Please enjoy this live, unscripted working session with a founder, one of only two I’ve done this year. Niels Hoven (@NielsHoven) is the founder and CEO of Mentava, a company building software to support fast learners.
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Tim Ferriss: Niels, it’s nice to see you. Thanks for making the time. Looking forward to this.
Niels Hoven: Thanks so much. I appreciate the chance to be here.
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. And it was fun for me to take a trip down memory lane in a sense, because I remember exactly where I was when we first had our very initial long conversation about Mentava and I got super amped. I was in British Columbia walking around a friend’s cabin. I remember exactly right next to a river, freezing cold outside, snow on the ground. And digging back into the website, looking at the testimonials, watching some of the videos of kids, I was like, “Yes, I remember very clearly why I invested so long ago.” It feels like ages ago. It was quite a while back. And we will get to the bio. I actually want to use part of this working session to go through the bio as I have it here intended for me to read, because I think the wordsmithing may apply to other places, including the website, including potentially paid acquisition.
But before we get to that, why don’t you—let’s hear it from your mouth. What is Mentava? What is the latest draft of your quick explanation of what Mentava is?
Niels Hoven: All right. The latest draft is that Mentava is software that is designed to let kids learn as fast as they’re capable of learning instead of just at the pace assigned to their age. And the first product we have is our early literacy software, which is designed for kids, preschoolers, as young as generally three to get to a second-grade reading level.
Tim Ferriss: And what is a second-grade reading level? Let’s just say I’m a first-time parent. I don’t know what it means. What is an eager to learn, reasonably smart second-grader doing with their reading by the end of second grade?
Niels Hoven: Our finish line is basically able to read easy reader books on your own. So think Green Eggs and Ham, Hop on Pop, the Elephant & Piggie series, the conscious competence level of being able to read.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it. And what are some stories? And I recognize these are not RCTs, right? So for the people out there who are going to try to needle everything, a lot of these are anecdotal of course, but you also have data in terms of performance on the app, right? It’s not just a subjective measurement, but could you just give some stories related to kids learning to read faster than one might expect?
Niels Hoven: Right. We had a set of two-year-old twins who were reading Hop on Pop, Green Eggs and Ham, these early reader books before their third birthday. We have a three-year-old who—
Tim Ferriss: That’s the [inaudible] that I saw where they were standing.
Niels Hoven: Oh yeah, you just retweeted that video.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The parents were projecting the game onto some large screen and the two twins were basically just playing and competing with each other to read. Wild. They were so excited to read.
Niels Hoven: It is really adorable. It’s funny, there’s so much fear around, but if I give my kid these academic opportunities when they’re so young, are they going to stress out? Are they going to freak out? But no, it’s actually fun. Kids are these little sponges. They want to learn everything.
Tim Ferriss: And just as background, well, why don’t you tell one or two more stories and then I want to hear how Mentava came to be, not the Iliad version, like the abbreviated version, but maybe you can give a few more examples because people might say, “Okay, fine. You got the Wonder Twins, but we need more than the Wonder Twins.” So what else have you seen?
Niels Hoven: We had a three-year-old who learned to read in about three months. We had a kindergartner who was behind and his mom asked us, “Can we use this software to help him catch up?” And she came back to me a little later and said, “Yeah, he’s reading now. The teacher says she’s never seen a kid catch up so fast.” What was the phrasing? She was like, “The teacher didn’t actually say this, but I could read between the lines. I could tell that the teacher really wanted to say your kid was just a terrible reader.” The teacher didn’t say that. The parent was like, “But I could read between the lines. I knew what she wanted to say.” And the teacher said she’d never seen anyone catch up that fast.
And the thing that actually really stuck with me from that one was the mom was saying the kid used to come to her and tell her, “Hey mom, there’s this kid in my class who’s so smart. He’s able to read and do all these things.” And then she said, “He came back to me the other day and said, ‘Mom, I can read like he can read now.’”
Tim Ferriss: That’s so cool.
Niels Hoven: That was just really neat.
Tim Ferriss: I was watching the two-minute, maybe three-minute demo. I’m not sure. It’s pretty short. I don’t think you guys publicize or use it much, but the demo video that you sent over.
Niels Hoven: It’s a terrible demo, but yeah, it’s out there.
Tim Ferriss: It’s terrible except there is one slide, let’s call it, it’s text that is a testimonial that is kind of below the fold on laptop on your love letters section with all these parents sharing their experiences, which is roughly more progress in one week with my daughter than in roughly six months of kindergarten. And that’s bananas, but it’s not so bananas as to be outside of the realm of possibility. And you become somewhat of an adept in the sport of sparring with critics on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter. And we may chat about that, to what extent it’s helpful to engage in or even provoke the culture wars. But I have seen a few. I think there’s one notable. You’re good at responding to the critics in a way that gets people to sign up for Mentava. And there was someone who said like, “The learning process, I have a four-year degree that was earned because learning is complex and you cannot simplify it and we’re not focused on outcomes. We’re focused on all this hand wavy stuff.” And certainly—
Niels Hoven: This was an educator who said something like, “You will never convince me that results are the driver of education. You’ll never convince me that efficacy is supposed to be one of our goals.”
Tim Ferriss: People can watch the documentary Waiting for “Superman” if they want to see the part of the sorry state of things. But I was introduced to you. How was I introduced to you? It was Eric Ries, I believe, of The Lean Startup.
Niels Hoven: Also one of our investors.
Tim Ferriss: Also one of your investors because I think he knew or intuited that I’m very much on the same page. You can learn things much, you meaning adults, but also humans, broadly speaking, can learn things much, much, much more quickly than conventional wisdom would suggest. And I could go off on this long list of things, but how do you do it? How do you do it? How did Mentava come to be, short version, and why does it work? How and why does it work?
Niels Hoven: Short version of how it came to be. Mentava started during the pandemic. At the time, my wife and I, we had three little kids, so we both have full-time jobs. We’re locked down in this 600-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment. My kids want to learn. They’re young kids. They’re these little sponges. They want to learn to read. They want to do math, but I have a full-time job. I don’t have time to teach them and be their teacher every step of the way. What I really want is I want them to be able to teach themselves, which aside from just being practical in that situation is just this life skill that I feel is really, really important. And so, I started looking around for software or apps that could support my kids as they’re learning, and there just wasn’t very much out there. I found a couple of things that were okay and we made it work, and it was honestly surprising how well they were able to learn despite using software that really wasn’t designed for having kids teach themselves.
And so, other parents noticed what I was doing. They asked me questions about it. I pointed them to the same software, and some of them had some success and some of them didn’t. And really what I realized as all of this was going on was that the problem was in the design of the software. No one is designing software for three and four-year-olds to be learning on their own. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it’s really, really hard. But my background is in games. I spent a long time designing games and designing tutorials, and it’s just design problems all the way down. I felt like this is a problem that I could solve, that I wanted to solve for myself, that I wanted to solve for other people, and that’s where Mentava came from.
Tim Ferriss: And what’s the magic sauce? Why does it work? Why is it better than the 12 other things that I’ve seen you rate from a scale of, I think, 1 to 10 in different ways and giving your reasons?
Niels Hoven: Right. I think the key things that Mentava brings to the table is an extremely optimized curriculum and a lot of really good motivation design. I think the curriculum advantage should not be as much of an advantage as it is because reading and math are both basically solved problems. We know how to teach reading. You teach kids letter sounds and then you teach them to blend them together. And honestly, for $15, you can get a book off of Amazon that will let you do that. You have to be the teacher. It’s a lot of heavy lifting from the parents’ side, but it will get the job done. So it’s kind of unconscionable that this has been a debate in education for a generation, but this is very much a solved problem. So we take phonics, we optimize it, we teach it really nicely. We make really good UX. We make it really easy for two, three, and four-year-olds to use.
Tim Ferriss: And this is on, typically, a tablet?
Niels Hoven: Yeah, on an iPad, just as an anecdote is where the bar is hanging in terms of low hang design. In one of the apps that I was using before we built Mentava to have my kids learn, if you have a two-year-old, if you have a three-year-old and they’re using an iPad, they kind of brace it on their belly and they hold it there while they’re tapping away at it. And a very common situation that happens is their little tubby toddler belly hangs over the edge of the iPad and you get all these extraneous touches at the bottom of the iPad. And in one of the apps that we were using, every time that happened, the app would crash. It was just a tap. So you have this—
Tim Ferriss: Belly crash.
Niels Hoven: —two-year-old toddler belly constantly crashing the app. And so we take into account all these little things where you have a kid who doesn’t know how to read trying to use these educational apps. The other piece that we really bring to the table is motivation. I think there’s a lot of people really don’t understand how sophisticated motivation design is. But if you look at video games, if you walk into a casino and you walk through the slot machine aisles, human motivation is kind of a solved problem. We know how to get people to do the things that we want them to do over and over and kind of, I don’t know exactly how to say that.
Tim Ferriss: You mean like variable reward or how does the slot machine example map to motivation design?
Niels Hoven: Right. The slot machine example is probably the crudest example. It’s the easiest way to motivate someone because the metaphor for motivation that I like to use is it’s like trying to get someone to jump through a hoop. And so, you can either increase the size of the reward on the other side or you can lower the hoop. And so, slot machines are kind of the purest example of this where they dangle the biggest reward you could possibly imagine, which is like a million dollar jackpot, and they’ve moved the hoop as low as you possibly can, which is just press this button over and over again. And so for that specific use case, it has been solved. And so our goal with Mentava is, okay, the hoop we want kids to jump through is learning all of these phonic sounds and learning to blend them together.
So how, through really good user experience design, can we lower that hoop as low as we possibly can? And then what can we dangle on the other side of that hoop to make kids want to come back and do this every single day? And for that, we use a lot of insights and design principles from game design about helping kids feel motivation, about visualizing the progress that they’ve made, about twiddling the right reward centers in the brain in just the right way that we celebrate their intrinsic motivation rather than trying to replace it extrinsically.
Tim Ferriss: So Niels, let’s move next to your bio. And if you could indulge me, which might end up seeming like a very pedantic exercise, I’m just going to go through and tell you how I would change certain words because I think we’re going to talk a lot about these magical things that allow us to produce images in brains at a distance. All words. All right. How do you pronounce your last name correctly? Remind me.
Niels Hoven: Hoven.
Tim Ferriss: Hoven. All right.
Niels Hoven: Hoven.
Tim Ferriss: Niels Hoven. On X, if you want to see front lines of the culture wars, @NielsHoven. He’s the founder and CEO of Mentava, a company building software to support unusually fast learners. This phrasing, unusually fast learners, I would actually just scrap unusually and go straight to fast learners. Part of the reason for that is that when I saw this on the website, I was like, “Well, what is unusually fast?” Even if I consider my kid fast, maybe unusually fast is what, 1 out of 100? 1 out of 1,000? And I stumbled. So I made note of things that I read twice or that I stumbled over. And this is a subjective take, but since I’m in the midst of having just recently cut an 870-page book to 350 and now I’m doing all of the fine tuning, this is how my brain is calibrated at the moment.
Okay. So software to support unusually fast learners or support fast learners. High achieving kids are dramatically underserved by today’s education system. I would also, I think high achieving for me at least, I think about pegging to letter grades in high school or college. I might just replace that or you could scrap high achieving. When in doubt, take it out is another writing dictum. So it’s like kids, high achieving kids, eager kids maybe, right?
Niels Hoven: Oh yeah. Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Eager kids are dramatically underserved by today’s education system. And again, I recognize this might be a little laborious for a second, but it’s going to tie into things that come up later. Okay. Niels created Mentava to allow top performing students to achieve their potential. I think we can scrap top performing also, students to achieve their potential. Great. Now I would actually scrap this entire second paragraph, which I’ll explain in a moment, but while most education companies focus on raising the floor, Mentava’s mission is to remove the ceiling. I have very strong opinions about this. I know it’s on the website. I get the turn of phrase and I understand why there’s a degree of clever wordsmithing here. I don’t like this as a positioning for you because what I ended up stumbling over here, I was like, raising the floor, remove the ceiling, remove the ceiling. I guess that’s as high as the best performing students.
So raising the floor, does that mean accommodating and helping the lowest performing students? I ended up dissecting it and just spending a lot of time thinking about it. So I’ve read that line a lot, but let’s move on. Is my understanding of that correct? Am I actually understanding that sense as it’s intended?
Niels Hoven: Yeah, basically you are. I think one of the challenges we are struggling with is how we kind of target what we see as more of a niche audience that deeply values education, is willing to pay for it and has kids that are being unsupported academically. And so we’ve been playing with different turns of phrases to try and speak to these people, but I agree. I don’t think we’ve found the right one yet.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I would also say, I think it’s a big niche, frankly, which you may have already concluded, but their early literacy software, meaning Mentava’s early literacy software for preschoolers is used and trusted by some of the most influential people in the world. Don’t love that. We can come back to that just because it’s something that anyone could claim unless you have things to point to, right? And maybe you do. We can come back to that. Mentava blends careful curriculum design with best in class motivation design. I think, for instance, we are not that far from the beginning of the new year. I think doubling down on motivation design if you’re going to do more X posts around January would actually be very interesting and do some very interesting things there that would drive conversions, but developed through years of experience building mobile and I’m guessing the way you pronounce this is AAA games.
I don’t actually know what AAA games are, but that sounds like a good thing and I have heard it before. This is, I think, the money shot in some respects. Prior to Mentava, Niels worked at Cloudflare, ClassDojo, and Pocket Gems where he ran the highest grossing mobile game in the world in 2011. That says you know what you’re doing very, very clearly. So I would be inclined to scrap that whole second paragraph and then move up the third. And then it goes to mentava.com and it has all the links and everything else. So M-E-N-T-A-V-A, if people are wondering. But I don’t want to belabor the intro, but we are going to spend a lot of time on messaging.
And you very kindly sent a skeleton framework that we could use for going into the conversation. I think we already checked off kids can learn much faster than people think. Problem two, I think, is maybe not immediately obvious to folks, but the problem, and if you don’t mind, I’ll just read it. We waste the low pressure elementary school years and then pour on pressure in high school. And it’s like, okay, maybe I agree with that. Okay, waste low pressure. How should we capitalize on low pressure and are we accidentally turning it into high pressure if we add something like this? I mean, looking at the kids playing it, at least the video I’ve seen, it wouldn’t seem that way. I do like, I know I’m kind of spoiling the delivery by offering the punchline, but if you don’t mind.
Niels Hoven: Yeah, go for it.
Tim Ferriss: So you had two, right? You had two sub-bullets under that. Schools actively slow down fast learners. Yes, 100% agree. They wouldn’t let my son learn algebra, et cetera. Is that your son, your actual son?
Niels Hoven: My son, yep.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. Early acceleration means less pressure later. That I think is super, super, super interesting as a point that could be really used, maybe not in exactly that form. And then number three solution. Mentava lets kids accelerate without requiring parents to become teachers or taskmasters. And that’s through, as you pointed out, the very finely tuned curriculum and motivation design. And I would agree that schools are surprisingly bad at both.
Tim Ferriss: So what are some of the current challenges? How would you lay out the hierarchy of problems to solve, opportunities to capitalize on, however you would like to phrase it or list it out? Where should we go next?
Niels Hoven: Zooming way out. We’ve built a product that we are really proud of that when our customers use it, they rave about it and they tell their friends about it. I think we have not figured out. We are really good at product design and we are not so good at marketing. We are trying to explain a problem that a lot of parents don’t realize that they have, that their kids could be doing so much more, that their kids are going to be held back when they get to elementary school. By the time parents realize that they had this problem, that their kids are bored and not achieving their potential. It’s kind of too late to—or the biggest opportunities to do something about it are now behind them. And then for even the parents who are looking for a product in this space that can help support their kids’ learning, they’re not experts.
And what differentiates our software from a lot of the other stuff out there is really nuanced. And so, how do we differentiate what we feel is a premium product when the differentiates is really nuanced and in thousands of small decisions that customers can’t look at themselves? It’s kind of like trying to explain what makes this video game better than this other video game. It’s a very hard thing to explain or has been for us.
Tim Ferriss: Right. It’s a thousand decisions that add up to a very distinct feeling maybe on some level. Okay.
Niels Hoven: We found a lot of the parents who came to us immediately sort of already feel this problem intensely because sometimes it’s immigrants who come to the US and then are just shocked at how much worse the education system is here than what they experienced. So they just see this immediately and they’re like, “I am not going to have any part of this. I need to start addressing this right away.” Or it’s people who already care about motivation and just recognize that their kid is capable of doing more than they’re doing. We have a lot of parents who are in Montessori who send their kids to Montessori school because they love the values there, but they’re like, “But Montessori school doesn’t focus on academics. My kids could be learning to read and they refuse to give them any phonics, so I want to do it at home.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. So let me just say what’s top of mind and then we can go in a lot of different directions because I think that the fixes in a way are going to be a lot like your product design. I don’t think there’s one thing. I think there are probably myriad things that when moved five degrees in the right direction might reach this breakthrough or step function distinction where suddenly you have better retention, more referrals, et cetera. That’s just my intuition looking at everything in front of me and the website and so on.
Niels Hoven: That sounds right to me.
Tim Ferriss: But let’s start with what came to mind for me, which is related to something that you have, I think is kind of like one of your pain points, which is how do we solve a problem before the customer knows it exists? And a way to rephrase that would be like, how do we educate people about the problem? And there’s a framework, you may have heard it. It was actually introduced to me. I met a doula the other day, someone who’s somewhat like a midwife who helps the birthing process and she was talking about this acronym BRAIN, and it was benefits, risks, alternatives, what does your intuition say, and then N is nothing. What if we did nothing? What if we didn’t do anything about this?
And so, I’ve been applying that to more things and I’m like, “Well, what if you didn’t do any education in—” Rephrasing that, what if that were not the problem? And the reason that comes up for me is when I imagine I want to have kids at some point, it’s like, okay, I would hope my kids are eager learners and curious and maybe have a little embedded software that gives them an advantage. It’s like, okay. I don’t know if you’ve run into this, but my hesitancy, if I had any, I don’t think I would have a ton. I think I would just pay the price and use Mentava, but is I want my kids to be socially intelligent. I want them to be in school with other kids. I’m not going to have child neuro taught by private tutors or whatever. I mean, hopefully not child neuro, but that’s a whole separate conversation.
The point of that being, I want them to be kids and to have time socially. But if I push them three, four years ahead, is school going to be even worse for them because now they’re just sitting there staring at the clock waiting for school to be over? And if so, how do I check the box of maximizing intellectual development while also allowing for kids to be kids plus the social development?
Has that come up at all or is that—
Niels Hoven: This has come up.
Tim Ferriss: Because for me, I’m like, fuck yeah. Let’s pour gasoline on this eagerness to learn. And these kids want to go, go, go and they’re being held back. They’re these thoroughbred racehorses locked in the gate. They’re just not being let out to run. It’s like, “Sure, I want that kid to run, but then what? What form does school take if I give them such a head start?” How do you think about that?
Niels Hoven: So a big part of the reason we’ve designed Mentava the way we did is because of exactly this. So when I was in third grade, I was ahead of my class in math and my school only went up to third grade. So before third grade, in second grade, I would go to the third grade class for math and then I would come back to my classroom. But in third grade, there was no classroom for me to go to. So I started doing independent study in third grade. During math class, I would go to the back of the room, I would study out of a math book for the hour of math class, and then I would come back and join my class for the rest of the day. And I did that for the next four years all the way up until I rejoined classes in seventh grade for pre-calculus. And then I took calculus in eighth grade.
And so, those four years of being able to learn on my own at my own pace allowed me—I didn’t have any homework. I got to go as fast as I wanted. It was really incredible. It also built this skill of teaching myself that I depend on today. And that’s why I think you look at a lot of the other alternative schooling startups that are happening where they’re trying to develop an entire schooling ecosystem that would run parallel with public schools. And I actually really believe in the institution of public schools. I went to public schools. My children go to public schools. I just want them to be supported and allowed to learn at their own pace there.
So to me, really, the ideal case is let’s let our kids go to public school with their peers from their neighborhood. And then for an hour a day during math class, they study Mentava. They do math Mentava for an hour. They get to go at their own pace, and then they rejoin their same age peers for the rest of the day and have a good time.
Tim Ferriss: Am I wrong? As an Austinite, I feel like it may not be exactly this, but Alpha School uses sort of adaptive software on tablets for a portion of the day.
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I think I’m getting that right. But you would also want something that scales that people can use now as opposed to moving to a city that has Alpha School, which is going to be great, but also very expensive and limited capacity, et cetera, et cetera. Right?
Niels Hoven: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Niels Hoven: So Alpha School’s big insight is essentially the same as ours, that if you allow kids to learn at their own pace, you can pack the entire school day into a very small amount of time. When my own son was in third grade, after a lot of back and forth, we finally got permission from one amazing teacher for him to do independent study during math class from an app during the school day. And he finished eighth grade math while he was in third grade. And that’s just the pace of what kids are allowed to do, capable of doing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So let’s hop into it because I love what you’re doing. I have since the beginning. It works. I’ve seen plenty of videos and enough testimonials and the design. This is going to sound maybe arrogant because I’m certainly not an educator, I’m not a computer scientist, I’m not a UX designer, but I look at it, I’m like, “Yeah. From a micro progression logical sequencing perspective, it just makes sense.”
It’s very hard to make and when you see it, you’re like, “Oh yeah. That makes sense like many things.” So I want to be as maximally helpful as possible here. Let’s hop into a real customer. And I’m going to give you an example of a real prospective customer because as chance would have it, it’s such a small world. It’s crazy.
So we’re doing this kind of live workshop on this podcast episode. I’ve only done two of these. You are number two. Number one, I don’t think you’d mind me mentioning is Jake Becraft of Strand Therapeutics. He’s developing mRNA as a programmable layer in medicine and doing all this crazy stuff that’s amazing with cancer.
And Jake is very, very smart, so not shockingly. His kid is also pretty smart. And he reached out to me because he saw me as an investor on the website, and he’s like, “Of course you’re an investor in Mentava.” He’s like, “All right. Well now, I want to ask you about it.” And I encouraged him to try it and then never heard back.
And so I reached out to him, and I was like, “Whatever happened? Did you try Mentava?” And then I just want to read his feedback, and we’re going to just take a bite of the apple from a bunch of different directions because again, I don’t think there’s one—as much as I wish this were the case, like, “Okay. We’re going to change unusually fast learners to fast learners,” and boom, automatically conversion and everything like quadruples. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
But here’s what he said, “Yes, I did.” So they have a 14-day trial period and also try to see if your kid is ready. He put that in quotation marks. A few thoughts. Number one, I won’t give his kid’s name, but let’s call his kid Rob. Rob was super young, two years and two months, but he taught himself the whole alphabet at 17 months so he figured why not try?
Two, there’s a “sequencing milestone” that they explain is important. Rob was likely not fully there. Three, let’s see. Their curriculum sort of made the sequencing tests more difficult than I think they need to be, and then pushed him to easier curriculum, which I couldn’t figure out how to override. That was one sort of annoying part, but it makes sense to make sure people fail fast and don’t pay before the kid is ready.
Four, we ended up pausing at the end of the trial with the plan to restart in three months, which will be soon. Five, he still points to the iPad. This is the most important part of the whole thing by the way. Well, I think there’s a lot in all these bullets, but here’s the last one. He still, this is his son, Rob, still points to the iPad and says he wants to play the letter game.
So clearly, Mentava had some pull for him. So the kid wants to use it. But one question I had, I guess there are two things that pop to mind. Well, before we get to the suggestions, can you explain the 14-day trial period and the sequencing just for folks so they have an idea of what this looks like? People go to the website. They’re like, “Oh my God, totally want to try this.” And so they click on the 14-day trial period. What happens, and what is the sequencing?
Niels Hoven: I think there’s not a question about the user flow, which we know is bad and more about a question of the experience that they’re having as they engage with the software. Is that what you’re asking?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yep.
Niels Hoven: Okay. So the point of the 14-day free trial is that we know we are not good at explaining what differentiates our software. We think what works best is just get it in the hands of the customer and let them try. So I think within 14 days, we think that’s enough time that a customer can figure out if this is going to be a good fit for their family or not.
A very common problem is exactly what happened with Jake where he has a kid who is probably not developmentally ready to learn to read. And so we want the parents to recognize that during the free trial. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the developmental milestones, kids are able to learn letters and letter sounds quite a bit earlier than actually being able to blend those sounds together and be able to read.
So very common that you could have a kid who’s a year and a half, two years old, knows all of their letter sounds, but they are not actually capable of learning to read because they can’t blend those into words. We’ve figured out that there’s a test that we can give the kids to see if they can understand the concept of left to right reading order, basically the idea that directionality is important.
So what do we do is we show them a couple emojis. We show them dog fish, and we show them fish dog and we say, “This one is dog fish. This one is fish dog.” And then we ask them, “Now, we just told you, which one of these is dog fish, and which one of these is fish dog?” And what we found is that for older kids, this is an obvious question.
Of course, you just go this way, “This one is dog fish, and this one is fish dog.” But for younger kids whose brains haven’t connected those neurons or whatever, this is a nearly impossible question. And so in the Mentava experience, fairly early on, you purposely hit this wall where we’re asking your kid, “Do you understand dog fish, fish dog?” And if they can’t, we boot them over to, “We’ll just teach you letter sounds,” and we send the parents an email explaining this developmental readiness.
I think we send the parents an email. We might not. I hope we send the parents an email explaining this developmental readiness issue and ask them to try again in three to six months.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So that was going to be one of the questions I wanted to hit on. And I’ve got plenty. So don’t worry folks who are listening. We’re getting into the weeds quickly, but the weeds are where we have to play this game. What share of failed trials come back like a Jake? And are they prompted three months later or are they just told when the kid doesn’t pass the hurdle, try coming back in three months? I guess how proactive is the outreach and what percentage?
Niels Hoven: There’s zero proactive outreach.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m going to hit something that is going to be related to all of this, which ultimately is going to fold into mock-ups and redesigns of the website as well. But let me give you just a brain dump of some things that I think might be helpful, and I’ll prompt some of them with questions. All right. Is Mentava free for schools or in some capacity free for teachers? Is there any free option? Is there anyone who can use Mentava for free?
Niels Hoven: We have pilot programs running with schools right now. We’re not charging the schools who are in the pilot program. I would like to give Mentava to schools for free. Our philosophy is that if you want to use us as essentially a private tutor to accelerate your kid, that’s going to be expensive. But if you’re a school just using us as a tool to support your teacher, we’d like that to be cheap or free.
We are in the process of getting—may actually have just gone live of having self-serve signups for teachers so that they can get it for their classroom. The main issue we have there unfortunately is just fraud. What prevents just a random parent from saying, “I’m a teacher. Let me sign up and get this for free.” And so that’s why we haven’t really scaled that or pushed it aggressively.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I would say a few things. The first is that if, in fact, you end up offering it at very low cost or for free to schools, even if it’s in some limited fashion and people need to check a bunch of boxes, that could be a useful flak jacket for offsetting the premium cost of the product, which is what right now? What is the cost?
Niels Hoven: I don’t think we’ve mentioned this. So this is a $500 a month product, which I think many people are shocked when they first hear, but also, we have a lot of customers who are like, “Oh, we let go of our tutor. We don’t need our private tutor anymore because we’ve replaced it with your software. You guys should be charging more. This is great.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I don’t think the cost is a problem personally, and we can come back to that. But I do think the free for schools and teachers is interesting. The other thing I would say is that—I probably shouldn’t mention them specifically, but I know someone who has created a spectacularly successful app, and it’s pretty expensive.
On an annual basis for an adult, it’s going to be in the hundreds of dollars, and it’s very, very successful. And he set a policy very early on, which was if you can’t afford it, send an email to this email address, explain why. And chances are, you’ll get it for free. And the fraud has been unbelievably low.
People do email, and I’m sure some of them are fraudulent. But on the margin, it is so unimportant. It’s so trivial and the cost of delivering the product to a handful of fraudulent customers who are unethically kind of abusing things is so low that maybe it doesn’t matter.
At the very least, I think it could be worth the test. I don’t want to belabor this particular point because I don’t think it’s the most important of those we have to talk about. But it might not matter.
Niels Hoven: I think I know exactly the app you’re talking about and I do know that it’s a great program.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a great app. Yeah. I’ll just give another example. Long ago, when I started my first, let’s call it, real business, I offered a 110% money back guarantee if the product didn’t work and never questioned it. Just did it unflinchingly because frankly, the time that it would take me to police it would be so much more expensive than a certain degree of fraud.
Even if it’s like 10%, 20% even of the people who requested it were fraudulent. Also, I should say in this case, this is a hard product being shipped via regular mail, and they would be able to just keep the product because having them ship it back and paying for shipping, it just wasn’t worth it given the cost of goods. People were much better behaved than I expected.
It really didn’t cause a problem. Assuming the product is good, this isn’t a returns situation. So you could offer something like that, frankly. I think that the 110% back is really underutilized, but I feel like you were going to say something else. Yeah.
Niels Hoven: We have something along those lines, but not exactly. When people write, so sometimes, people do the free trial. And then they write into us and say “Essentially, we love the free trial, but we just can’t afford it. Do you have any scholarship programs or anything like that?”
And what we’ve been going to right now is Mentava costs $500 a month, but if you tried the free trial and you loved it and you really want to keep using it and you’re motivated enough to write us, we’ll tell you that you can have Mentava for $100 a month, but we would like you to send us a video of your kid every week using Mentava, enjoying Mentava that we can use in social media, in marketing, because we want to run those ads, but we want to make sure that we have signed releases for any kids that we put into advertising or social media.
And we don’t police that aggressively. I would say not everybody participating in that program has been sending us all the videos we would like them to send us. But like you said, mostly people are pretty good about it.
Tim Ferriss: Where would you like to go next? I can pull up lots of things. We can look at the website. I want to come back to the readiness check. Is there any reason to have people sign up and then do the readiness check as opposed to do an abbreviated readiness check, a two-minute, is your kid [inaudible] type of place?
Niels Hoven: I like that idea a lot. We’ve been talking about that for a long time, just put the readiness check directly on the website.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, because if you had, is your kid ready, take the two-minute quiz, you could still accomplish the data capture of email address and so on and verification so that you can communicate with those people.
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I think that’s reflected in some of the mock-ups that I sent over. On the price, I don’t know if you guys have approached this. I really think that selling the parents relief, not just the kid’s speed is a big deal, that you don’t have to be the teacher because the 500 can be anchored in a few different ways. $500 a month. Is it the same or is it less than a tutor? Well, let’s just say it’s the same.
And let’s say they’re equally effective, but there’s one difference. And one is you’re giving a kid a fish, meaning the teacher is motivating the kid versus you’re teaching the kid to fish, meaning the kid is becoming a self-motivated, self-directed learner, then Mentava still wins, even if they’re equally effective.
And then furthermore, it’s like if you have all these other tools and let’s just say they’re—as you mentioned, you can get books, I don’t know, 10 bucks, 20 bucks, 30 bucks, who knows? And then you’re going to put in that time. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be an absent parent. There are plenty of ways you can spend time with your kids. But if you want to create a self-directed learner and you also put a value on your time, if you can afford $500 a month, it’s also kind of a no-brainer, right? But we can look—
Niels Hoven: I think that’s very true. I think we need to lean into that more because we’ve had people I know personally who could absolutely afford Mentava. Usually, they are parents of only one child. This is their first child, and they say, “I tried Mentava. It works, but I really want to be the one to teach my kid to read.” And so they opt in with another product where they get to be the teacher. They actually want to be the teacher. But for a lot of parents who are busier, who have multiple kids see that value immediately. They cannot be the teacher for every single one of their kids. They want their kids to learn on their own, and we’re the product for that.
Tim Ferriss: I love teaching. It’s one of my favorite things in the world. I absolutely love teaching. But the selling point for me, if I were the stand-in parent, would be extrinsic reward/pressure, teacher making the kid study versus kid becoming self-directed and excited about learning.
I’m like, “Well, that’s a very easy choice for me.” They’re going to have plenty of time with teachers. They’re going to have plenty of time with me coaching them or teaching them or going out and being curious about things in the real world. But it’s like if that. How many minutes a day or per week? How much time do you suggest?
Niels Hoven: Fifteen to 30 minutes a day, depending on age.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So okay, look. You got all day with your kids from when they wake up to when they go to bed, depending on the day and schooling and so on. But it’s like 15 to 30 minutes is just getting them closer to being stoked about learning and able to actually take that stoke and put it into practice. It’s like, okay.
Niels Hoven: Okay,
Tim Ferriss: Is that worth $500 a month? Yeah. For a lot of people, I think the answer is yes.
Tim Ferriss: Do you mind if I just brain dump and then—
Niels Hoven: Yeah, I love it.
Tim Ferriss: Then I want you to steer the ship a little bit.
Niels Hoven: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: So the two minute, is your kid-ready quiz right up front, I think, would be an amazing email capture tool, but it would also be in service of the parents who are running at light speed with a million different things, exactly the kind of people who are probably considering something like this.
I think it’s the type of thing that might also get shared, right? So in a sense you have user generated marketing, lead gen and a filter all at once. The selling the parents relief, not just the kids speed, as I mentioned, like the you don’t have to be a teacher, how much is your time worth? Maybe there’s something there. One of your lines that—I think this is from the website, tell me, but we don’t push kids, we stop making them wait. I think that’s an amazing line.
Other words I’d be a little more careful with, right? So the unusually fast learner, the gifted, any IQ elite top 1% kind of stuff, I think artificially constrains your market in a way that is unhelpful to Mentava and unhelpful to parents. Does that make sense? Yeah, I agree. Because the kid doesn’t need to be a super genius to use Mentava and benefit from it. So I really like the idea of paying attention to that language so you aren’t accidentally excluding a lot of parents whose kids would benefit from the product.
The free to school story, if that ends up being tenable, I think is—it’s a decent adjunct to other things you’re doing, but it’s also an example of playing defense instead of offense in a way. Does that make sense, right?
Niels Hoven: It does make sense.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s like if people say this is just for rich kids, it’s like, “Okay. Fine.” This is not what you’re doing, but if you just focused on people who make 500K a year or more, that’s a huge market. You’re fine at $500 a month. It’s like you don’t. And it isn’t just for rich kids, but I think that given the fact, and if I say anything, I’m not supposed to say publicly, stop me, but you guys have four full-time employees. I’m sure you have other contractors. You guys are going to be spinning a lot of plates, wearing a lot of hats. If you have a lot of unqualified leads emailing you, asking questions, requesting special treatment, that time is incredibly expensive for you guys internally, right?
Niels Hoven: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: I would just be inclined. If I were talking to someone, I had two glasses of wine, so I’m playing a little loose, and someone’s like, $500 a month, I’d be like, “Well, do you want something that really works and makes your kid not just stoked, but capable of learning faster, or do you want a video game that is disguised as education that’s going to do nothing for them?” If you want that, sure. There are a thousand other options.
If you actually want something that works with people who understand product, then suck it up. How much did you spend on your kid’s pants last month? How much does your stroller cost? Really? You’re not going to spend. Come on. So that’s how I would sort of hopefully productively bust their balls.
That’s how I would do it. I’d be like, “Yeah, if you want something that works and you want something that the kid is going to request, as opposed to something that kind of works, that requires you to be a nag and police that the kid might push back on” it’s like, “How much is removing all that brain damage worth to you?” And I understand that’s probably not the text you put on the homepage, but let’s see.
So on the online, you have done a good job of using X specifically, I would say. And the two examples you sent me of social media that had converted was basically a response, if I’m remembering correctly, two examples of responding to people, right? Someone called basically what you’re doing, snake oil and you’re like, “Well, here’s a video of snake oil.” And it was the twins, the two-year olds or two and a half year olds reading.
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And then there was the other one with the educator. Those are good examples. I wouldn’t have any critique around those. I would say that jumping into the culture war, even if it gets a lot of views, in a sense, forces readers to pick a side instead of picturing their own child, which is why I think the video of the two twins works so well.
So that’s just a side note. And I know you have math coming so that you can move from the perception of reading app to learning for kids who are ready to move faster or something like that. I think we can leave that alone for a moment. We can come back to that, but I don’t want to spend too much time on it because I think you get it, and you’re branching out, and it makes sense. The pricing against tutors, I have hired—look, I had two different coaches this week for rock climbing.
I am a connoisseur of teachers and coaches and tutors. I’ve used probably a hundred plus coaches of various types. And getting a tutor, managing a tutor, scheduling with the tutor, none of that is free. Even if the hourly cost of that tutor is commensurate with the cost of Mentava. However, there are other ways to make the price case, but this is one of those examples of what if you did nothing, coming back to that brain acronym that I love so much.
It was the first acronym. I’ve heard all these SWOT acronyms, like strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, all this stuff. But this was the first one where one of the prompts was, “What if you did nothing?” And I was like, “That is such a good question. What if you didn’t justify the price and you were just like,” Let’s just find—” And look, this is going to be very unappetizing, maybe a turnoff for some people listening, but this is how Uber started. This is how a lot of companies start, is go after the easy customers, the people who have plenty of budget.
Later, you can use the initial cohort of wealthy people to subsidize product development, then you get economies of scale, you have more employees, blah, blah, blah, dot, dot, dot, and then you have more offerings at lower cost. But rather than trying to convince the edge cases, it’s like maybe you just talk about the efficacy and take a different tack, I think it’s tack as in the sailing, to get that done.
Look, I could give you six different examples of how you could make the price, could justify the price, but let me keep going. This is coming back to the parent’s role because the parent’s buying it, not the kid, right? Not to overly state the obvious, but you don’t have to teach, you don’t have to nag.
Now, you don’t have to teach, might accidentally elicit a sense of guilt in parents because they’re like, “Oh, I’m just trying to foist the responsibility of education onto an app. I’m a terrible parent. What’s wrong with me?” But if it’s you don’t have to nag, you don’t have to police, you don’t have to reward, you don’t have to give cookies because the kid’s just going to want to play this game, period, full stop, that’s what we spend our time on, right?
That’s a huge one, right? Because some parents—I love teaching. I want to teach a lot. So if the selling point to me where you don’t have to teach, I’d be like, “Oh, does that make me a bad parent? I actually do like teaching. Does that mean I’m not engaged with my kid?” But nagging and policing, nobody wants to do that.
Niels Hoven: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So choosing things that are an easy hell yes for parents, I think, makes a difference, and that’s where the words matter. And that you don’t have to teach. You don’t have to nag. Beats the book. That beats the live tutor. It beats all that stuff. It’s not like, “I don’t want to take the piano lesson with teacher X.” It’s like when you have Jake’s kid being like, “I want to play the letter game. I want to play the letter game.” And he’s like, “Man, we just have to wait a few more months and then, okay, then you can play the letter game.”
Niels Hoven: I kind of want to hop in on this because maybe this is my pathological honesty because I do believe we built a really delightful product that kids will want to use most of the time. But absolutely, sometimes, you do have to push a nag, I think, way less than anything else. But I’m reluctant to say you won’t have to push a nag.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I think that that is where you finesse, right? I’m coming in as—I’m not blind because I’m familiar with the product, and I’ve looked at the website and everything else, but I’m not a parent with a kid who has used the product.
So instead of saying that, you can say parents don’t want to nag. They don’t want to police. They want a kid who can learn as fast. They want a kid who can learn at their own speed, even if that means fast. You can say that.
Niels Hoven: Yep. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a truthful statement, right?
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll give you a bit of trivia that not many people know. So my name in Chinese is—well, it was Fei Ting Chung. Now, it’s Fe Yu Chung. And the reason I have that name is because Fei is for Ferriss, right? So there’s some alliteration, but Ting Chung is Very Honest because I would just blurt things out that were clear or honest to me. And so my teacher was like, “Good God, you are a pain in my ass.” Okay. Your name is like Ferriss Too Honest, basically.” I was talking to you, I can’t mention which, but talking to another startup I’m involved with, and they’re about to have a huge launch, and I was like, “Exaggeration is death. Do not exaggerate.” I was like, “Because if one statement can be falsified and it’s a casual statement, it’s going to call into question every other claim you make, and your competitors are going to fuck you.” And they should.
If you’re exaggerating and inflating your claims, like, “Hey, you’re going to reap what you sow.” So I am on the same page. I think there are ways to word it where it is a completely truthful statement. And it may not be nag and please. It may be something else.
No one wants to force their kid to learn. What would it be like if your kid wanted to learn and use it? You get the idea. And you could come up with 10 of these and just split test it with an Optimizely or whatever. You’d probably have something homegrown that does a better job, but you get the idea. All right. Feel free to stop me.
Is there a way to get an indication of how many sessions are initiated? Coming back to, yeah, sometimes, you have to push a little bit or prod or prompt. Maybe that’s a nice delicate word to use, your kids. But do you have any idea of what percentage of sessions are initiated by a child versus a parent? I don’t know how you would have that.
Niels Hoven: I think they’re probably 100% parent initiated. We’re talking mostly three and four year olds here.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Right, right. Running around like chickens with their head cut off. Yeah.
Niels Hoven: I think it’s the sort of thing where it’s just like the parent is responsible for saying, “Oh, it’s that time. Let’s do our Mentava again.” And rather than it being a battle, then your kid is like, “Oh, okay. I guess I’ll put down my Legos and do Mentava.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. So I’ve noticed in the investor update emails, and I’ll add my personal preference here, but I will, I think, speak for a lot of investors. So I have a lot of portfolio companies and I don’t invest all the time, but they add up. If a company’s going to be successful, mega successful, it usually takes 10 to 12 years, in my experience. So that means if you’re investing every year, you start to gather portfolio companies. The reason I mentioned that is that I get probably 10 to 20 investor updates, a month. And some of them are super long, yours are not super long. But if you have investor asks, I would put them at the very top. I would skip all the updates. I would skip all of the numbers. I would skip the runway. I would skip the new hires. I shouldn’t say skip. I would defer. I would put it lower down.
But if the intent, because most of the people who are getting that, outside of your major investors, if you’ve got board members, sure, give them the nitty-gritty. But the vast majority, I don’t have voting rights. So the only way that I can really impart influence is by trying to be helpful, but I also am in an inbox with a million other things. So having the asks at the very top will get more help. I know that seems self-evident, but almost no founders do it. So that’s just a quick suggestion.
But the reason I brought up the investor updates also is that I feel like I’ve seen in a number of the investor updates, something along the lines of, we just need to figure out how to drive more conversions through, I want to say paid advertising. And maybe I’m misremembering, but that leads me to a question which is what channels actually convert and retain? TikTok, X, referrals, search, paid advertising. What is actually working best for you guys? Which might not be working well, but what is of the available options, what is working best for you guys? At not just conversion, because you could get garbage leads that sign up for trials and then don’t convert. But for actual paying customers who are retained, what seems to be working best so far?
Niels Hoven: I think our best customers are X, and word of mouth. And I think the reason for both of those is that our message gets in front of people who are receptive to hearing it. I would say that a big part of our struggle is top of funnel. How do we raise awareness with the right people? And I think what tends to happen on X is that, I get in an argument with someone who is basically arguing that kids should not be learning, or kids are learning too fast, or something like that. And then the entire internet piles on and I am kind of like the loud voice saying that kids should be learning as fast as they can learn. This is our thinking. I think people hear that and believe in the mission and because it’s hard to make sophisticated product decisions about these nuanced products, they hear the mission and they’re like, okay, this is a company that believes in a mission of very accelerated learning, which is something that I believe in too, that I don’t hear a lot of people talking about.
I’m at least willing to go out and try their software. And I think that’s why we get people from X. And we have not been able to replicate that on, say, Meta ads. I think Meta’s algorithm, basically, you give them your ads, you give them your videos and they put them in front of the people who engage with those videos the most. And so we absolutely have content that goes viral, that people engage with, that gets a lot of interaction and even gets very, very cheap leads, but they’re not qualified leads. So they’re not getting in front of the right people who care deeply about accelerated learning, and are willing to pay for it.
Tim Ferriss: Here’s a tagline that came to mind. Less nagging for parents, faster learning for kids.
Niels Hoven: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: You’re not saying no nagging. Faster learning for kids. You probably put the kids first, right? Faster learning for kids, less nagging for parents, or something like that.
Niels Hoven: I like that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Faster learning for kids, less brain damage for parents, whatever. You could test a bunch of them.
Niels Hoven: I think one of the things that really sets us apart is our motivation design and our way to keep kids motivated and engaged. And we really have not found a way to talk about that in a way that gets any sort of traction. I’ve tried, but a lot of the arguments that I get into are around topics like accelerated learning or phonics. Phonics is a big cultural touchpoint right now. But nobody really seems—
Tim Ferriss: Really? There’s a war going on about phonics I didn’t know about?
Niels Hoven: There is a huge war about phonics. For the past 30 years, schools have been debating over whether or not phonics is the right way to teach kids.
Tim Ferriss: It seems like something you could test.
Niels Hoven: Yeah. And they have tested it. Basically everybody outside of education, everybody in cognitive science, everybody in the rest of academia, completely understands that phonics is the only way to teach reading. Academia and teachers and schools have been the one holdout refusing to teach phonics, saying that all we have to do is teach kids to love reading, that if you show them a picture of a puppy and they say dog, then they got that right. They’re reading because they understood the gist, they have comprehension.
Tim Ferriss: Slippery slope of that one.
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Understand. Wow.
Niels Hoven: So we have not found a way to, we think that motivation is one of our biggest differentiators and just have not found a way to talk about that that engages people. But maybe this less nagging for parents is that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I will say that, this may not matter, there may not be much collateral damage, but when I have seen some exchanges, I think that some percentage of the observers of those arguments might feel like it’s Mentava versus teachers. And I don’t think that’s a great fight.
Niels Hoven: Agreed.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Because there are plenty of teachers too who are just as frustrated as the parents, in a lot of ways. They’re hamstrung. But, you know, so it goes.
Niels Hoven: We try very hard not to position ourselves as Mentava versus teachers, although I know it doesn’t always come off that way. But to a big part, I think teachers are the victims here too. They were told in teacher’s college that phonics will turn kids off of reading, and they believed what they were told, and they went out and taught to the best of their abilities, the best they knew how.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s come back to the word of mouth. This is something that everybody wants, but sometimes it’s difficult to get high resolution on the mechanisms of word of mouth.
Niels Hoven: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Do you have any insight on what that actually looks like? At what point, this is I think perhaps a helpful question, at what point do people suggest that someone else checks out Mentava? Is it after they’ve been on the app for three months, six months? Is it as soon as they sign up and they are on 48 hours? At what point throughout their experience of Mentava do people share with others? Do you have any idea?
Niels Hoven: We get that wow moment within the first week where parents, sometimes it’s the first day, sometimes it’s the first week, but very quickly the parents realize, if it’s good for the family and the kid, parents realize very quickly, “Oh my God, this software actually works.” Going from there to word of mouth, we have a lot of parents say to us that they tell their friends about it. There’s some reluctance to tell their friends about it, because there’s a certain amount of shame around using a $500 a month app. There’s this sort of cultural shame around using your resources to allow your kids to get ahead. I have friends who can afford private school, who know that their kid is not getting a good education in their local public school, but they insist on sending them there because they feel they have a responsibility to not give their child an advantage. And I don’t know, there’s some deep-seated self-hatred there, but.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. God, I wish they would take the money they’re not spending on their kid and put it into therapy first. But I mean, that maybe come off a little callous.
Niels Hoven: We have tried incentivized referrals.
Tim Ferriss: That’s what I was going to ask about. What is the incentive that you’ve tried?
Niels Hoven: I believe we did as big as, if your friend signs up, we will give them a free month and we will give you a free month. So that’s basically, that’s $1,000 user acquisition cost. And we sent out coupon codes to our entire customer base, and we got zero referrals. Even though we know that customers are actively referring friends, we have a lot of people who sign up. I do an intro call with almost every customer who comes on board. And so we know that a lot of people came because they saw their friend use it through word of mouth, but the incentives didn’t drive, they drove zero.
Tim Ferriss: What do you attribute that to?
Niels Hoven: My guess is that our customer base at $500 a month is fairly wealthy. And so that $500 bonus that they get is not as valuable to them as the social currency that they either gain by referring this, or sort of lose by telling someone about this product that they feel guilty about using. And so I think that, yeah, it is an incentive, but they already had very strong incentives to tell their friends about it if they would love it or were reluctant to tell their friends about it.
Tim Ferriss: What makes the people who do refer through word of mouth different from the archetype that you just described? The people who have some shame around it, and they don’t want to burn social capital because what if their friend’s like, “Oh my God, I didn’t realize you’re such a rich asshole.” Or whatever. What makes the other people different, the ones who talk about it?
Niels Hoven: I don’t know if they’re different. What I’ve heard from the people who do refer their friends is that they’re very selective about who they mention it to. They have specific ideas about which of their friends would be receptive, and they tell those friends about it. And my theory is that they tell those friends about it anyway to help their friends out, and the $500 is not a driver of behavior.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Okay. Have you done multiple tests? Did you just do one incentive test?
Niels Hoven: Yeah, we just did one.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I do think the devil’s in the details with a lot of these—
Niels Hoven: That could be a two.
Tim Ferriss: Right, I mean, for instance, one free month versus $500 credit, which sounds better? $500 credit sounds better, but it’s the same thing. Also, and this may be unappetizing, but if the cost of delivering the product is zero, which makes a bunch of assumptions, around the associated costs of various things and customer support and duh duh duh duh. But if the cost of development is high, but the cost of delivery is low, you can afford to do very limited, first 100 people to get it, use a little scarcity, free year, if you refer three people. $6,000 value, if you get three people to sign up, whatever. I’m pulling that out of my ass.
Niels Hoven: Yeah, we can be more generous.
Tim Ferriss: But it’s like, if you tried that and you limited it to the first hundred people, you know your maximum downside cost. It’s not this open-ended fog of scary expense because you’ve already set a cap. I am a big fan, I mean, sometimes you have critical weaknesses, some Achilles heel that needs to be fixed. And I think that there are, I think the website hops to mind for me as an example of that, which I don’t fault you for because you’re doing so many things at once, but we will get to that. But also for me, I’m like, look, if something isn’t working, and it’s just continually not working, which is not the case with the incentives because you only tried it once, I think that’s worth testing. And also, it’s because that is related to one of the two means that has proven most effective for acquiring customers who are retained, X and word of mouth.
But X is time-consuming. You got to write, you got to engage, you got to respond. Maybe you get lucky and there’s an easy one that really pulls some weight, but you got to keep feeding the monster. Whereas if you figure out some type of flywheel that involves—and incentives are just one tool in the toolbox, but really focusing on how you can facilitate word of mouth, and particularly if there’s a prompting at that first peak of magic, the wow experience, if that’s within 48 hours, boom, they get an email, or a notification of some type. If it’s one week, it’s within one week.
And I think that could obviate the need for paid advertising. There are plenty of huge brands with monstrous ARR that never spend a dime on advertising, because they figure out the small levers to pull that in concert create a flywheel of some type for this type of referral generation. We will put these up for people watching the video. If you’re on audio, I’m afraid you’re going to have to really use your imagination. Would you like to talk about the website or would you like to talk about any other challenges, goals? We’ll probably touch on a lot of it as we look at the before and after on the website, but is there anything else that you would like to cover before we get to the website?
Niels Hoven: I guess, do you have any thoughts about very, very top of funnel? Just as parents are first exposed to Mentava, how we might want to think about positioning ourselves or messages that you think might reach out broadly?
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Top of the funnel, it’s like, get as many parents who see this sentence to be interested in Mentava, is that the question?
Niels Hoven: I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: Or is it a question of marketing channels? Because a big top of the funnel is not always a good thing, right?
Niels Hoven: Right.
Tim Ferriss: If it creates a bunch of noise and garbage applications that are going to—
Niels Hoven: Yeah. I’m not saying go broad. I’m saying what sort of messages might get the attention of the specific kind of customers we want, if they’ve never heard of Mentava before?
Tim Ferriss: Well, this is going to seem like a lazy response, but it’s usually where I like to start because you’ve thought a lot more about this than I have. What is on your short list at the moment, for how to do that?
Niels Hoven: I think the two that we’ve been playing with are teach a kid to read, teach a preschooler to read, which we don’t love because we feel like it doesn’t differentiate us well. The other one that I think does differentiate us is talking about the mission, talking about acceleration, talking about schools not supporting fast learners, but then there’s kind of a deeper—
Tim Ferriss: How are people seeing this?
Niels Hoven: What’s that?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. In terms of top of the funnel, the phrasing that you were just mentioning, or the taglines, how would people see these across all marketing? Facebook, X, website, everywhere, or somewhere else?
Niels Hoven: Say TikTok, X, and Meta, Facebook, Instagram ads are where we get the most volume.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I mean, look, my beginner’s eyes, uninformed, knee-jerk response would be, “My daughter made more progress in one week with Mentava than six months in kindergarten.” You start with the testimonial. And not to be too Glengarry Glen Ross, but for those who haven’t seen the Alec Baldwin sequence, it’s very short, you should watch it. But AIDA, A-I-D-A, “Do I have your attention? Are you interested? Have you made your decision for Christ?” Got to watch the clip, folks. I’ll link to it in the show notes. And then action is the last piece, right? But that type of testimonial is what I would use.
Niels Hoven: That makes sense.
Tim Ferriss: That’s what I would test.
Niels Hoven: We haven’t tried that. That makes a lot of sense. We’ll go for it.
Tim Ferriss: Because you hit a few things at once with that. If a company says, “We are the best,” you’re like, “Of course you’re going to say that. What do you give me next to prove that you’re the best?” Testimonial gets around that. And fortunately, you’re not dealing with a medical product or something where you have structure function claim restrictions, which are very important to have. And thank God we have the FDA and FTC and all that stuff. But in this particular case, I don’t think you have too many restrictions about how you can use testimonials, assuming you have written permission from the people who provided those testimonials. And man, the mock-ups that were created for the website, for a revision of the website, are one thing. But if you were like, “You know what? We can’t make. I’m afraid the internet is broken. We cannot create any new pages.” I’m like, “Bummer.” I’m like, “Okay, then make your main page the testimonial page.” That’s what I would do.
Niels Hoven: We’ve talked about that.
Tim Ferriss: I would make the main page the testimonial page. And then you have a persistent popup in the middle of the screen that’s like, “Is your kid ready? Take the two-minute quiz.” If I’m playing with applying constraints, if we cannot create a new website, is the current homepage the one that should be the homepage? Maybe, maybe not.
Niels Hoven: I feel like I’m getting too into the weeds, but I feel like this is exactly where your expertise is coming through that yeah, of course, starting with the testimonial. If I did a short video, like a, I don’t know, a 60-second-long TikTok video, where would you go after the testimonial? What would the beats of that video be for you?
Tim Ferriss: Well, here’s my hot take, and it could be totally wrong. I mean, everything I’m saying could be wrong. But my hot take is that the people who can spend 500 a month, and are busy and value their time and their kid, this is not going to be a fair assumption for everyone on TikTok, but I don’t think that is where the people making the buying decisions are spending most of their time. I could be wrong. I mean, there are younger men and women I know who spend plenty of time on TikTok. Do you have any idea of who is making the purchase decision? How many males versus females are actually putting in their credit card information to buy this right now? Which, look, that’s a very heteronormative question, but you guys get the idea.
Niels Hoven: I think it’s roughly fifty fifty judging from the customer calls that I do. In the beginning, it was very heavily male, but I think that was just my audience at the time, and now it feels a lot more balanced.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you probably don’t have this information. Any idea on the age, the sweet spot age range using past customer data of your current customer avatar? If I said to you, okay, guess what? You only have one opportunity to ever sell Mentava, that’s the bad news. The good news is I’m going to put you on stage in front of an audience of 5,000 people, but they all have to be of one particular demographic/personality/—
Niels Hoven: Yes. Give me—
Tim Ferriss: —makeup. Give me the census data, right?
Niels Hoven: Give me age 35 to 45, first generation immigrants who work at tech companies, who value education, who see it as a ladder to a better life, and are willing to pay money to make their kids successful.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. I’m guessing those people are not on TikTok. So the beats of the video, honestly, it’s a tough one for me to answer off the cuff, but I think in part because, it may not be the right medium. Where I think video matters is showing actual kids using Mentava and learning with Mentava. Here’s a crazy question, and I think I failed my computer IQ test for the day, because maybe it’s something obvious. Is it possible to turn on audio for the current video that is right in the middle of your homepage when I open it?
Niels Hoven: That’s a good question. I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: In Chrome, I kept trying to figure out how to turn on the audio because I’m like, it’s not really—
Niels Hoven: Oh, is it possible for you to turn on the audio?
Tim Ferriss: I wanted to hear what the kids were saying while they were using the software, but I could not figure it out, which could be user error.
Niels Hoven: That was a request that we were planning to do. I don’t know if it may not have gotten done. Yeah, that was an oversight. Good catch.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So that does nothing for you. And it is, at least on a 13-inch MacBook, that is the entire screen on Chrome.
Niels Hoven: Brutal.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m like, okay. So if we come back to the website, and I’ll just give people a visual description, and I’m sure we’ll throw it up. It’s got a very familiar layout, which I think is, there’s nothing wrong with this familiar layout, but you got Mentava company name top left. You have a menu bar at the top, parents, teachers, about reviews, case studies, sign up, login, and then you have get started at the top right. Then you’ve got the giant video playing with no audio, and a cute little character, presumably from the Mentava app itself. And then under the video that is auto playing, it says, “Most education companies try to lift the floor. We want to remove the ceiling. Mentava was built for unusually fast learners. Try it for free.” And the try it for free is a button. Okay.
If we were to look at a heat map of what I just described, meaning what is clicked on the most, do you have any read on which elements I just mentioned get clicked the most? Yeah. Which doesn’t, at least my experience was didn’t do anything. Yeah. Okay. I think, and I’m sure they’re called something else now, but way back in the day, you could get a heat map and it would be so called because, things would get redder and redder and redder the more they were clicked. And so you could, at a view, look at a website and with these tiny little circles indicating clicks that were colored in the way I just described, you could get a pretty good idea of what people were clicking on or trying to click on, right?
Well, if it works for you, let me pop open some mock-ups that were created using Claude in an incredibly short period of time. It is just insane what you can do these days. Shout out to Lenny Rachitsky, who had some really good tips on how to use these LLMs for design, turning your LLM into a, or maybe your AI into a world-class designer. All right, so I’m looking at the website right now, and if I go right now, a 13 inch, I did not look on mobile, which I probably should have. But on the MacBook, which is kind of my workhorse daily driver, the try it for free is where the screen ends, right? So my world of Mentava on first contact is what I just described. And then if we scroll down, you got best reading app for kids, and you got all these amazing testimonials, which I think do a hundred times more for you than what I just described.
Now, if we go to the mock-ups that I sent over, and we can play around with these because they’re not perfect, but you’ll notice a couple of differences. So I’ll point out some of those differences. So instead of get started in the top right, which is that button, and I still, well, it’s replicated in another place on the homepage, but it’s, “Is my child ready?” Instead of get started, maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t. Something that’s very easy to split test. Then the actual tagline on this mock-up, I don’t love, I’ll be honest. I like it more than the, “Most education companies try to lift the floor. We want to remove the ceiling.” I do prefer what is in the mock-ups to that, but it’s not where I would put it. I think maybe—what was it? Less nagging for parent, faster learning for kids.
Niels Hoven: Faster learning, less nagging for parents.
Tim Ferriss: Less nagging for parents is maybe what you test, but some kids are ready to read before school is ready to teach them. Okay. I don’t like that because ready and read throw me off. Frankly, they’re just. I know that sounds ridiculous given we’re talking about learning to read, but they’re too similar. So I would not use that phrasing. But then below that, we get an idea of what we’re actually talking about. Because when you say most education companies try to lift the floor, we want to remove the ceiling, it’s like, well, who are you selling to? What is it? Education company? Is it a clinic? Is it a company that sells consoles to nursery schools or daycare centers? It’s not as clear, whereas Mentava’s expert reading instruction for your child. Oh no, no, no, no. It’s just too wordy. Mentava is expert reading instruction, that’s terrible, but your child will actually want to do, right?
So you could say Mentava teaches reading that your child will actually want to do, or something like that. 15 to 30 minutes a day, a coach on call, and nobody in your house has to be the teacher. It’s not quite right, but below that you have two buttons, take the two-minute readiness check, and then how it works. And then a video that could auto play or not, but I would definitely have audio on there. So that’s one option. And then right below that, and I’m not convinced this is the way to do it, but it makes it very explicit below the readiness check, $500 a month per child. Most families finish in 6 to 12 months, free 14 day trial, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s one approach. You could also, rather than make the $500 fine print, you could just lead with it. Mentava is, you could have what we had before, faster learning for kids, less nagging for parents, if you want something that works and not something that’s cheap, right?
Niels Hoven: Right. We have absolutely had luck leading with the price. We’ve had customers tell us we use you because you cost $500 a month, because we knew there’s no way you could be a scam if you managed to charge that much money.
Tim Ferriss: You can’t survive. You can’t survive for years if it’s not working.
Niels Hoven: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Yep. Some of these other mock-ups I sent you, I do like the tagline on the second one better than the first one, for children who are ready before school is. A bunch of the other copy would be replaced, and I think that one is too sassy looking. It looks like it’s trying to sell a tablet, which is not what you guys are doing. Watch the 60-second demo or whatever. The [inaudible] score mock-up I don’t particularly like, but I do like in the third option, leading with the testimonials.
Niels Hoven: I like that too.
Tim Ferriss: Right? So for instance, let’s imagine maybe the first mock-up, but some kids are ready to read before school is ready to teach them. Man, that’s a mouthful. It’s a tongue twister for me. If it were faster learning for kids, less nagging for parents, make your child love learning, right? Whatever, something like that. And then on the top right, much like the third mock-up, there was this big testimonial which was like, my daughter learned more in one week with Mentava than six months in kindergarten. And then there was another one maybe for—you pick it, you’ve got a million of these testimonials. You’ve got an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the testimonials. Maybe if I were going to pick from the ether one other type of testimonial, I saw a number of testimonials that were like, we got rid of our tutor and did this.
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Maybe that’s the other one. Right? Just so you address that, what about this? What about the comparable, the cost of it? You just have a testimonial do some of that heavy lifting for you. I mean, you have so many good testimonials. These are real testimonials.
Niels Hoven: Yeah. [inaudible].
Tim Ferriss: Last fall he didn’t know how to read his letters. Now he can read his baby brother a book before bed. Like what? WTF? Are you serious? You guys changed our lives. There’s not a world where I could teach a child to read without your app. I mean, these testimonials are crazy. So aesthetically you have some choices to make. Some of these are a little too sterile. The last page of mock-ups I think are a little more friendly, like the second to last one would be a little too busy and a little too like, did our web designer take LSD? But you get the idea. I’m just going to note what I like about these things. So the testimonials, I would 100% test having the testimonials very prominent. And just looking at your homepage as a print advertisement effectively, you want to have a clean visual progression through the piece.
Generally people are going to be pulled through a graphic and then to the largest headline, then to the second largest. So making sure that the visual tracking isn’t too pinball machine. So frankly, it’s like if I were going to be really nitpicky and try to pull something from Ogilvy, I would say the—look, you could have the video on the left instead of the right and then the headline on the right if we’re talking about people who track from left to right with reading. But what I do like about this third one is that it’s got a couple of bubbles on top of the kid learning, 15 minutes a day. These would have to be fact checked obviously and audited to make sure. But 15 to 30 minutes a day, a real coach for you on the couch in pajamas, whatever some of the main features are, and then take the two-minute readiness check. Can you speak to the real coach or the coaching aspect? Is that a thing or is that just a hallucination?
Niels Hoven: Yeah. So when you sign up, we have the Mentava parent app and even during the free trial, we prompt you to book a call with me and chat about where do you think your child is stuck on? What have you been having issues with? How is the free trial going? And then you have the parent app where you can chat with us 24/7 and we will get back to you as fast as we can. We use that a lot for customer support, but also parents are confused about whether their kids are engaging the right way and we can let them know and get them back on the right path.
Tim Ferriss: How much do you sacrifice, and you can tell me what the exact bracket is, but on this third mock-up, something that was put right above the headline, not saying that’s the right place for it, but a reading program for curious three to seven year olds. Is that an accurate description of the product? Would you say that’s the sweet spot in terms of ages or what is the ideal age range?
Niels Hoven: I’d say three to five.
Tim Ferriss: Three to five. Okay, great. So reading program for three to five year olds. How much do you lose by saying three to five? That’s maybe not the right way to phrase the question. But for instance, Jake came in. What I’m trying to figure out is how much noise and time-consuming activities are introduced by having people try this too early versus just saying, you know what? It’s not for two year olds. That’s going to be like 90% failure rate so let’s just say three to five. Do you feel like that would [inaudible] results?
Niels Hoven: I’m very comfortable saying it’s probably not for two year olds. I think the two-year olds that this works for, although we’ve had a couple, are very rare.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. So if you were to give an age range right up front as a way of discouraging people who are ultimately maybe going to be frustrated, would three to five be the bracket? Would it be two and a half to five?
Niels Hoven: I would actually say three and a half.
Tim Ferriss: Three and a half. Okay, great. And none of these design ideas are permanent decisions, right? It’s a living, breathing website, you can change it. But what I’ve found with the startups I’ve worked with and also just with all the stuff that I’ve launched myself is being very clear about who you are for and who you are not for makes everything else easier, particularly when you are explicit about it.
Niels Hoven: Can you give some examples of what that means? Because we want to do that, but I think we’re not sure how.
Tim Ferriss: Well, what that means is if someone says, like in the case of The 4-Hour Workweek, which I think crossed your path many, many years ago, in the case of The 4-Hour Workweek, it’s like I would get these questions when I did media around or even from my editor early on. It’s like, well, how can employees in big companies use this? And I’d be like, frankly, it’s not ideal for them. There are things they can use and let’s just say 20% of it I think is going to be very, very valuable to them, but it’s really designed for people who are in a job but want to experiment with designing their own lifestyle vis-a-vis starting a company of some type, ideally product and not service. And that happens to be a huge market. You don’t have to please everyone. And even if you tried, it’s not going to be possible. So that would be one example.
In the case of, for instance, there’s a company that I’m involved with, it’s probably 30% of my protein calories called Maui Nui. Maui Nui Venison, wild harvested venison from Hawaii. And it’s the most nutrient dense red meat you can buy, period, full stop. And it’s expensive. It is. If you think Mentava is expensive, no way. Maui Nui Venison is much more expensive. But in my case, I’m like the one place—when I have kids, it’ll change. But healthcare and nutrition and exercise, I’m not going to try to get the Goldilocks perfect amount. I’m happy to overspend to ensure that I am getting the best. And it turns out there are plenty of people who fit that bill. Even if you just had professional sports teams, collegiate sports teams at the high end and military, that can still be a really sizable business. So that’d be another example. They don’t hide it. You very quickly determine that this is going to be expensive.
Niels Hoven: So it’s not so much like a framing of the messaging. It’s just like price tag is there, they’re unapologetic about it. It’s just not something they pay attention to.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I would say that there is one facet, which is price. I’d say price, it’s just a very clear delineator. So rather than use four paragraphs to describe something that is probably accidentally going to insult a bunch of people one way or the other, it’s just like—I think there are ways that you could skin the cat. Oh, that’s a terrible expression. I wonder where it came from. I think about a lot of these things, like you can have your cake and eat it too? I’m like, where does that come from? If you have your cake, of course you’re going to eat your cake. Why is that double dipping? It doesn’t make any sense. In any case, the point is you could say something—I mean, maybe there’s something about, I’m sure there is, I would just have to spend more time on it, but the teaching your kid to fish as opposed to giving them a fish, right?
Traditional education gives your kid a fish and forces them to eat it. What if they loved learning how to fish and all it took was 15 minutes on a tablet and you did not have to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m shooting from the hip here, But I do think that there are—I mean, I’ll take another stab at it. Another stab would be for parents who realize that the education system in the US is broken in one fundamental way: eager, fast learners cannot learn at their own pace. It’s not perfect, but it’s edging directionally, I think, towards something useful.
Tim Ferriss: There are tons of examples, right? And you could look at punk rock bands, you could look at fashion brands. How do they position? Very often, they’re very good at making a stark contrast between our people and not our people, which this is coming back to the do nothing. That may not be a task worth spending a lot of time on, but there are a lot of ways that you can distinguish. I think who you’re for is a lot more important than who you’re not for, stating who you’re for.
I’ll give you an example. This is something I’m working on right now myself because the book that I was alluding to, it’s primarily a book on saying no. Which I’m working on the positioning of this right now, because the first third of the book is how to identify or create the few things to say yes to that actually make all the difference. So it’s not exclusively a book on saying no, it’s a book on making really high leverage decisions. However, the crux of the book, because there’s so many, it’s very easy to say yes. I mean, just everyone’s got promiscuous over commitment in their lives and a lot of tech is designed to push us into the realm of distraction, infinite distraction. But with saying no, I’m going to get a bunch of pushback and I address this pushback in the book, but I’m going to get lots of things right off the cuff on social. I would bet my entire net worth on it, which is must be nice, you’re already successful so you can just say no.
I’m too kind for that. You’re just saying this after the fact. I bet in the beginning you had to say yes to everything. There are a couple of pieces that I feel very confident are going to come up and I have somewhat of a binary choice. I can try to respond to all those and I can try to convince them otherwise, which I could. I could do it, but it’ll be very time-consuming and it’s not going to make me particularly happy. I’m not going to enjoy it, let me put it that way, because I’ll have to do it repeatedly over and over and over again because I’m like, did you read my blog post? No, of course 99 out of 100 people did not. [inaudible] 999 out of 1,000, probably even worse ratio didn’t see it. Or I can just say, you know what? You’re right. This is for people who’ve had just the bare modicum of success where they have figured out maybe one thing they’re good at where they have too much inbound and too many requests of their time. That’s who this book is for.
That, by the way, is still well over a hundred million people. I do not need to worry about an audience for the book, but if I try to boil the ocean and somehow homogenize it into appealing to everybody, the game is lost. I’m dead. So these are the types of things I’m thinking about where it’s like, okay, well, if I’m stating who it’s for, how precise do I get? How much do I reduce the aperture of the description? And it might make sense to really, really reduce it. I mean, when I launched The 4-Hour Workweek, I was like—in the background, in my mind, I was like, I am pitching this to 20 to 35 year old tech-savvy males in San Francisco. Phase one. Phase two, same kind of psychographics, female, same city. Next, same thing, New York. And then the sort of sphere of available readers was expanded to a handful of other major cities. And then before you know it, okay, fine. Then 16 year olds in Oklahoma are reading it and 60 year olds in Sri Lanka and so on. But if you try to start there, you’re fucked.
Niels Hoven: So when you have this very specific idea of who you’re trying to reach, what are the specific behavioral changes does that drive for you? Is it specific messages that you’re hammering on or—
Tim Ferriss: Marketing in that case, right?
Niels Hoven: Where you’re running ads or the messages that you’re running?
Tim Ferriss: All of it. I always like to look for the uncrowded channel. So in my case, I don’t think this would be appropriate for Mentava, but when I’m launching something, I often look for, always look for, don’t always find, but I always look for the fast-growing undervalued channel. And if I can’t find that, or even if I can, I then ask—and that could be channel or format. Then I ask what is the most uncrowded path to communicating with the taste makers in that sphere? So I’ll give you a concrete example.
In the case of The 4-Hour Workweek, which was published April 2007, 20-year anniversary coming up next year, which is insane, but there was this relatively new thing that had hit a critical mass and it was called a blog, which is short for web log. When I reached out to bestselling authors to ask them about their recent launches and I asked them what was a waste of time, what under delivered, what over delivered, what surprised you, what came back was TV is becoming less important for prescriptive nonfiction or nonfiction in general, NPR marketplace, there are a handful of NPR shows, and there’s this new thing, it’s really weird. They’re called blogs and I did this thing I never expected. I put this excerpt up, I did a little interview, sold more books than some gigantic morning show in New York City that gets all the fanfare.
And I was like, okay, well, I think I’m going to push all my chips in on this thing called blogs after I heard that six or seven times. And then the question was, well, how do I communicate with bloggers? And the answer was not email because that was the most crowded channel. So I spent my marketing budget basically for The 4-Hour Workweek flying to conferences to meet these people in person. WebExpo, can’t recall where that was held, but I spent all my time in the lounges, didn’t really do anything in the panels. And at the time, I’m not going to give the whole Dr. Evil life story, but met Robert Scoble. I have a lot of rules and thoughts around this type of approach, but flash forward, I’ll give a different example, 4-Hour Chef.
4-Hour Chef was launching in 2012. I asked the same questions, reached out to people, asked them the questions I already mentioned, and they said, you know, radio’s getting less important. It’s not having quite the same effect on sales as my last few book launches, but I went on this one thing called a podcast, and I was like, huh, okay. Well, I’d heard of podcasting, but I thought it came to the fore for a brief moment and then kind of flickered out and died. But that wasn’t true. It was just very, very early innings in podcasting in 2012. And when I launched The 4-Hour Chef, I was on Joe Rogan before Joe Rogan was Joe Rogan. Back in 2012, it was like, Joe Rogan, you mean the guy who used to be on Fear Factor? Like that was the reference. It wasn’t like, oh, the guy who was in the Oval Office and pushed through the executive order and is on every major news outlet every day where they’re quoting his podcast?
Man, this is incredible. I mean, that whole story is amazing. So Nerdist, Marc Maron, Adam Carolla, these OGs in the game, I was able to see the effects of that firsthand. Now later I took that experience and used it to inform starting my own in 2014. But for each book with Tools of Titans—no, was it Tools of Titans? I also did a bunch of experiments with BitTorrent with 4-Hour Chef and gave away the audiobook for free and all these experiments. They don’t all work out. I don’t think the BitTorrent experiment really panned out as I would’ve hoped, but that’s how I workshop. I do think, and look, you’re the CEO of the company, you don’t necessarily have the time to do this, but I imagine that you have the opportunity on these calls that you get on with the live coaching. I think in-person workshopping is just the fastest way to get feedback, real feedback.
Because sure, you can get feedback that is measurable in the forms of clicks and so on, and you can use user testing and see how people are reacting to a website, which I think is interesting. If you have a webcam on, you can look at their face and where they pause, which is not going to be transmitted if you’re only getting click-through data or click data in the case of a heat map, let’s say. But when you’re talking to people in person and trying to explain what you do, it’s like, do they lean in or do they lean back? Do they follow up with a question or they’re like, oh, interesting. If I’m at a party and someone’s like, what do you do? I’m like, I write books. 99% of the time, even if they don’t want to talk to me, they’re going to ask, what kind of books?
On the other hand, if I’m like, I’m an accountant, and I have some accountants I love, but if I’m like, I don’t really want to be at this party, and they’re like, what do you do? I’m like, an accountant, they’re like, oh yeah, that must be a job. There’s no follow-up and you can get a feel for which messaging is working. Or if you give them a paragraph and then two or three people at a bar, you’re just having casual conversations with at an event, they all ask about the same little thing that you’ve been discounting that has been a minor cameo in your messaging as opposed to the leading headline. And you’re like, you know what? Maybe I should test that.
Niels Hoven: Yeah. Actually, that’s brilliant. And it makes me think of comics, like trying out at open mic nights. I’m leaving so much on the table. I’m doing all these intro calls with our new customers. I should be asking them, if I said this, how would you have reacted to it? What were the pain points that got you to sign up? I should be at networking events, trying more taglines and seeing what gets people interested in having longer conversations with me.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You’re going to be having these conversations anyway. And just like it’s more signal if you ask someone to buy and they actually pay as opposed to do you prefer A or B? Similarly, it’s not bad to ask, do you prefer A or B, but the fidelity of that signal isn’t as strong in my opinion. It’s not as reliable as if you mention a few lines and then just wait. And if they don’t follow up and two or three people don’t ask follow-up questions, that’s a problem. But if they latch onto something, you’re like, okay, that wasn’t organic. That was a proactive move on their part. It wasn’t in response to a question. They’re not trying to appease me necessarily. Maybe they are, maybe there’s a component of people pleasing or just being social, but that’s why you have to talk to more than one person.
And I’m like, The 4-Hour Workweek was workshopped. I mean, I didn’t intend on writing a book, but it was notes from a class that I taught twice a year. It was a guest lecture. It wasn’t an ongoing class, but I got to see what didn’t work. It was very much like a standup comic. If I tried a joke and it fell flat twice, I was like, kill it. Yank it. That’s got to go. It’s not working. So I’m not sure if that’s helpful, but there are other things you can use. I mean, for instance, with some of these mock-ups or if you’re testing copy options, I think it’s most valuable if it’s on your own website because you control it and you can try to discern intent to purchase.
However, there are many services that do this. I don’t know how I ended up finding this one. There’s one called PickFu, P-I-C-K-F-U. We’ll put the branding aside, but instant consumer feedback, split testing and market research. And so they’ve got their fancy social cred with these logos, HBO Max, L’Oreal, Wayfair, et cetera, have supposedly used it. But you can, I believe—I think it’s PickFu that’s allowed me to do this. It might have been another similar platform, but basically picking Amazon Prime members and then serving up— You can spec out your demographics, and then it just surfaces three options. And the reason this can be helpful—well, there are a few reasons. I use this for split testing different aspects of the design and packaging around the Coyote card game, which I created with Exploding Kittens, which came out, I don’t know, a year or two ago, which was a really fun experiment.
I’ve never had anything in thousands of Walmart and Target stores, which is super fun, but you’re not going to get much data from Amazon, and you don’t really want Amazon to be your debutante ball where you show up in your new dress for the first time and see if people like it. I do not like taking that type of risk. And there was internal debate. I mean, there were diverging opinions. And in the case of Mentava, it’s like, I don’t know what your traffic looks like. So if you are going to get a statistically significant signal with which you’re going to make an important decision about something, you might just not have the volume necessary.
Maybe you do, but maybe you don’t. And in this case, it’s like, look, if I want 5,000 people to vote on something in 72 hours, I can do that. It’s a function of cost, and maybe it’s like 500 bucks, 600 bucks. It’s very affordable. And you could very easily—I can’t recall what the competitors are, but you could use Claude or ChatGPT or whatever to ask, what are the three most compelling competitors to PickFu with similar pricing? Because some of them are going to be very, very, very expensive intended for large enterprise. They do the same thing, frankly. It’s [inaudible] up a little bit in a tuxedo and you have to do a sales call or they demo and then quote you a price. If you see that and you’re just looking for fast, quick and dirty, then I wouldn’t proceed. But these are all different tentacles that are all out probing that bring information back to the central brain that then determines which I want to split test in a place with higher stakes, but better signaling for purchase intention, which would be your website, right?
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And you can do it really fast. I’m famously impatient. I do not want to wait weeks and weeks and weeks. So I’m like, okay, cool. 72 hours over the weekend? Great. I’ll just let this run and then on Monday we can look at it because if we got—and if it’s an edge case where we’ve got something that’s like, okay, well, it’s like 49% or 51%. Don’t be too cheap on this because you can get a false positive on something. I mean, you did more math by eighth grade than I did throughout all of high school, so I don’t need to tell you about statistics. But the point is, don’t do the bare minimum because very often the results will flip when you get just a larger sample size.
Niels Hoven: These tips are so helpful because I think it makes me realize how many opportunities we’re leaving on the table to iterate with our messaging and get it dialed in. So I’m pretty excited about this.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s throw out a prompt for people who are still listening or watching this. Let Niels know. Look at the website, mentava.com, check it out. Of the things we’ve talked about, what has resonated? What should the tagline be? What language or features or anything have resonated most? Just let them know on X, right? Tag him @NielsHoven. That’s @N-I-E-L-S-H-O-V-E-N. And trust me, Niels will be paying attention.
Niels Hoven: I will be.
Tim Ferriss: So check it out. Is there anything else that we should cover? I mean, I feel like we have hit a lot. I don’t feel like we need to spend a ton of time on competition. I mean, I did a competitive analysis, but I do feel like you’re heavily differentiated. But if there is a particular competitive snag that you run into and you’re like, oh God, Newman, they brought up whatever again, then we could talk about it. But if not, then we probably don’t need to spend too much time there, right? I mean, you got the cheap reading apps. I don’t think we need to spend time on that. Teach yourself books and kits. We got live online tutors. Then, we’ve got kind of like the super mega, super comprehensive localized options like Alpha School which are just a different category altogether.
Niels Hoven: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m not sure we need to spend time on that. Big fan of Alpha School, by the way. It’s just a different thing.
Niels Hoven: They use us—my kid is using their homeschool program right now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Cool.
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Niels Hoven: They’re investors also.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, nice. I didn’t realize that. That’s—
Niels Hoven: Yeah. Joe Liemandt was like, “I will take your entire round right now if you let me.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool. Yeah. Joe is very smart.
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Funny story, he may not realize this. Probably doesn’t. Why would he? But I almost ended up working for Trilogy Software out of college. The reason I fell in love with Austin is because I made it to the finals round of interviews and they flew out the finalist to Austin and gave us a whole whirlwind tour and kind of—I don’t think it was wining and dining, mostly just dining, but they made it really fun.
I didn’t make the cut. In retrospect, I guess, thank God, right? Blessing in disguise. Kind of forced me to really scrap for a while which was good for me. I’ve been in Austin for more than a decade, still haven’t connected with Joe. So that’ll happen eventually.
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Anything come to mind that we should cover? I’m not sure if there’s anything outstanding. Just while we’re here, if there’s anything else that you’d like to chat about.
Niels Hoven: Is there—do you have any insights on getting in front of people who aren’t actively looking for your product or who aren’t actively trying to solve a problem, like don’t know they have the problem yet?
Tim Ferriss: Tell me more about that.
Niels Hoven: The issue about parents not realizing how much school is going to hold back their kids until they’re—like, it’s too late or that your best opportunities for acceleration are even before your kid gets to school.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So the question is any thoughts on how to get in front of those people?
Niels Hoven: Yeah. They say you want to be the painkiller. You want to solve the problem that your customer knows they have. I think for a lot of our customers, they don’t realize that this is a problem yet. They don’t realize how far their kid is from their potential or one of the strongest reasons I have for teaching your kids to read early is because when they hit school, your school is going to try and hold them back. And being able to say, “My kid can already read. You need to give them more opportunity,” is one of your strongest negotiating levers.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s a great point. I really like that. Let me do a Rashomon multi-directional thing on this question. The first is coming back to like, “What if I did nothing?” One position I could try to take, it might not be justifiable, is the people who are using your product understand the problem. So just spend a bunch of focused time on the referral engine for those people.
Then, you don’t have to explain anything because chances are they’re not going to have to explain anything either because their cohort of friends, i.e., parents with kids, will be cut from the same cloth. Then, it’s a question of, “How do you congregate the converted versus how do you convert the non-believers?” which I think is—I think that may be a better question but—
Niels Hoven: I think there is a lot there about, like, giving our customers the tools to let their friends know about this problem that maybe their friends don’t know about yet. They are going to have that opportunity to explain it if we can give them the words for it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I—I would also say that the—if you had a two-minute readiness test, make it interesting, make it—if the parents never end up using Mentava, how can you make that as illuminating and useful as possible so that people—that would be a worthwhile thought exercise. Namely, how can I make this two-minute readiness test or, like, “Is your kid ready?” or—there’s probably a better question to ask, better wording for that, but is there a—I cannot tell you. There was this thing a couple of years ago, I don’t remember what it was selling. It was definitely selling something to be clear. This was not just some questionnaire online for fun, but it was like—this is a bit risque. Hope those three-year-olds aren’t listening to this but—
Niels Hoven: I cannot wait.
Tim Ferriss: It was like a sex compatibility test and you would take this thing and then your girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse would fill it out or whatever. And then—
Niels Hoven: Oh, Mojo Upgrade. I remember it.
Tim Ferriss: And then, it would tell you like, “Oh, you’re a Switch,” and, “This person is a that,” and, “This person is a this,” and, like, “You might be into all these things,” and it was—people got very excited about it and they shared the test. The point of that business was not to provide tests. It was selling something else. I can’t even remember what it was. I didn’t buy it. But in one of the more awkward transitions of my podcast career—let’s now come back to children.
If you made—I think it would be very—it could be fun to try to create a readiness test which is not sexy enough. It would have to be called something else. But a test that people could take in two minutes that would give them information that they would find valuable or interesting or fascinating, to the extent that they would want to share the free readiness test with their friends.
Because then, they’re not saying, “Hey, I’m not automatically one of those rich assholes who is just going to spend, who can burn $500 a month,” which is not what I think. I think it’s a fantastic investment, right? But they’re not risking that social judgment by recommending someone take a free two-minute test. So I think that’s another opportunity potentially. And then, where are you based, Niels?
Niels Hoven: I’m outside Seattle.
Tim Ferriss: Outside Seattle. All right. So in Seattle, you probably have some organization like this. If you were in the Bay Area, just because I’m familiar with the Bay Area and I’ve been there for so long, you mentioned first generation, immigrant, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I would go speak at the Indus Entrepreneurs, TiE, in Silicon Valley. I would be—
Niels Hoven: Sorry. What did you say? The what entrepreneur?
Tim Ferriss: Indus, I-N-D-U-S. Let’s see if it still exists. The Indus Entrepreneurs, TiE, nonprofit organization. There it is. So tie.org, T-I-E, .org. Wow. Well, let’s see here. The world’s largest community of entrepreneurs. I’m interested. Now, about the genesis of TiE. Yeah. So let’s see. Board of trustees. Who’s on the board of trustees? I’m expecting—I have high expectations, TiE. Let’s see who we got. Yeah. Founder of Infosys. Yeah. Baller. Okay. Oh, this website—they could use a website upgrade. Here we go. Jensen Huang. I believe TiE is one of the most extraordinary communities known to any industry.
I mean, they’ve got some good testimonials. But the point of this is that back in the day when I lived in Mountain View and I would go volunteer for TiE because it was the only way for me to punch above my weight class and meet people who would otherwise be completely unreachable, it was basically all Indians, right? Fine. Great. But if you want to talk about first or second generation immigrants who are all in on learning, like this about as—it’s about as warm an audience as I can imagine.
Niels Hoven: That’s great.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So you can check it out. But the point being, if you were like, “Hmm. All right. Well, look, I’m going to take a trip anyway to the Bay Area,” or maybe they have a chapter. Let’s see. Chapters. I mean, it’s freaking Seattle. Come on. I would think it’d be—well, they got Nairobi. They’re going to make me scroll through all the countries. Man. All right. Come on now. There is—I’m boring the hell out of people. Yeah. There’s a Seattle chapter.
Niels Hoven: All right.
Tim Ferriss: But the—and all over the US, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, et cetera. So I would just say pitch to your dream customer or get up and talk and do—see if you can get on the main stage at one of TiE’s large events and give a presentation. This is another way that you can test things. Give a presentation. If it’s good enough, if it’s not, then too bad. Try again.
But if it’s good enough, which does not have to be great, but if it’s—I suspect you’d have a very warm audience. And then, you see what people ask you. You see what people mention and you see what people ask you afterwards, right? And then, you’re hearing from the converted exactly what they want to know to join your church and I’m just like, “Man.”
Niels Hoven: I feel like this is the bread and butter question to ask you. How do you get on the main stage at these events when you don’t have a track record?
Tim Ferriss: I think you do have a track record. I think you’re underselling yourself. I think you point to some of these—I think you point to your pedigree, right? So in other words, that third paragraph where I was like, “Use that sentence: Niels worked at Cloudflare, ClassDojo, and Pocket Gems where he ran the highest grossing mobile game in the world in 2011.” If—well, first of all, it seems like TiE has branched out way beyond Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley which is great. But depending on who you’re pitching, you have to customize to who you’re pitching, right?
Niels Hoven: Right.
Tim Ferriss: But I would say it may be easier than you expect, right?
Niels Hoven: So I didn’t even know that this is a thing. So people reach out to organizations and say, “I know you have a conference coming up. I would like to be a speaker there and here’s what I do.”
Tim Ferriss: People definitely do that.
Niels Hoven: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, look, I have not done this type of legwork in a very long time. But yeah, just cold email and pitch them.
Niels Hoven: Okay. Cool.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, it’s—you want to make sure it’s thematically related to what they’re doing, right? But they have the TiE Global Summit, TiEcon Silicon Valley. Maybe TiEcon Silicon Valley is more interesting because you could use it as a recruiting tool simultaneously, right? Depending on what your priorities are at the time. Definitely going to be a high density of venture capitalists, although perhaps you don’t need that at this point. Yeah. Let’s see, tieglobalsummit.org. What I would say is don’t be too attached to getting on stage and spending an hour talking about how Mentava was born and this and this and this, right? Maybe it’s the behavioral optimization or—what did you call it? Motivation engineering? There’s a term you used that I’m blanking on.
Niels Hoven: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Maybe it’s that, right? Maybe it’s commentary on disrupting and innovating education in the United States and, “Oh, by the way, I’m the founder of this startup,” and you spend two minutes on that. But like, “How did we get here?” Okay. Now, I’m giving a broader talk about my thoughts on education and where it’s possible to stick in door wedges, so that we can gain a foothold in something interesting. I am really just shooting from the hip here, right?
Niels Hoven: Yeah. You—
Tim Ferriss: But there are lots of things because you—I mean, look, you could have some side hobby—I’m making this up, right?
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s just say you bump into the chairman of the board of trustees of TiE and—I don’t know. He is about to go on a trip and you’re like, “Huh. Seems like he’s got an Olympic archery recurve bow that he’s taking with him. Isn’t that interesting?” You get into this whole archery and you’re like, “You know what? I’m into archery,” and he’s like, “Would you come speak on archery?” and the answer should be, “Absolutely. I’ll get on stage and talk about how to learn, how I approach the task of learning archery. And oh, by the way, I work at this company and here’s a minute on Mentava.” It’s like, “Yes, the answer to that one’s yes.”
As long as you have a very clear idea of what constitutes a success, getting on stage to talk in front of an interesting audience is not enough, right? What constitutes success? Is it recruiting? Is it feedback from people when you get offstage? If that’s the case, guess what? You probably want an earlier speaking slot as opposed to a closing speaking slot. You probably don’t want to be speaking on the last morning when a lot of people have already left, if they’re coming in from out of town, this type of thing.
I’m not, by the way, saying that you should focus on TiE, even though I do think it’s, at least when I was exposed to it, a very interesting organization. Again, an uncrowded channel. It’s like, “I might have been the only white person volunteering there.” I was like, “That’s ridiculous. This is an absolute goldmine of brilliant people and world-class entrepreneurs,” and it’s like, “Why isn’t everybody here?” So it’s cool to see that they’ve grown so much but—
Niels Hoven: I think what’s coming through so much out of these conversations with you is that it’s like an exercise in thinking out of the box. It’s like, “Okay. I know what the goals are.” It’s like, “Where are the open channels? Where are the—where were the opportunities that nobody else is looking for? Where are the shortcuts?”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It’s like—I mean, it might not even be going to TiE, but you look at their team and you’re like, “Oh, look at that.” I’m looking at the board of trustees and you might realize like, “Oh, wow. Kamal Agarwala follows me on X. Maybe he’d be open to hopping on a phone call or a Zoom,” and then—or maybe you look at the bios and Anita is mother of three and you’re like, “Where do the Indian moms in the US congregate? Are there WhatsApp groups? Are there message boards? Are there whatever?” And I’m not saying this is a good idea, right?
Niels Hoven: Right.
Tim Ferriss: But I do think there is value and I did this—you might recall. Very early on, I mentioned The 4-Hour Workweek and the whatever the range was I gave, like 20- to 35-year-old tech-savvy males in San Francisco. That’s very specific and—but the target isn’t the market, right? So the initial target is lead domino that you tip over that makes the rest easier to tip. The eventual market can be infinitely large, but the reason for being so specific—there are many reasons. I gave a few already.
Another is that I can achieve a surround sound effect for a very small number of people where they feel like I am ubiquitous and that there is a perceived momentum that is very helpful, right? Because at that point in time, going back 2007, if I was on Gizmodo, TechCrunch, I think it was 42 or 43 Folders, Merlin Mann and a few other places at the same time, as far as Silicon Valley technorati were concerned, I was everywhere, right?
Niels Hoven: Right.
Tim Ferriss: There are other ways to approach that, right? It’s like, “Okay.” Like Jdate for Jewish dating, okay? That’s like they’re very, very clear on who it’s for and you could— I mean, look, it’s like India is a subcontinent, right? It’s a gigantic place. So I’m not trying to paint with a broad brush. But it’s like, “Okay. Maybe I try to create a surround sound effect in a critical mass within the Indian communities in the United States.”
I’m not saying that’s a good idea, but that is—I would say that’s a very achievable—or at least it’s very concrete, right? It’s more precise than parents who want their kids to learn faster from a marketing perspective. Because then, you can figure out, “Well, maybe I sponsor a TiE event. Okay. Maybe there’s some app that they’re particularly fond of for cohesion.” I don’t know what that would be. Again, making this up as I go.
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Maybe there is—who knows, right? This is going to sound antiquated, but Facebook groups or something. Who knows? And you’re like, “Okay. Well, maybe I or my wife can become active or somebody on the team and offer free trials in exchange for feedback and—” Nothing sneaky, nothing underhanded. It’s just like I—people underestimate, I think, the power of a surround sound effect for a very focused group. This just happens to be the thing that popped into my head, but there could have been a dozen other examples.
Niels Hoven: Yeah. I think this resonates a lot because if that surround sound effect is going on, then at some point you’re like, “I keep hearing this name. I keep hearing this product. Let me go see what this is all about. I’m curious. I want to look into it.” That’s all we need, that first hook.
Tim Ferriss: Well, also, again, I’m stereotyping here but this is my lived experience. It’s like I would be very—I would put a lot of money on black that the management organizers of TiE care a hell of a lot about education and education for their kids. I would put a lot of chips on that and maybe that’s the way to make the ball roll downhill as opposed to pushing it uphill, right? You don’t need to convince them. They are convinced. They just don’t know that you exist.
Niels Hoven: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: You know? And then, you can focus on the stuff that’s really fun to focus on. I mean, a lot of this is really fascinating and, at some level, fun to focus on. But it’s like then you can focus on making it as good as possible for them. I think that’s more—I think that’s quite a fun piece of this whole puzzle, right?
Niels Hoven: Cool. I like this a lot.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s an approach and it’s a very human scale approach, right? I’m not suggesting something that requires hiring McKinsey. I’m not suggesting something that requires outsourcing analytics to some board, which I’m certainly not averse to, but it’s the amount of intelligence that you can absorb both explicitly. But also, kind of implicitly and intuitively by spending time in some of these concentrated environments. You’re like, “Oh, okay. For at least this subset of Indus diaspora entrepreneurs, these are the questions and comments that come up when I use this two minute spiel that I ever find on Mentava.” That’s valuable. That’s really valuable.
And then, there are ways online that you can also convert that into very targeted paid advertising, right? This has turned into an infomercial for TiE, but it’s like maybe they have a newsletter, maybe they have—these are relatively low cost things and it’s—I mean, look, I—I’m going to get in so much trouble for this, but it’s like, look, I’ve gone to—went to two universities in China. Also, probably, you could find an equivalent for first generation in the US, Chinese parents who are all in on education, right?
Niels Hoven: Yep. Yeah. We had—
Tim Ferriss: Chances are, if they made their way here, which is hard AF, they’re going to care a hell of a lot about giving their kids as many advantages as possible and there’s no convincing. They just don’t need—
Niels Hoven: Yeah. We had one customer who was, I think, Chinese, possibly Vietnamese, and she was saying she loved Mentava because she does not speak English very well. So she’s like, “I probably wouldn’t be able to teach my kid to read. So I give them this app, I sit next to them, I do my work, and I just—just to make sure that they kind of stay on task.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s super cool. So those are some of the things that I would be thinking about. I mean, I only know my toolkit, right? So I have lots of blind spots, tons of blind spots. But I will say that this is—I think this type of product, even though I don’t yet have kids, hope to remedy that soon, but this is the type of business I like a lot, right?
Because you have premium pricing, you have to build a product that allows you to charge premium pricing, so there is upward pressure on product quality. And you can find very discrete populations that are already converted, right? It’s like this is not—Education is not a nice to have. By hook or crook, one way or the other, sure, you might get lucky and your kid is like the Ramanujan of self-study. But in most cases, kids are going to need nudges in the right direction. They’re going to need tools, they’re going to need guidance, and it’s like people are willing to pay for that if they have the means, right?
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So in any case. Niels, people can find Mentava, obviously, at mentava, M-E-N-T-A-V-A, .com. Check it out. Who knows? Maybe the website will be revised by the time you see it, but they can find you on X at @nielshoven, N-I-E-L-S-H-O-V-E-N. I was dying to ask you about Beauty and the Geek, honestly, but I’ll save that for our round two.
Niels Hoven: All right.
Tim Ferriss: That’s round two. Anything else that you’d like to say or point people to? Any requests you’d like to make of people listening or watching before we wind to a close and land the plane, at least for now?
Niels Hoven: I think my one request to people, whether or not they try Mentava, is you will have to advocate for your child throughout their lives, especially when it comes to education, and never ever let anybody make you feel guilty for advocating for your kid.
Tim Ferriss: Love that. That is a great place to close. Niels, thanks for taking the time, man. Great to see you.
Niels Hoven: Thank you so much, Tim.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Love Mentava, the mission behind it, the purpose behind it, the ethos. Not to mention the product. I mean, go look at these testimonies on the website. It’s bananas. To everybody listening, we’ll include links to everything. Probably not the sex compatibility tests, but we’ll include links to just about everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. If you search Niels, N-I-E-L-S, or Mentava, it will be the only result, so you’ll find it there. Until next time, be just a bit kinder than it’s necessary to others. But also, to yourself. Make sure that your compassion includes yourself and thanks for tuning in.
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