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Testing your ideas against reality can be challenging. Not everything will go as planned. It’s about keeping an open mind, having a clear hypothesis and running multiple tests to see if you have enough directional evidence to keep going.
This is the How I Tested That Podcast, where David J Bland connects with entrepreneurs and innovators who had the courage to test their ideas with real people, in the market, with sometimes surprising results.
Join us as we explore the ups and downs of experimentation… together.
David J Bland (0:1.825)
Welcome to the podcast, Ali
Ali Jiwani (0:3.507)
Hey David, good to be here.
David J Bland (0:5.390)
So I first stumbled across you, I think it was on Reddit and I was browsing Reddit in between some work stuff and I heard, I was reading this amazing story about Slay School and it piqued my interest and I started digging into how you got to so many users so quickly and I thought, wow, it would be really great for you to share that story because so many early stage entrepreneurs are figuring out, oh my gosh, I have no.
branding, have no acquisition channels, how do I get to my customers? And so I was just really excited when you said yes to be here on the podcast.
Ali Jiwani (0:41.141)
Yeah, I would love to share my story. I appreciate you reaching out. That Reddit post actually blew up, Like there was like 200, 300 likes, a lot of comments. yeah, I mean, for me, it was a way to give back to the community. And I'd realized that there's so many people who are interested in that story. So I'm glad I'm doing this.
David J Bland (0:59.084)
Yeah, so why don't you maybe give a little bit of your background to our listeners, sort of, you know, how you came upon the idea of Slay School, but maybe before that, sort of your background and your sort of entrepreneurship journey.
Ali Jiwani (1:11.935)
For sure. where do I start? guess I, so I studied, I'm from Toronto. I studied finance when I was in school and I really enjoyed finance, but I knew that tech was gonna be like the bigger frontier, like the thing that I should really be focusing on. And so when I graduated, I spent some time working in banking for about two years and the entire time I was in banking, I was really jealous of all of my friends who were product managers and software developers and they were doing all these cool things in tech.
And I thought, why not, why not do that? And like how hard could it be? And so ⁓ in the evenings and weekends, I would spend a bunch of time learning the code, understanding what all these like metrics like DAU and MAU and what all that stuff means. And I realized that I could do this. I could definitely build something in this space. And when I applied to a bunch of PM jobs, no company would take me seriously because they were like, you're an investment banker. You don't have any tech experience. Like how are you going to do this?
And I was like, well, you know what, I'm going to start a company and just prove to all these guys that I can be a good product person. And so, left my job in banking and started a company called Meal Surfers, which was a food delivery platform. It was kind of my first real foray into entrepreneurship. Like I tried a couple of things in university, but that was like the first time where I was like, this is going to be legit. And we basically focused on helping mom and pop shops, people who had food trucks, people who were just trying to sell their food in any way, any capacity besides restaurants.
We wanted to give them a platform so they could actually compete with the bigger restaurants. was kind of like Shopify's whole like arm the rebels. Like we were more like arm the mini restaurants and the mom and pop shops to like be successful. And so we built them everything that they needed a website, apps, delivery services, social tools, whatever they wanted. And we grew to around a thousand different cooks across the city using our platform. And many of those cooks ended up actually going and starting their own restaurants and becoming much bigger.
And after doing this for about two years, we realized that we had so much data. We knew so much about who was going to be the next cook, who's going to be very successful, who's going to build a really big business. And we ended up selling that entire company and that data channel to a fund that was then going to back Uber Eats and a bunch of other companies that were coming into Toronto at that time. So that was a really cool play, really good business model that we had created. And then after that point, I decided now I'm ready to take on a product role. I moved to Berlin.
Ali Jiwani (3:33.237)
took on a head of product role with a company called Zalando, which was like the Amazon equivalent over there. Like they were selling a lot of stuff online, did that for a year, moved to the UK, because I thought the UK scene was much more exciting, spent about three years working in healthcare, and didn't really do any like true entrepreneurial things. I kind of just did a bunch of stuff on the side, but then COVID hit and I was like, this is the big inflection point. Like this is where things are going to change and I got to build something.
And so around 2020, we started a company called Rally, which was like a video tech business. We essentially made it easier for people to have fun on their video calls, as opposed to just a Zoom call where you're just kind of talking one -on -one. And we grew very quickly. We almost hit a million ARR within the first year. We started consumer, went into business, and I can talk about like the differences and stuff there. But grew very quickly, got into YC, raised a bunch of money, and then didn't realize that COVID was going to essentially end and that our customers were going to leave.
But that did happen, unfortunately, in 2022. And then we started a bunch of different ideas on Pivots. And that's kind of where Slay School came from, where it was like, how do we actually build something with the new trend, which is AI, and how do we capitalize on education, which is, think, one of the most important areas that need dynamic transformation. And that's kind of where Slay School was born.
David J Bland (4:49.892)
So there's so many winding parts of that journey, but what I loved hearing about was how you use data to maybe as a leading indicator of what behavior will be, maybe backing up a little bit with the meal startup. What were some of the things you would see to determine if someone was going to be successful? How did you stumble upon that?
Ali Jiwani (5:11.989)
That's a great question. a lot of it comes down to... It's really three things. One is how does the person who's cooking or making the food depict the food and themselves? Right? So is there a story? Is there like a persona? Like, can I get behind this? Right? Like, you're not going to buy macaroni and cheese from Ali, who lives down the street, but you are going to buy, like, I don't know, like Afghan macaroni and cheese mixed with like herbs from like the motherland from Ali, who like just moved here.
Right? Like all of a sudden it's like, oh, there's a story here. Like, how did he move here? What was he doing back home? Oh, now he's cooking with like the original spices that he's been making from back home. Like I'm not Afghani, but like that's kind of the process of like how people buy. Right? So that's one thing is like the marketing and the story. The second thing is like the area. like there's different suburbs and different like pockets within any city that have specific types of people who want to eat specific types of things. Right? So you might have like a vegan area or a predominantly gluten free area.
Or even if you're like talking within like cultures, there's like kosher and halal and like all sorts of other backgrounds like that. And so if you can cater to those areas and identify that certain restaurants aren't serving those localities, then all of a sudden you have again, like a big, uptake potential. And I think three is just sales, right? Like you just watch how customers are interacting with specific cooks, specific restaurants, how much foot traffic clicks, impressions are getting, social media likes, et cetera. And you can start to see, these people are actually
doing really well, let's try to support them even
David J Bland (6:43.118)
So you're able to almost predict who will be the next big thing based on those factors. That's incredible. So you have kind of a winding journey like many entrepreneurs, many of us have to get to where you are now. Maybe talk a little bit about...
Rally and what you witnessed there or ⁓ what was some of the data or maybe some the insights that you were able to get from Rally to help inform the pivot to Slay School.
Ali Jiwani (7:14.773)
Yeah, so rally started because me and my two co -founders at the time were on a 30 person zoom call and it was COVID, it was like the very beginnings of COVID and we couldn't leave the house, we couldn't go anywhere. We were kind of stuck having this conversation and we realized that, you know, there's like 30 people on this call and there's like five of them that I know really well that I really want to talk to and there's 25 others who I'm just like, I guess I got to listen to you speak now. And we didn't really have like a good breakout function. We were kind of just stuck listening to each other talk.
And we were like, how can we make this much better for like conversations? And so we built Rally, which basically became essentially like a breakout room solution on steroids. I was like the first prototype where you could click on someone's square face and you could say, Hey, I want to talk to you privately. And all of a sudden they would create a separate room where you can have a conversation and you could do it in such a way where you could still hear the conversations that are going on in other rooms, but you were like specifically focused on your conversation. So that kind of really helped with that social element.
And we realized that that's not only good for like social conversations and graduation parties and birthday parties and weddings, which we all hosted on Rally, which is kind of crazy, but it's really, really good for schools. Like schools and education institutions love the fact that they could break out their classmates or break up their classroom into smaller subsections and be like, okay, let's definitely like double down on education and educational like products. So whether it's
companies teaching their employees about how to do something, or whether it's schools and institutions who are actually teaching their students about something, let's give them rally and grow that way. And so having those conversations, talking a lot to students and users, talking a lot to employees, talking a lot to schools, we realized that education is actually really fun place to be. It's a really good place to make change. A lot of people are very open -minded to what's happening in technology.
And the on -ramp, students love using new tech. So it just made sense to build something within that space. And I guess when AI came out, when ChatGPT blew up, when we started to see LLMs really take off, we were like, okay, let's try to figure out how we can use AI and how we can use this technology to then work with students who are already using it in really creative ways.
David J Bland (9:32.334)
So you have insights from just basically people that are loving Rally. It's really interesting sometimes that we build things and we think we're building it maybe for a certain segment.
And then another segment shows up and you're like, wait, are these our customers? ⁓ then you're, said the dawn is the dawn of realization of, maybe these are our customers. So it sounds like you learned so much from how they were using your product that when it was time to move on, you could kind of take those insights and use that to inform Slay School. So maybe explain a little bit for our listeners, like what is Slay School? What is that all about? How that got started.
Ali Jiwani (10:10.015)
Yeah, so Slay School is a way to personalize your learning no matter what you're learning. So you could be a medical student who has tons and tons of notes and lectures and you want to be able to understand all the information very quickly. Instead of spending days, hours, weeks making flashcards, creating tests, summaries, testing each other, we have AI do it all for you in a way that's personalized to you. And originally the prototype of Slay School was basically just
take your PDFs and turn them into flashcards. So take the 20 pages that you have to read or take the 300 page textbook and we'll make flashcards out of it for you. And we'll fine tune a model, create like, essentially we'll create like an AI that can do that so that you don't have to spend time doing it. But since then we've expanded into, we'll take any input. So we'll take audio, we'll take video, we'll take images, whatever you want to study and we'll give you any output that you want. So whether it is...
quiz, a flash card, an essay, whatever the case is, we'll give it to you so that you can study it however you want to do it. And eventually if we can do this really well, then we want to be able to create almost like a learning journey for you. So you can actually have, well step one, you got to understand like how this works and then step two, once you understand how step one works, then you can move on to step two, step three, step four, et cetera. And by the time you get to let's say step 10, you have everything you need to study for the test or the exam or the application you're going for.
David J Bland (11:31.862)
So how do you begin to get and test your way through getting early customers for Sly School? How did that process? Because that's usually where people get stuck. I don't know where to go. I don't know how to get customers. How did you navigate that part?
Ali Jiwani (11:46.869)
So we were in one instance really lucky. So my co -founder, Matt, he had spent a bunch of time making a flashcard app almost twice over, once in high school for organic chemistry, and then a second time for his engineering courses in the University of Waterloo. So he built this app twice without AI each time. The first time was completely rudimentary, but still sufficient enough for his teacher, his organic chemistry teacher, to use that application to this day. So that teacher is still like, you
using his tool, which I think is like phenomenal. And then in Waterloo, he was like, I'm just too lazy to make these flashcards. I'm just going to like automate a bunch of this. And so that's exactly what he did. But then when AI came out, I was like, hey, you know, I've got all these students that I've spoken to, and I know that they're like having trouble studying. The COVID pandemic really, really harmed how they're like understanding and retaining information. Can we maybe do something in like the crosshairs between AI and education? And he said, well, I've got this flashcard app that I've built.
Why don't I add AI to it and see where it goes? And so he kind of built this version that we call Slay School. And I was like, I'm going to give it to every single student I know. So I gave it to like my law friends. I gave it to my engineering friends. I gave it to my med school friends. And a bunch of them came back and said, wow, this is amazing. This is saving us so much time making flashcards. This is like awesome. Can you do this and this and this? And then from there, it was kind of like, okay, well, like, yeah, we can add this feature or like we can make these changes. I think there's a, a really cool video from
Michael Seibel at YC where he talks about like, if you don't have the problem, you must like whatever you're building, you must at least know 10 people who you can like give the product to to test, right? So if it's not your problem, fine, like we're not studying anymore as students, but we knew 10 students and those 10 students obviously know 10 students themselves, but they can initially give us that initial piece of feedback that we can then use and say, okay, now I've got some information to prove A, that there's something here with this product.
and be what I need to do to make this product more successful or who do need to like sell to to make this product grow and scale.
David J Bland (13:52.365)
So it sounds like some earlier prototypes that had a little bit of traction and then being able to marry AI to that. you're handing it out to people you know. How do you get beyond them? Where do you go online, offline, to get beyond these sort of first connections from those that you're sharing it with?
Ali Jiwani (14:12.437)
Yeah, there's actually two points here before I go on to like, how do you get onto, you know, more than the initial set of users that initial set of users? Like, I think a lot of people are spending time trying to be perfect with their product. And I think we gave people like a very scrappy product, like both with Rally and with Slay School. The product literally broke, I think, like five out of 10 times. And I think we were completely okay with that. And I think they were okay with it. But
I think it's really important to get like an almost broken prototype out because I people want to use something and they want to know what you're kind of going after. And I think the second part of that comment is almost, you know, the other side of it, which is now that you've given it to 10 people, now that they've seen how broken it is, that's kind of done. You've burnt those 10 users. Like now you can't go back to them over and over again with like improvements and get like really good insights. Like you'll get insights, you'll get feedback, but you won't get good insights. You got to find 10 new users to actually give more of that information to. And so.
once we had given away this broken prototype to our closest friends, we were like, let's fix up the things that they told us to and go to a new set of 10 users. And so we actually then went to Reddit and we said, hey, let's find Reddit communities that are very similar to our friends and like post there. And our message was basically, we have this product, we are building it completely for free. We want you to test it out. We're not going to charge you anything. We just want feedback on it. And
You know, we posted in various groups, but the med school community really liked it. And so they were like, okay, let's definitely like give this a shot. And, you know, there's like a lot of different med school communities within like Canada, us, et cetera. So we like went to like every single sub Reddit and we went with our own Reddit accounts. Like we weren't trying to like create new accounts and like, you know, have like, make it like spammy. was more just like, Hey, like we really just want, we're curious. We just want feedback. And a lot of people responded and.
We took those people, we asked them to DM us and from those DMs we got their emails, gave them access links to the product, added them to our Discord. That's kind of how it initially grew.
David J Bland (16:13.346)
Okay, so you also had Discord. How did Discord help complement what you were doing with Reddit for that initial acquisition?
Ali Jiwani (16:23.405)
I'm actually going give you our actual Reddit strategy, and maybe that's going to help a lot of your users. So a lot of people, what they do is they post on Reddit and they say, comment if you like our product or tell us if you want to see it. But the truth is, you want to get people into the DMs because once you get into the DMs, you're building a relationship directly with them. So all of our posts were like, DM us if you want this product. And when they would DM us, we would do one of two things. We would say...
either give us your email and we'll send you a personalized email with like access to the product or join our discord. And if they didn't want to give us their email, cause a lot of people on Reddit are very like anonymous prone, they would go and join our discord. And on discord, what we would do is we would have like our main channel where like anyone could talk and give us feedback. But as soon as somebody would join, we would create a separate group with them and we would say like, Hey, welcome username, blah, blah. Thank you for joining our discord. Here is access to the product.
please give us feedback. The more feedback you give us, the longer we can extend your free trial or whatever the case is. And that way we got tons and tons of really, really fast feedback on our Discord and a ton of really good feedback on our emails.
David J Bland (17:34.615)
That's that's really insightful strategy. So getting people to DM and then use that to link to Discord and then also nurturing them there. So. I imagine this took some time to do how many how many weeks, maybe months did you spend on this getting these initial folks like into your Discord?
Ali Jiwani (17:54.357)
So I think Prototype was launched early to mid -October. And I think our first paying users came in early November. And I think, yeah, so maybe like two to three weeks of actual testing and validating. It's a lot faster than you think, right? Once you post and people are excited, you've got to double down on that excitement. You can't give them 24 hours to respond. If somebody commented a minute after I posted, a minute later, I'd be in their DMs.
and like two minutes later I'd be on Discord with them. And I'm like, you know, if we were really good, like five minutes later we're getting feedback and we were like making changes on the fly. Like you almost want to be there with like your laptop and your code out and you want to be like ready to like make changes as soon as you get feedback. Cause there's nothing, there's nothing as good as like being super relevant and super timely to a user. Cause then they feel like, these guys really do care about me.
David J Bland (18:45.508)
So really quick feedback loops here. And we were talking minutes of getting them into the Discord and then being able to incorporate their feedback. That's a really quick turnaround. But that also makes sense because that's how you're able to get to where you are in just a month or two. So that's really, really insightful. So you go through Reddit, you start DMing people, or you're getting people to DM you, you bring them into the Discord, you create a group, you get feedback, you incorporate these changes into the product.
How are you thinking about, this is working so far. We've worked out some of the kinks with the issues. Where do you go from there? Like, how do you get, how do you test something bigger from there?
Ali Jiwani (19:31.445)
It's a good question. I think you always have to keep asking, like, what does the user want? Like, what is the holy grail for the user, right? In the case of education, like, a user is just looking to either learn as much as they can as fast as possible, or in some cases, they're just trying to almost circumvent the education system and just get to the end result, which is like doing well under exams. Like, I'm not sure if you remember this in school, but a lot of times teachers would give you homework that had nothing to with the exams.
And then you do well in the exams, but these exams have nothing to do with your career. And so it's like, there's so many like mismatches within the education system where it's like, why am I pushing paper so I can like just get the grades so I can maybe get a job that's completely irrelevant to the grades that I got. And so if we can somehow streamline that and give you a way to essentially learn anything you want to, but learn in a way that's like efficient and effective for you, then I think we could like save people a whole bunch of time.
and make life a whole lot easier for everybody, including teachers, right? And so when that's kind of the holy grail, then you kind of work backwards from like, well, how do I get to that holy grail? Like, how do I talk to users to understand, you know, what they feel like is an inefficient study method or what they feel like they wish they could do better? And users almost always want to tell you all their problems, especially if you ask it in like a nice enough way, we're like, hey, I'm glad we made these flashcards for you, but what else are you doing?
And then they would say, well, we're actually like doing multiple choice questions and to study for the exam. The best way to do it is to have question banks. Okay. We can create question banks for you. And all of a sudden now we're taking notes and converting them into quizzes and question banks. Right. Then you talk to med students or law students and they say, well, we need case -based questions. We need scenarios of like, you know, Sally and Bob walked into a store and they slipped. Like what happens, right? And all of a sudden it's like, oh, we can have AI create that for you too. And so now your PDFs and your videos are converted into case questions, multiple choice questions and flashcards.
And so it's conversations like that that really, really help. And I think it's also kind of important to be around the user as much as possible. And I can talk a bit about that if you want.
David J Bland (21:39.875)
I'd love to know how you stay connected to them because it feels as if there's so much of learning about how they're changing their behaviors over time and are you making an impact.
Ali Jiwani (21:50.365)
Yeah, I've got a coach. I've got like a, I guess a founder coach, if you will. And, you know, I was telling him all of this feedback that we're getting and I was saying like, hey, like we really want to build a big company that both grows quickly and has like very high retention. And he was like, well, how are you getting user information? How are you getting user feedback? And I was like, oh, like we've got this discord. We like chat with them. We tried to jump on a call with them. And he's like, it seems to me that you're getting like,
third party information, like you're not really present to like how the user is using your product or how the user is studying today. And I was like, well, no, like I haven't like left my house. I've just been doing this Reddit and Discord stuff. And he's like, well, why don't you go to a library and actually watch people study? And I was like, well, okay. So if the majority of my users are medical students, I got to go to a medical library. Luckily Toronto has a whole bunch of medical schools within like a half an hour drive. So went to all these different medical libraries. The trick is you can't get into a medical library if you're not a medical student.
So you got to find sneaky ways to get in. And so we did. We found a bunch of different ways to essentially go into the library. A lot of these medical students had never seen this before. And the medical community is very tight. So they were like, who are you guys? And we had to openly tell them, we're not medical students. We're building this app. We understand what they're doing. And when you can speak their language, when you've talked to users enough and you can say, we want to build something better than Anki, or we want to build something that's going to help you with your OSCII, like,
Things of that nature will really get students excited. And then all of sudden it's like, okay, well, now they'll talk to you. And so we got to sit and watch students do their Anki cards. We got to watch students do their studying, write their applications, go through even our product and see how useful the product was. And after doing, I don't know, 30 or 40 interviews a day for almost a week, we would drive to different schools almost every day. And we got a ton of different data. And that's when we were like, okay.
Like we've got something here. Let's now take this feedback and actually like build something that could be really, really helpful.
David J Bland (23:47.992)
That's incredible. You're just so focused on the mission here. think if I asked a lot of entrepreneurs to do that many interviews a day, they would say it's impossible. There's no way I could do that many a day. So you have all this feedback. How did you start sorting through it? I mean, I imagine you had a lot of contradicting, conflicting information in quotes. How did you start to maybe see themes emerge or find something that's going to help you really push it forward?
Ali Jiwani (24:15.977)
Yeah, that's tricky. The good thing is we really enjoyed our users. I've built products before where I've not had fun talking to users, but we really enjoyed talking to students, especially the ones that were very aspirational, the ones that you could see are going to definitely change the world if not change their own trajectories. And so we were like, OK, well, how do we take all this feedback? How do we read through it? We put an entire Notion doc together.
I'm not going to lie, we put some of that information into chat GPT and we're like, hey, find commonalities, find themes that are like interesting. But weirdly, like once you have enough of these conversations, you kind of know what students want and you can kind of like take that information and build it. it's like, it's important, I think, to quantify, but there's something about just like understanding the user so deeply where you're like, I actually think I know what I need to build for you. And after like, you know, hundreds of these conversations,
We found that there's one thing that a lot of students were doing, which was they would have like multiple tabs open on their Chrome browser or whatever browser they were using. And they would have like their main study place, which could be like Notion or whatever else. And then they would have like multiple tabs for the content, for the PDFs, for the lectures, whatever they were doing. And they were just jumping through all these things. And there was like, almost like they were like losing track of what they were studying. There was like, almost like they were like getting prone to ADD because of how much switching that they were doing.
And we were like, well, it's very clear that we need some sort of way to sit on top of all of these tabs. And it became clear that like a Chrome extension would be like the way to go. And so if you had a Chrome extension where you could open up whatever piece of content you wanted, you could scrape all of that information and turn it into your flashcards or quizzes or whatever else you were looking to do. And then you could either keep within that Chrome extension study those cards and information or open up our app separately. That could really help you study. And I think
once we, and we kind of like realized that as we were watching their workflow, as we were watching them like actually figure out what they were trying to do. But it wasn't until we actually sat down with them and like literally spent like an hour walking them through or watching them work and then walking them through our new idea that we were like, okay, this could actually work. And that's kind of what brought the Chrome extension out.
David J Bland (26:28.206)
Yeah, I love that. love how you're not necessarily asking them to solve the problem for you. It's more of a combination of I'm talking to them, I'm understanding their pain points, I'm observing them, how they're actually working. Because sometimes people say they're working away and then you watch them and you're like, that's not quite what you explained to me. And then be able to take that away and say, OK, I think I know how or we think we know how we could potentially solve this. And it seems like you were pretty flexible on ways you could solve that.
Ali Jiwani (26:44.403)
Yeah.
Ali Jiwani (26:57.319)
Yeah. And I think it's also helpful. Like I'm not the only one thinking about this, right? Like I've got my co -founder who's also watching this stuff go down and him and I are brainstorming as we're like thinking about this as to like, you know, what we can do. And then the students themselves, they have, you they have some idea of like how technology works that are also able to provide their own input. And so you now have essentially three minds working on the problem and you're coming up with like a solution that way. Like when we were building out this Chrome extension, like we actually flew to San Francisco.
because we had this specific user and he, his name's Kevin and Kevin really, like he really wanted this product. He's like, man, I love what you guys are building, but I can't use it because it's another product in my like repertoire of like a ton of different things that I'm using. But if you build a Chrome extension, I would be more inclined to use it because none of the other products have one. And I was like, we got to fly and talk to this guy. So we flew, we spent two hours with them, we bought them lunch.
And we just like literally like during lunch we like moved our food aside brought out our laptops and we're like hey like let us show you like our Development code let us show you like our prototype and you tell us like what's working What's not working and then for the next week while we were in San Francisco every day we would text them with like screenshots or loom videos of like Here's you know the updates based on what you said and he would say like yeah this works this works and then that's kind of what? Brought about that specific product we found that power user and we just like triple down on like how to make it
really powerful for them.
David J Bland (28:21.294)
Yeah, it like you were able to make so much progress just with those quick feedback loops with Kevin. So yeah, I think it takes commitment, but I think your product shows all the amazing work you put into it. So you're at a Chrome extension stage with this. How does pricing start to fit in? How do you begin to even think about pricing? Maybe explain a little bit of how you're testing your way beyond the early Chrome extension.
Ali Jiwani (28:49.555)
Yeah, so pricing is hard, right? Like it's very difficult to figure out what is the right number. The, I guess, initial way to do it is to look at competitors and see how much they're charging. And so we looked at like Duolingo, we looked at Quizlet, we looked at Chegg and to see how much they're pricing. And we kind of like priced around that area. But then we realized that a lot of these bigger companies, they've got a bunch of capital.
they can charge as low as they want to and they don't have to worry about retention curves and kind of worry about like churn and stuff as much as we do because everything is so much more important to us since we don't have unlimited capital. And so we were like, what if we focused on trying to get users who are going to be like highly retentive? And that means we, instead of putting like a low monthly price, we put up a very high monthly price, but a very low annual price. So now you're forcing the user to not only see that it's much better to save if you pay lower for the annual plan.
But also now that you paid for the annual plan, you have a reason to use our product, give us feedback, help us grow more than any other product since you're kind of invested in like our business. And so we went with that approach and we saw a lot of competitors do the opposite where they were charging a very low price per day, per week. And I think that's great for like a short -term cash grab, but that doesn't really get you the right level of retention, which I think is super important in building like a sustainable product.
David J Bland (30:8.910)
Yeah, I often keep referring back to pirate metrics. I think I picked up early stage when I moved to San Francisco, which was acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue, or you could flip the last two and you could say revenue referral. But that always stuck with me as...
Well, where do I focus in this part of the journey? Am I still trying to get customers in and just seeing if they're engaged with our value prop and with our early stage MVP? And then it becomes a quick question of, well, will they stay after the usage and then will they refer others and can we make money? So it feels as if you focus more on retention because you're trying to change study habits, you're trying to have recurring revenue, and it feels as if retention at this time in your journey was the right thing to focus on.
Ali Jiwani (30:39.935)
Yeah.
Ali Jiwani (30:54.429)
Yeah, and like, to be honest, like we haven't solved this problem, right? Like retention is a tricky problem in education. Figuring out the right pricing is always gonna be a tricky problem for any like consumer focused business, even like B2B focused business. So we're still iterating on all of these things constantly. And I don't know if we're ever gonna truly nail it down until we like have like a huge ton of users who are like, man, I love your product. And like, this is how much I want to pay for it.
David J Bland (31:21.038)
Yeah, it's tricky. And we always talk about product market fit, but it's not the static thing. It moves and people's behavior change. And sometimes you can just pivot out of it and you don't even know it until you realize, we moved away from our core customers. okay, so you're working through pricing. like the annual discounted.
Ali Jiwani (31:27.562)
Yeah.
Ali Jiwani (31:36.732)
Yeah.
David J Bland (31:42.947)
pricing to help engage retention. I love how you frame that with they're invested in us now. It's almost like they're a partner more than just a customer. And so where are you taking this now? Like what are some of your risky assumptions and what are you looking to test now?
Ali Jiwani (31:58.837)
Yeah, so we got to around 100 ,000 users in the past six months. I think we're closer now to 200 ,000 in the past nine months. So that's been a very good growth trajectory. I think really we want to do two things. think one is we want to keep scaling the users and keep getting high -retentive, really good users of our product so we can get more feedback and continue to grow. But I think the second piece is really trying to identify how we can personalize the education component for them.
Like my dream is if you're 15 and you're like, I think I want to be a rocket scientist. Like right now there's no one that tells you here's your career path. There's no one that kind of built it out for you. But I think if we can be that company that says, okay, you want to be rocket scientist by the time you're 25. Well, here's how you can spend the next 10 years, you know, study these core foundational topics, right? Some of these high school courses you're taking are honestly not going to be as effective, but here's a bunch that could be very effective.
Go and join these specific clubs or organizations. Here's a couple of videos that are both AI generated and human generated to help you understand various concepts. And then here's like maybe the top 20 schools that you can aim for. And here's all of their essays, applications, potential SAT scores. Basically, here's like a visually laid out map for what you got to do to become the person you want to be. And we're going to give you all of those step by step so you can essentially not have to worry about this system or how the system is designed.
but you essentially just have like a path to wherever you want to go.
David J Bland (33:29.912)
Yeah, having high school age kids right now, that's a lot of conflicting advice and a lot of frustration and anxiety about, wow, should I take this class or not? Or should I go into this program? And they're just freshmen and sophomores and they're already swirling with all kinds of conflicting advice on how to go forward. And they're not even really sure what they want to do. So I do think there's definitely room for improvement in that space.
It's so amazing to me to hear your story from, well, we learned some things at Rally. We use that to inform our new company and new product, Slay School. And then we started off with flashcards, but then...
We have this much bigger goal in mind that we're trying to kind of almost like reverse engineer our way back into through testing. I love that you're explaining sort of how you have that in mind and you're trying to test your way through it. I think sometimes we get confused or maybe just the advice we hear from folks are, oh, you just kind of just see where the tests go and just, it's almost like you have a spreadsheet and you just keep running tests and you end up with a profitable business.
It doesn't really replace vision. It's more about testing your vision against reality. So I love that winding journey. So you mentioned this vision that you have and you're closer to now. So what kind of big risks are you focused on? What do you need to sort of make that happen?
Ali Jiwani (34:59.797)
There's a couple of things. think one is definitely funding. So we are in the process of raising a small round enough to get us by for the next year, maybe a year and a half. So we can really validate some of the assumptions that we have. We can actually grow our user base beyond med school. About 40 % of our users today are med students and another 20 % are like med adjacent. So we really want to get beyond the med school, the nursing, the dentistry. We want to get to like as many students as possible. The second piece is finding really, really good talent.
I think we want to bring on people who really understand how to fix what I would call like a broken education system and not only provide like content on how students can learn better, but actually like if they're software engineers, code up or like build better solutions with us or if they're designers, help us design like a more gamified or fun mechanism for students to actually learn, but essentially bringing on the right people to actually like make this work. And I think the third thing is like we have
We've grown outside of North America very quickly as well, so we're not just focused on the North American markets, but definitely bringing people on who understand international markets and helping us scale across the board that way.
David J Bland (36:9.859)
Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. So hopefully one of our listeners can help or direct you to someone that can help with some of those. I want to thank you so much for sharing your story. know you're really giving back is really important to you. And so I love that you spent time here giving back today. If folks want to reach out to you, they want to get in touch with you after they listen to this, what's the best way for them to reach out?
Ali Jiwani (36:33.558)
You can just send me an email at ali at slayschool .com. ⁓
David J Bland (36:41.877)
Well, I appreciate you so much for sharing your journey and definitely reach out if you want to connect with Ali. Thanks so much for sharing your story with us today.
Ali Jiwani (36:49.759)
Cool, thank you David, appreciate the time.