I’ll get to that in a moment. they go through the signup page and then there’s a pop-up video that basically leads a student through the platform. It’s like two minutes long and it’s got another little sizzle reel of prep medians. So they X out that and then there’s an option to try out a module. And in the module, there’s the pre-video question set. There’s a video, there’s a post-video question set.

47:33
And then there is the review of how did you like the platform and then also your actual questions and answer explanations and so forth. So once they’ve seen how they’ve done, and as I mentioned, they probably typically increase, they then are given the opportunity to put their parents’ email address in again as the same one or as a different one. And we send the email to a parent that says, hey, your kid signed up for our test prep if you want.

48:01
keep their momentum going, just click this link and you can purchase it. And so that’s been most of what we see. Students can also, and this was something you were mentioning before, the way that you, the way you as a student, to prepmedians.com is you went directly to the website, which we see a lot of students do too, because we’ve advertised prepmedians.com over the place. And then that’s typically someone who’s on a desktop. So the reason we do it differently is because someone’s on a mobile who’s going through TikTok has a much shorter attention span.

48:31
And someone who’s sitting on their laptop and Googling, ACT prep or going directly to prep meetings.com. It’s a very different mindset. So with the tick tock person, we just want to get their information as quick as possible because they’re probably going to leave pretty soon versus someone who’s on the desktop. They’re going to come to the site. They’re going to click around. They’ve got maybe 10 to 20 minutes. So we’ll have them actually go through the free module. And then in order to get their scores for that free module, they have to put their information in.

49:00
And then that’s the way that we get their information and then they see their results and so forth. Okay. So the detail that you’re missing, Kelly on is, uh, so I went through the process. I took the test, but you don’t give me my results. actually have to enter my information just to get the results. Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I, that’s what I mean. know, get their scores for that. have to. Yeah. Yeah. And, what’s, what’s tricky. Well, I shouldn’t say tricky, but what’s, what’s ingenious is that.

49:27
You take it before you take the lesson, you take it after, and you really want to know whether you did better or not. Yes. And you’re a curiosity factor. Yeah. And there’s that curiosity. It’s huge. And there’s this element of like, I’ve the sunk cost fallacy, right? I’ve spent 20 minutes doing this. I want to see, I want to see how I did. And yeah, exactly. As you’re saying, it compels the person to put it in at that moment and see what the results are. And then there’s also this element of it.

49:56
It’s not sticky anymore. It’s not friction. There’s not a lot as much friction anymore where now they’ve put their information in. They see that they’ve improved and they’re like, Oh wait, wow. That was fun. That was great. And now all I have to do is go to the billing page and then cause all my other information is in. mean, all I can say is that if my daughter entered in my email to sign up for an SAT prep class, I would just sign up.

50:24
Without even thinking about like if my kid wants me to buy anything educational in my household I buy it you’ll buy it without even thinking about it. So yeah, especially at the reasonable price point that we’re offering it at, know, I mean, it’s which is extremely reasonable actually. Thank you. I was going to get into that. But I mean, the pricing must have been pretty tough for this too. Yeah, you know, it’s interesting because I did a couple of things with the pricing. One was I benchmarked it across similar

50:54
online course only SAT, ACT prep programs. And there are some that go up to 400 for years. just for clarity for listeners, what we do is we offer 299 for one year and, or $99 for a monthly subscription. And we give an automatic 10 % off for someone using code bestparent10 in all caps.

51:24
And that’s the code that is sent to someone who receives the email because their kid just signed up. So in reality, it’s like 90 bucks for a month for the first month, or it’s closer to 270 for a year. So what I figured out was, okay, the students who were going through and who were using the program, sometimes they might use it for a month, but a lot of times you start prepping and you’re like, I know I got the March SAT.

51:53
But I might also take the June. I might also take a fall one just depends on how things go. And what we wanted to do is make it easy enough that a person looking at it is like, all right, maybe I’ll do the, I’ll try it out for a month, but also maybe the price point for the one year is compelling enough that it basically in three months, I’ve made up my money and now I get it for a whole year instead of just the three months. So maybe I’ll just go for that. So that’s one way we priced it. And then in comparison to some of the other products out there,

52:22
The 270, for example, in some cases, a little bit more expensive. In some cases it’s a little bit cheaper, but we wanted to really make it competitive, but also accessible for most, families. And one of the things that’s interesting is we’re, doing, we got the zip codes of where people are purchasing and we’re seeing that it’s spanning pretty much top 40%, top 50 % of income. And then the lower 50 % of income we’re able to.

52:51
access those students through our nonprofit and public school partnerships. So we’re trying to span across the entire socioeconomic spectrum. Nice. Well, Kalyan, I really appreciate your time here. If anyone wants to check out your programs, which I recommend that you guys do, anyone who’s listening to this, even if you have no interest in the SATs or ACTs, just the entertainment value alone, I mean, you’re guaranteed to learn something. Yeah. Where can they find you, Kalyan?

53:19
Absolutely. So prepmedians.com it’s prep medians like the prep comedians. So prepmedians.com is our main website. And then on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, our username is prep medians and on Facebook it’s prepmedians.com. Cool. Well, Callian, thanks a lot for coming on, man. This is great. I love your business. Super, super fun time as always Steve. Thanks so much.

53:47
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now if you have kids or even if you’re an adult, go to prepmedians.com right now and take their first free lesson. I guarantee you that you’ll be entertained and that you’ll learn something at the same time. Calian is definitely onto something here. More information about this episode, go to mywifeclutterjob.com slash episode 404. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button.

54:14
you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscope.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows, gonna abandon card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you my own autopilot.

54:40
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Now I talk about how I use these tools in my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.