At Teachable, we have spent the last six years empowering creators to transform their knowledge into income.
Our platform has been used by 50,000+ creators, who have gone on to teach 30 million students, and in the process have earned over half a billion dollars (!!).
Every single day, our creators reach 20,000+ new students and earn close to a million dollars.
But beyond the numbers, it’s been awe inspiring to see the actual impact of allowing people to earn a living from their passion.
Today, we are excited to announce that we are being acquired by Brazil-based Hotmart Technology…
On September 1st, I sent our 63rd monthly investor update. It was one of the better ones.
A little over five years after Teachable was incorporated, we were excited to sneak past the $2,000,000 in monthly revenue mark.
While we are proud of this–as we should be–this post is about the entirety of our journey over the last year and not just our highlight reel. (For that, there’s always my IG).
While I maintain that running this company is the most rewarding part of my life, I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t been a goddamn @!%*@% at times.
…
There has never been a better time in history to earn a living as a creator.
Who is a Creator?
A creator is defined as someone who brings something into existence.
Traditionally, you could create art or music or photography. Or write something, record something or build something with your hands.
But today, creation takes many unconventional forms. There are literally thousands of ways you can be a creator in 2019.
You can stream video games on Twitch, design custom objects to be 3D-printed on Shapeways, create memes on social media, produce beats for artists on Splice or start a podcast.
In three months, Teachable turns five years old.
In that time, we’ve grown an enormous amount. We now power 25,000 creators who teach 20+ million people. All of our beautiful creators will sell over $300 million worth of knowledge this year alone! That’s close to an average of a million dollars in sales every single day this year.
But ultimately, as Uncle Ben told Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Today, I want to talk about that responsibility.
What responsibility?
- The responsibility that comes with supporting the livelihoods of thousands of people.
- The responsibility to serve our creators…
A year ago, I published Scaling Teachable — Our Journey to $500K in MRR.
A lot has evolved since then, so one year later I figured it’s time to update our narrative and chronicle where we are as a business today.
While it may be unusual for a private company to share such a close look at the important metrics behind the business, transparency is one of our core values at Teachable — and by doing this annually, we’re putting our money (our venture capital?) where our mouth is.
Business Metrics
In August 2018, Teachable earned over $1.2M+ in revenue.
Our revenue…
We share revenue, sales, student numbers and more.
Transparency is one of the four core internal values at Teachable. Outside of compensation information, we believe in making every single aspect of our business transparent internally.
What does that mean?
Everyone internally has access to our financials. Investor updates. Revenue dashboards. Board meeting agendas. Meeting notes from other teams. My personal Snapchat. Ok, maybe not the last one.
But today, we’re extending our internal transparency to apply externally. …
Three years ago, we created a small side project with a bold mission — to make it possible for anyone to make a living teaching what they know online.
As course creators ourselves, we hated the inelegance of every existing solution. We wanted a fresh start on a platform that didn’t control our students, and we built Teachable as a small side project for ourselves.
I remember the specific moment when we sent an email to our list inviting them to buy our course on our new platform. That feeling of “no one is ever going to buy this.” …
How a Side Project Grew Up to Become a Company
The pervasive Silicon Valley myth goes something like this: founder is passionate about solving a huge problem, raises millions driven by a powerful vision, and amidst much struggle finally changes the world.
Our story isn’t like that.
Fall 2013
Fedora started as a side project to scratch an itch.
I was teaching courses on Udemy with my partner Conrad. We were making some money, but it appeared unwise to market courses to students that we would have no direct access to.
So I locked myself in a room for three days and built an incredibly rudimentary website to sell my mobile marketing…
I launched Fedora on Product Hunt a year ago.
While hundreds of blog posts have covered Product Hunt launches in great detail, this post is a full year in review — what happened in the one year after we launched on Product Hunt on April 15 2014?
How It All Started
The vision behind Fedora was simple — building the easiest way for people to make money teaching online courses without having to go to a marketplace and give up ownership.
Six months in, we had attracted a small base of beta users, who were collectively processing a few thousand dollars in monthly transactions…
Earlier in the year, I spent a few weeks raising a seed round of financing for Fedora. Rather than questions about our business model, traction or pedigree, the most frequent question I received was “Why now?” —- this is the (long-form) answer.
Everything we knew about education has now changed.
Never before in history has it been feasible for an individual to teach millions of people at scale.
Historically, people have always learned from local experts — your high school football coach, your community college professor, the pastor at your local church, the intensive coding bootcamp at the nearest city.
…
