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.
Neil, nice to see you. Thanks for making the time. Looking forward to this.
Thanks so much. I appreciate the chance to be here.
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 Mntava 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. Feels like ages ago. 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, let's hear it from your mouth. What is Mntava? What is the latest draft of your quick explanation of what Mntava is?
The latest draft is that Mntava 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 two, three, to get to a second grade reading level.
Mhm. And what is a second grade reading level? Let's just say I'm a first-time parent and I have no idea what that means. What is an eager to learn, reasonably smart second grader doing? What are they reading by the end of second grade?
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 and Piggie series.
Kind of the conscious competence level of being able to read.
Got it. 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 I mean 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?
We had a set of two-year-old twins who, you know, were reading Hop on Pop, Green Eggs and Ham, these early reader books before their third birthday.
That's the video that I saw.
Oh, yeah. You just retweeted that video. Yeah. The parents were projecting, right, 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 be doing it.
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.
And just as background, well, you know, why don't you tell one or two more stories and then I want to hear how Mntava came to be, but the sort of not the Iliad version, like the abbreviated version, right? But maybe you can give a few more examples because people might say, well, okay, fine, you got the Wonder Twins, but we need more than the Wonder Twins. So what else? What else have you seen?
We had a three-year-old who learned to read in about three months. We had a kindergartener who was behind and his mom asked us, you know, 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.' Like, 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.' That was just really neat.
That's so cool.
I was watching the two-minute, maybe three-minute demo. I'm not sure. It's pretty short.
Didn't, I don't think you guys publicize or use it much, but the demo video that you sent over.
It's a terrible demo, but yeah, it's out there.
It's terrible except there is one slide, let's call it, right? It's text that is a testimonial that is kind of below the fold on laptop on your love letters section, okay? With all these parents sharing their experiences, which is roughly, you know, 'more progress in one week with my daughter than in roughly six months of kindergarten.' That's bananas, but it's not so bananas as to be outside of the realm of possibility, right? And you've 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, right? 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. And there was someone who said like, the learning process, I have a four-year education degree that was earned because learning is complex and you cannot simplify it, and we're not focused on outcomes. We're focused on like all this hand-wavy stuff.
This was an educator who said something like, 'You will never convince me that results are the driver of education. You will never convince me that efficacy is supposed to be one of our goals.' And it's like, then what is the goal?
Well, people can watch the documentary Waiting for Superman if they want to see the sorry state of things.
But I was introduced to you, how was I introduced to you? Was it Eric Ries, I believe.
Of The Lean Startup, also one of our investors.
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 Mntava come to be? Short version, and why does it work? How and why does it work?
Short version of how it came to be. You know, Mntava started during the pandemic. At the time, my wife and I, we had three little kids. We both have full-time jobs. We're locked down in this 600-foot one-bedroom apartment. My kids want to learn. Like, 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 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 was 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. And 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 Mntava came from.
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, one to ten in different ways and giving you reasons?
I think the key things that Mntava 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. You know, we know how to teach reading. It's 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 know, you have to be the teacher. It is a lot of heavy lifting from the parent side, but like 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.
And this is on an iPad typically, a tablet?
Yeah, on an iPad. You know, just as an anecdote is where the bar is hanging in terms of low-hanging design in one of the apps that I was using before we built Mntava 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. And so you have this 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 who 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 in kind of, I'm not sure exactly how to say that.
You mean like variable reward, or how does the slot machine example map to motivation design?
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 Mntava 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 kind of, you know, 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.
Mhm. 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 called words.
All right. How do you pronounce your last name correctly? Remind me.
Hoven. All right. Niels Hoven on X if you want to see the front lines of the culture wars at Niels Hoven. He's the founder and CEO of Mntava, 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? Like even if I consider my kid fast, maybe unusually fast is what, one out of a hundred, one out of a thousand? And I stumbled. Right? 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, right? Or you could scrap 'high-achieving.' Like when in doubt, take it out. Is another writing dictum. So it's like kids, high-achieving kids, eager kids maybe.
Right. '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 Mntava to allow top-performing students to achieve their potential.' I think we can scrap 'top-performing' also. Okay. '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, Mntava'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 sort 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. 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?
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 phrase to try and speak to these people, but I agree. I don't think we've found the right one yet.
I would also say I think it's a big niche, frankly.
Which you may have already concluded. But 'their early literacy software, meaning Mntava'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. 'Mntava 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 that you could 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 Mntava, 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 mntava.com and it has all the links and everything else. So m-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 know, 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, right, 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.
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, etc.' Is that your son? Your actual son?
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: 'Mntava lets kids accelerate without requiring parents to become teachers or taskmasters.' And that's through, as you pointed out, like the very finely tuned curriculum and motivation design. And I would agree that schools are surprisingly bad at both. So what are some of the current challenges? How would you lay out like 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?
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're 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 have this problem, that their kids are bored and not achieving their potential, it's kind of too late to, like, 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 differentiation is really nuanced and in kind of 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, right? I mean it's a thousand decisions that add up to a very distinct feeling maybe on some level. We found a lot of the parents who came to us immediately sort of already feel this problem intensely because they 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. Yeah. 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.
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 like step-function distinction where suddenly you have better retention, more referrals, etc. That's just my intuition looking at everything in front of me and the website and so on.
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 like, 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, somewhat like a midwife friend who helps the birthing process, and she was talking this acronym BRAIN, and it was benefits, risks, alternatives, what does your intuition say? And then N is nothing, like 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, like what if that were not the problem? And the reason that comes up for me is like when I imagine, right, 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 like my hesitancy, if I had any, right, I don't think I would have a ton, right? I think I would just pay the price and use Mntava, 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 like child prodigies taught by private tutors or whatever. I mean, hopefully not child prodigies, but that's a whole separate conversation. The point of that being I want them to be kids, right, 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 like the social development? Has that come up at all?
Because for me, I'm like, yeah. Like let's pour gasoline on this eagerness to learn. And these kids want to go, go, and they're being held back. They're like these thoroughbred racehorses locked in the gate. They're just not being let out to run. And it's like, sure, I want that kid to run, but then what? Like what form does school take if I give them such a head start? How do you think about that?
A big part of the reason we've designed Mntava 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 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 sort of 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, you know, for like an hour a day during math class they study Mntava, they do math Mntava 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.
Mhm. I feel like, 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.
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, etc., etc.
Alpha School's big insight is essentially the same as ours, that if you use self, 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.
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's like it just makes sense. It's very hard to make and when you see it, you're like, 'Oh, yeah, that makes sense, right?' 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, well, 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 Beitcraft of Strand Therapeutics. He's developing, you know, 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 Mntava.' I was 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 Mntava?' 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 like 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, I'll automatically conversion and everything like quadruples. Like I don't think that's going to happen, but here's what he said. 'Ah 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, like 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 quote-unquote sequencing milestone that they explain is important. Rob was likely not fully there. Three, 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 of 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 Mntava had some pull for him, right? So like the kid wants to use it.
But one question I had, I guess there are two things that hopped 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?
I think this is not a question about the user flow, which we know is bad, and more about a question of sort of the experience that they're having as they engage with the software. Is that what you're asking?
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 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 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 Mntava experience, fairly early on, you kind of 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 kind of, we'll just teach you letter sounds and we send the parents an email explaining, you know, 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.
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 kind of, we have to play this game. What share of failed trials come back, right? 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 like how proactive is the outreach?
There's zero proactive outreach.
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. Okay? And I'll prompt some of them with questions. All right. Is Mntava free for schools or in some capacity free for teachers? Is there any free option? Is there anyone who can use Mntava for free?
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 Mntava to schools for free. Kind of 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, we 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.
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?
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.'
I don't think the cost is a problem personally. And we can come back to them. But I do think the kind of free for schools and teachers is interesting. The other thing I would say is that I probably shouldn't mention him specifically, but I know someone who has created a spectacularly successful app and it's pretty expensive. I mean, 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. Like 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.
I think I know exactly the app you're talking about and I, yeah, I know that is a great program.
It's a great app. I'll just give another example. When 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, right? And never questioned it. Just kind of 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, right? 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, right? This isn't a returns situation. So I mean, you could offer something like that. Frankly, I think that the like 110% back is really underutilized, but I feel like you were going to say something else.
We have something along those lines, but not exactly. Sometimes people do the free trial and then they write in to 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 Mntava 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 Mntava for $100 a month, but we would like you to send us a video of your kid every week using Mntava, enjoying Mntava, that we can use in social media and marketing. Because, you know, 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. Where would you like to go next? I mean, 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, kind of a two-minute like 'is your kid ready' type of quiz?
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.
Yeah. Because if you had like 'is your kid ready?'
Take the two-minute quiz, right? You could still accomplish the data capture of email address and so on and verification so that you can communicate with those people. 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 kids' 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. All right. Is it the same or is it less than a tutor? Well, let's just say it's the same. Okay. And let's say they're equally effective.
But there's one difference. And one is like you're giving a kid a fish, right? 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 Mntava still wins even if they're equally effective, right? And then furthermore, it's like if you have all these other tools and let's just say they're, I mean, 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.
I think that's very true. I think we need to lean into that more because we've had people, people I know personally who could absolutely afford Mntava. Usually they are parents of only one child. This is their first child and they say, you know, 'I tried Mntava. It works, but I really wanted to be the one to teach my kid to read.' And so they opt in with another product where like they get to be the teacher. They actually want to be the teacher.
But for, you know, a lot of parents who are busier, who have multiple kids, see that value immediately. Like 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.
I love teaching. It's one of my favorite things in the world. Like I absolutely love teaching. So the selling point for me, if I were the stand-in parent, right, 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?
15 to 30 minutes a day depending on age.
So, okay, look, you got all day with your kids from when they wake up to when they...
They go to bed. I mean, 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, is that worth $500 a month? Yeah. I mean, for a lot of people, I think the answer is yes. Do you mind if I just brain dump?
Then I want you to steer the ship a little bit.
So, the two-minute, you know, 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.
Selling the parents relief, not just the kids' speed. As I mentioned, like the you don't have to be a teacher, you know, 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 like 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 like 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 Mantava and unhelpful to parents. Does that make sense?
Because the kid doesn't need to be a super genius to use Mantava and benefit from it. 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 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?
It's like if people say this is just for rich kids, it's like, okay, fine. If you just focused, I don't want to, this is not what you're doing, but like if you just focused on people who make 500k a year or more, that's a huge market. Like you're fine at $500 a month.
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? So,
If I were talking to someone, I had two glasses of wine, right? So, I'm playing a little loose and someone's like $500 a month, you know, 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 is 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 kids' pants last month? How much does your stroller cost? Really? You're not going to spend, like, come on.
That's how I would sort of hopefully productively bust their balls, right? I mean, that's how I would do it. 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'd put on the homepage, but so you have done a good job of using X specifically, right? 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, like two examples of responding to people. Like 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, right? The like 2-year-olds or two-and-a-half-year-olds reading. 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 kind of a side note. And I know you have math coming, right? So that you can move from the perception of reading app to like 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 that's, you know, you're branching out and it makes sense.
The pricing against tutors. Look, I had two different coaches this week for rock climbing. I am a connoisseur of teachers and coaches and tutors, right? Like I've used probably 100-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 Mantava. However, there are other ways to make the price case, right? But this is one of those examples of like, what if you did nothing, right? Coming back to that BRAIN acronym that I love so much. It was the first acronym. Like I've heard all these like SWOT acronyms, right? Like strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, like 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, right? 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 like 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. I could give you six different examples of how you could justify the price, but let me keep going. This is coming back to the parents' role, right? Because the parents are buying it, not the kid, right? Not to overly state the obvious, but the 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, right? Because they're like, I'm just trying to force the responsibility of education onto an app. Like, 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. That's a huge one, right? Because some parents are like, I love teaching. I want to teach a lot. So if the selling point to me were you don't have to teach, I'd be like, 'Ah, does that make me a bad parent? I actually do like teaching. Does that mean I'm not engaged with my kid?' But like nagging and policing, nobody wants to do that, right? 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, like it beats all that stuff, right? It's not like, I don't want to take the piano lesson with, you know, 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.
I kind of want to hone in on this because I maybe this is my pathological honesty because like 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 and nag, way less than anything else, but I'm kind of reluctant to say like you won't have to push and nag.
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.
Instead of saying that, right, you can say parents don't want to nag. They don't want to police. They want a kid who can learn at their own speed.
Even if that means fast, right? You can say that. That's a truthful statement. I'll give you a bit of trivia that not many people know. So, my name in Chinese is, well, it was now. And the reason I have that name is because Fei is for Ferriss, right? So there's some alliteration, but Ting-Chih 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. And you know, I was talking to, 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 [ __ ] you. They're going to 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, you know, 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. Feel free to stop me. Is there a way to get an indication of how many sessions are initiated? Coming back to like, yeah, sometimes you have to push a little bit or prod or prompt. Maybe that's a nice delicate word to use with your kids. But do you have any idea of how many sessions, like what percentage of sessions are initiated by a child versus a parent? I don't know how you would have that, but
I think they're probably 100% parent initiated. We're talking mostly like three- and four-year-olds here.
Yeah. Right. Right. And running around like chickens with their head cut off.
Yeah. I think it's the sort of thing where it's just like the parent is responsible for saying, 'Oh, you know, it's that time. Let's do our Mantava 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 Mantava.'
Mhm. 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, right? And I don't invest all the time, but they add up. Like, if a company's going to be successful, mega successful, it usually takes 10 to 12 years in my experience, right? So, that means if you're investing every year, you start to gather portfolio companies. The reason I mention 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 because most of the people who are getting that, like outside of your major investors, if you've got board members, it's like sure, okay, like give them the nitty-gritty, but the vast majority, like I don't have voting rights. The only way that like I can really impart influence is by trying to be helpful, but I'm also 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, you know, TikTok, X, referrals, search, paid advertising, what is actually working best for you guys, which might not be working well, but like what is of the available options, what is working best for you guys at not just conversion, right? 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?
I think our best customers are X and word of mouth.
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. Like 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.
Here's a just tagline that came to mind. Less nagging for parents, faster learning for kids, right? 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.
Faster learning for kids, less brain damage for parents. Whatever. You know, you can test a bunch of them.
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 touch point right now.
Really? There's a war going on about phonics I didn't know about.
There's 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.
Seems like something you could test.
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. You know, they have comprehension.
Slippery slope, that one.
We think that motivation is one of our biggest differentiators and I just have not found a way to talk about that that engages people, but maybe this less nagging for parents is that.
Yeah, you know, 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 Mantava versus teachers and I don't think that's a great fight.
Agreed, 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. We try very hard not to position ourselves as Mantava 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 teachers 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.
Let's come back to the word of mouth, right? This is something that everybody wants, but sometimes it's difficult to get high resolution on the mechanisms of word of mouth, right? You have any insight on what that actually looks like? At what point, this is I think perhaps a helpful question, like at what point do people suggest that someone else checks out Mantava? Is it after they've been on the app for 3 months, 6 months? Is it as soon as they sign up and they are on 48 hours? At what point throughout their experience of Mantava do people share with others? Do you have any idea?
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 a good fit for the family and the kid, the 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. So, 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. Like, there's this sort of cultural shame around using your resources to allow your kids to get ahead. You know, 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 it there because they feel they have a responsibility to not give their child an advantage. And sorry, I mean, it's just like I don't know. There's some deep-seated self-hatred there, but yeah.
God, I wish they should take the money they're not spending on their kid and put it into therapy first, but I mean that may come off a little callous. We have tried incentivized referrals.
That's what I was going to ask about. What is the incentive that you've tried?
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 like that's $1,000 user acquisition cost.
And we send out coupon codes to our entire customer base and we got zero referrals. Even though we know that customers are like 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.
What do you attribute that to?
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 like they feel guilty about using. And so I think that yeah, like it is an incentive, but they already had very strong incentives to tell their friends about it if they love it or reluctant to tell their friends about it.
What makes the people who do refer through word of mouth different from the archetype that you just described, right? The people who have some shame around it and they don't want to burn social capital because what if their friends are like, 'Oh my god, I didn't realize you're such a rich [ __ ]' or whatever, right? What makes the other people different, the ones who talk about it?
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. Like 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. Um, and like the $500 is not a driver of behavior.
