Conscious Creators — Make A Life Through Your Art Without Selling Your Soul Sam Ovens — How He Built a $80M Course Empire, the Future of Online Education and Why He’s Going All-In on Skool
Family Boosts Business Skills
- Having a family increases your ability to handle chaos and improves teamwork skills.
- Parenthood encourages smarter time allocation and longer-term thinking in business.
Finding a Technical Co-founder
- Sam spent a year interviewing around 600 candidates to find a technical co-founder.
- He ultimately hired Daniel, a brilliant engineer with whom he had great chemistry.
Hire When It Hurts
- Hire team members only when you feel overwhelmed or pain points arise in specific areas.
- Consolidate multiple part-time roles into a full-time right-hand person who understands the entire business.
“People are burned out of courses and no one really enjoys them. So like notice what people like, people like masterminds - they like hanging out with other people and interacting. It's more about the people. It's less about the content.”
— Sam Ovens
This week Sachit (@sachitgupta) chats with Sam Ovens (@samovens), CEO and Founder of Skool — a community platform for creators.
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(02:37) - Balancing family and business
(03:28) - How his mental models about business changed since having a child
(04:51) - The process he went through to find his tech co-founder
(11:11) - His approach to building a great team, so he can get his time back
(14:25) - When Sam was working 15-20 hours a day - Would he do it again?
(15:51) - When they downsized the company to make ensure it’s fun end enjoyable
(17:55) - Example of how he turned non-fun tasks into fun tasks
(20:28)- Tasks that he got rid of during the process of downsizing
(25:09) - Lessons learned on building great products/courses in the online education world
(29:01) - How the product evolved over time
(30:08) - Thoughts on cohort-based courses and their future
(33:44) - Non-intuitive lessons he has learned over the last decade
(39:44) - The switch from trying to pull things from the market, to listening to what the market wants
(41:27) - Importance of communities in courses and education
(43:17) - How to create more engaging communities
(46:41) - Transitioning from a creator with an audience, to a seven-figure zen style business
(50:26) - Sam’s unique approach to launches and selling
(53:37)- How Sam sells using Loom videos
(54:54) - Core mechanics of an offer
(56:24) - How to create rush and scarcity at the launch of a course
(58:55) - How he goes from beta testing a course to the next step
(59:57) - Getting good at pre-empting things in business
(01:01:42) - Why he decided to go fully-in on Skool
(01:07:17) - The convergence of info marketing, creators, and tech
(01:11:01) - The pseudo-abundance of content on the internet
(01:17:44) - The gamification of communities
(01:20:27) - Creative trade-off decisions they made in Skool
(01:21:53) - How he thinks about the community's success and KPIs
(01:23:34) - How he keeps the quality of the community high since it’s gotten big
(01:29:59) - The importance of mindset as a creator
(01:32:36) - How a community can create unsaid rules based on members personalities and how to deal with that
(01:35:54)- Personal ideas that he changed his mind about after learning about them from a community
(01:36:53) - Books that have been most impactful to him
(01:37:16) - One piece of wisdom that changed the game for him
(01:37:44) - One person he is grateful to
(01:38:11) - What it means to be a conscious creator
(01:38:47) - Things he is most excited for in the next 5-10 years