Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's guest is Ankur Nagpal.
Ankur is the co founder and CEO of Fedora, a platform that enables anyone to easily create and sell online courses.
The company was founded in 2013 and to date has raised $2 million in funding.
Prior to launching Fedora, Ankur launched a business while at college building social widgets between classes, which generated over a million dollars.
Bloomberg Business called him a widget mogul.
Ankur, welcome to the show.
Ankur Nagpal (00:58.200)
Thanks, Homer.
Glad to be here.
Omer (01:00.280)
Now, I gave the audience a brief overview of your product and business, but just tell us a little bit about yourself personally.
Who is Ankur when he's not working?
Ankur Nagpal (01:09.720)
So I think just for context, I did not grow up in America.
I grew up in Oman in the Middle east, moved to America when I was 17 to go to college.
My parents wanted me to follow the good Indian stereotype of becoming an engineer.
Actually, that's a lie.
It wasn't even them.
It was just as an Indian, as an Indian boy, you can be an engineer or a doctor or business.
So it seemed like the intuitive path for me at the time, which was good.
My first year at college, I went to school at Cal in the Bay Area, was great.
But then my summer after my freshman year, I actually interned as an engineer at Amazon.
And it was there that I realized that that's just not for me.
That entire life I1 realized I'm a pretty shitty engineer.
Like, I'm not a good developer.
So that wasn't the right path.
But fortunately, that time period, which is the summer of 2007, coincided with the launch of the Facebook platform, which I didn't know at the time, but would become my primary occupation for the next four years.
Which, you know, led me to where I AM Now, a 26 year old that's never actually had a real job.
Omer (02:27.790)
Yeah, I love the thing about the engineer thing.
It's like, you know me sort of as well.
I think there was a point where, you know, from, if you're from the subcontinent, it's sometimes just a binary decision, right.
People are like, are you gonna be an engineer or a doctor?
Ankur Nagpal (02:40.950)
Right.
It's.
Omer (02:41.470)
There's no other option and it's.
Ankur Nagpal (02:43.310)
And I can't even blame my parents.
I mean, they're incredibly supportive.
They've never, you know, once said hey, you do X, Y, or Z.
It's just the path that you see other people follow, and it's almost like an organic kind of decision.
It's never that my parents are like, hey, you know, I need you to do this.
But.
But, yeah, I mean, you know, it was my pathway to kind of, you know, come to the United States, where.
Which was, you know, overall served me very well.
Omer (03:09.690)
Now we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
Do you have a favorite quote?
Ankur Nagpal (03:19.360)
This is not like, you know, a cliched success quote, but something that I think kind of is what I tell my employees and something that's made me who I am is the idea that you.
That it's always better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, you know, that in turn kind of breaks down into the idea that, you know, especially as an entrepreneur, very often you find yourself in a quandary with regards to what to do.
That quote just tells you that when in doubt, do shit, break stuff, and then, you know, the consequences are never as bad as you think.
Omer (03:55.450)
Yeah, I agree with that philosophy, and I have kind of a slightly different spin on that.
Maybe it's because I spend so much time in the corporate world, but someone once told me, just assume you have the authority until someone tells you that you don't.
Yep, precisely.
It's pretty much the same thing.
Ankur Nagpal (04:10.840)
And I've seen so many companies kind of get into a trap where they're not literally afraid to grow.
I mean, you know, they're.
They're trying to grow in certain ways, but they're not willing to be bold and, you know, really, really swing for the fences.
Omer (04:24.200)
Yeah.
Okay, before we talk about Fedora, let's talk about your life as a widget mogul.
How did that start out?
Ankur Nagpal (04:34.040)
So as.
As I said, I was, you know, in Seattle interning at Amazon the summer after my freshman year.
I was 18 years old at the time.
I had no fake ID, I couldn't go to places, I had no friends.
I was at a point where I had all this free time after work, which coincided with the launch of the Facebook platform.
Again, going back to my Indian roots, I realized, hey, wouldn't it be cool if someone built a fantasy cricket app on Facebook?
That's kind of where it all started.
I learned how to code PHP over that summer, built this app, and finally started seeing a little bit of traction, which initially started as beer money, 10 to 20 bucks a day, and then finally got to the point where we were Handling millions of users, tens of thousands of dollars a day, and everything in between.
Omer (05:32.650)
What happened with Dr. Phil?
Ankur Nagpal (05:38.090)
So that was one of.
That was.
I think one of the first things we discovered on Facebook was as much as I started with fantasy cricket and games that had some kind of utility, almost the sillier we made our applications, the better it did.
And at the time, we found that personality quizzes.
I created what I believe was the first personality quiz on Facebook, and it just worked amazingly well.
Like, much better than anything we had seen before.
At the time, you know, we were building, we had maybe five or six personality quizzes when my mother sent me an email saying, hey, you should try, you know, making an app out of this.
And this was one of those old email forwards on, you know, Dr. Phil went on Oprah's show and gave this quiz, and Oprah was amazed at what she found out about herself.
So we took that quiz, we kind of transcribed it into a Facebook application, and that just went insanely viral.
And it's one of the few things that I miss about the Facebook days.
Just the idea that you can have a concept that truly goes viral where you literally go from zero users to over a million users in a week.
Wow.
Omer (06:48.440)
Wow.
And I heard he wasn't too happy about that, right?
Ankur Nagpal (06:53.480)
Yeah, he wasn't impressed.
You know, it was a moment of minor fame when he indirectly referenced all those people on Facebook that were creating quizzes and stated that it explicitly was not him and had nothing to do with him.
But it's pretty funny.
One of my advertisers at the time, yeah, so called Offer PAL Media, that then became tapjoy, they actually sent me a bottle of wine with a picture of Dr. Phil on it, and I still have that bottle of wine.
The other funny thing is they apologize.
Well, they had to send me an apology note after because they discovered I was not 21 at the time.
So they actually sent a bottle of wine to someone that was not 21.
Omer (07:34.790)
That's hilarious.
How were you making money from this?
Was it all through advertising?
Ankur Nagpal (07:42.480)
It started out all through display advertising.
Later on, when we got into friend quizzes and different kinds of apps, we also had the idea for virtual currency, where we created this currency that only had value inside the context of the game or the application.
And you could earn that currency either by participating in the game itself or by paying us a dollar or by downloading a toolbar or downloading IE9.
And the advertiser would then pay us money.
So by the end, we were making about 50% of our revenue from display ads and 50% from virtual currency.
Omer (08:18.160)
So I, as I was researching this interview, I understand that you ended up with making well over.
Well, what was that?
Ankur Nagpal (08:27.520)
Sorry about that.
Omer (08:29.520)
I thought maybe you fell off your chair or something.
Ankur Nagpal (08:31.160)
No,
Omer (08:34.430)
you ended up making well over a million dollars from that business.
How did that change life for you?
As I guess you were, what, 21 at the time?
Ankur Nagpal (08:44.830)
Yep.
It's interesting, I think on the one hand, you know, I, I, I don't think it affected, you know, much in terms of who I was as a person, but at the same time, I had no financial literacy whatsoever.
For instance, I didn't know how the tax system in America worked.
I ended up buying, I ended up buying a really nice apartment in San Francisco in all cash because I did not have credit history.
So I made a lot of, you know, amateur kind of mistakes in the managing of money without doing anything, you know, completely stupid, like going to vegas and gambling 50k.
I did go to Vegas probably a little more than I should have.
But I think the biggest thing is it created a sense of complacency where in a lot of ways, aspiring to make money can be motivational.
And I definitely reached a point a little after building Facebook apps and before Fedora, where I was very complacent, working not as many hours as I otherwise would, and just being in a very comfortable place in my life a little too early.
Omer (09:59.200)
You know, I was reading a question on Quora the other day where somebody had asked about what is, what is it like to be, you know, super rich?
And there were a bunch of anonymous answers there.
I don't know whether they were true or not, but a lot of these guys were just like, painting this, like, really depressing picture of what it was like to have all this money.
It's like, you know, I don't get to hang out with my friends anymore.
You don't get to complain about anything in life anymore.
And you know, there was a whole bunch of things.
So I guess do you, having gone through that experience so early, do you kind of almost.
Has money become less of a motivator for you now?
Ankur Nagpal (10:44.140)
I, yeah, I think, I think that's one of the first things you realize.
I think the best thing about money is it buys you optionality and it buys you the ability to make your own choices.
And I think that's probably the best part about it.
But of course you then realize that it's not a primary motivator, at least not unless it's an order of magnitude more Which I think again, ties a lot into when you're building a venture backed company.
I think having that is important because I made a million dollars, which is great.
But it also means from an investor's perspective, I'm not going to be interested in selling this company for $10 million.
And you know, in venture capital, that's one of the big fears investors frequently have is a founder can build a company in such a way that's personally very financially rewarding for them, while for the investor, they barely make their money back.
So I think that's kind of one of the great things that it's allowed me to do is just not be focused on small wins, obviously, you know, like be comfortable doing things I want to.
You know, I moved to New York on a whim because I wanted to, because I can.
Being able to make those kinds of decisions, I think is the luxury that money affords you.
Omer (11:56.720)
Okay, so let's talk about Fedora.
How did you.
Well, before we get into that, can you just explain to the listeners a little bit more about Fedora and maybe how it's different or better than other ways of creating online courses?
Ankur Nagpal (12:14.730)
Yep.
I mean, I think, I think a good way of actually breaking into that is what you're going to ask about how I got started because it was, you know, it was an organic founding story.
It was not one of those, hey, I want to build a thing, let me build Fedora.
It started way back when I knew, when online teaching looked interesting.
And I was trying to understand, you know, what a good way of getting into the market would be.
And the first iteration of the idea was, hey, there's all these people that are, you know, that are effectively teaching on YouTube.
They might not call it teaching, but they're, you know, what they're doing is teaching on YouTube.
They don't know anything about online classes.
Let me help them structure their content as online classes on, you know, Udemy and Skillshare and so forth.
So that was version, you know, one of the idea.
We talked to a few people, we set up Udemy classes for them, soon realized that it's really frustrating working with them because it's not a priority for them.
They have 20 other channels and it's just one of them.
Why don't we create our own content on Udemy?
So I was working with a buddy Conrad, who then became the first customer of what became Fedora.
And we created our own udemy classes on, on growth, hacking mobile growth.
Just stuff that I've done in the past.
And then we Got to a point where we were making about two to $3,000 a month, which was good.
But like any entrepreneur, we were thinking, okay, how can we 10x this?
What can we do to make 20k a month?
We do make 30k a month.
And it turns out on Udemy or any other marketplace, it's really, really hard to scale a business.
You don't have ownership of your audience.
You know, the revenue share is obviously very high.
You don't have flexibility in the kind of products you can charge for.
And that's what led to me building the first version of Fedora, which at first was just a way for us to sell our own courses.
Omer (14:09.970)
Okay, so how did you go about building the first version of it?
Did you kind of go out straight away and try to get some funding for this or how did it start?
Ankur Nagpal (14:20.390)
Nope.
So, as I mentioned earlier, I'm a pretty bad developer, but I can still get stuff made.
So the first version probably took me three days.
And it was just, we had Vimeo videos, a basic analytics integration, and a way to pay for stuff.
It was so crude, so dirty, so ugly, but it worked.
You know, we had a list, we sent people to it, we made a few thousand dollars and in sales in the first week, and we knew we were onto something.
Omer (14:51.610)
Okay, so you've got this product up and running.
How did you start to get the word out about it?
Ankur Nagpal (14:58.170)
Yep.
So, you know, as Udemy instructors, that felt a certain pain point.
We figured there were other people that probably felt a similar pain point.
So I started reaching out to everyone on Udemy.
I started hitting them up over and over and over until we got two or three more people to finally take a shot on us.
And that obviously helped.
And then something very fortunate happened, which is Udemy decided to retroactively change the revenue share they paid instructors.
So in the past, they would pay instructors 70%.
But for whatever reason, they realized that was too much and they lowered people's revenue share to 50%.
And that was the best thing that could have happened to a two month old company, because all of a sudden there was an army of people really, really annoyed with Udemy, looking for an alternative.
And that just is one of those fortunate things that sometimes happen when you launch a company where you look back and you're like, wow, we got lucky.
Omer (16:02.850)
So I guess what happened was that people were like, you were kind of going out and reaching out to people.
But because of the change in the pricing structured, people were naturally just starting to look for other alternatives.
Ankur Nagpal (16:16.070)
Absolutely.
Omer (16:16.630)
And also I Guess they started to realize, wow, I, you know, I'm.
I've got a pretty shaky foundation here in terms of not, not in terms of being critical to.
To Udemy specifically, but in the sense that I don't.
I don't have a control over my own destiny if I'm building this in somebody else's platform.
Right.
Ankur Nagpal (16:38.340)
And that philosophy just resonated with me so much.
Having done the same thing on the Facebook platform for so many years, like, just fundamentally, like, that's a pain I've felt personally.
I've had, you know, days when our Facebook business was crushing it.
We were making, you know, thousands of dollars a day.
Facebook tweaks one thing in their algorithm, we make 20 bucks the next day.
Like, I've felt that pain personally so many times that a lot of, you know, a lot of the philosophy behind Fedora is something has come from my past experiences of building a business behind someone else's walled garden.
Omer (17:16.370)
Yeah.
Okay, so you've got, I guess, a little bit more momentum, more people coming in and trying the product.
What was the reaction?
I mean, you said that you put this together pretty.
It was a pretty simple sort of initial product, so you're getting people to try it out, but what happened once they tried it out?
Ankur Nagpal (17:38.670)
So that's the amazing thing about this product versus everything else I did in between Facebook and this product is the fact that even though looking back, it was bad, it worked.
People used it, people were making money on it, and our monthly sales or whatever was growing at the same time.
I was 100% of this entire company.
I mean, I was working with Conrad as the first customer, but he was still just a customer.
So I was doing everything from writing code, doing support, doing sales, doing paid advertising, everything, which obviously was good and helped define what this became.
But at the same time, it's probably the biggest mistake I made in the way I built this company as well.
Omer (18:31.530)
What do you mean?
Ankur Nagpal (18:33.530)
Ultimately, I think the fact that I left it and did everything just by myself for so long hurt our long term growth quite considerably.
It was, which I think probably came down to the fact that I didn't believe in the idea enough to the degree that, you know, I should have hired a team, I should have raised money, I should have done all those things many months before I actually did.
The first version of this was, you know, built in towards the end of September 2013, and we only.
I only raised money in July 2014, at which point, you know, I could have probably done that four or five
Omer (19:12.780)
months before was that your first time going out and raising money for business?
Ankur Nagpal (19:18.400)
Yes.
Omer (19:19.520)
So what was that experience?
Like, how did, how did you get started there?
Ankur Nagpal (19:24.400)
Honestly, I think I'm a little spoiled just because I had been in the Bay Area for so many years and I knew so many people that it started out organically.
You know, talking to my friends that had recently raised money, asking them, hey, you know, who, like, who should I talk to?
And, you know, can you help me get with that person?
And so that made the initial part really easy, but ultimately where things really happened was when we ended up getting on AngelList.
I've known Naval, the founder of AngelList for a few years, and, you know, he told me, hey, why don't you try raising online?
And at the time I was a little concerned because I thought it might be a negative signal.
I mean, is it normal to raise online?
Are you just like letting anyone invest?
You're opening up your financials to everyone.
But hands down, that was one of the smartest things I ever did.
And if I ever build a company again, I will definitely, you know, get someone to back me first, but then do the rest on AngelList.
Omer (20:20.530)
What was it about using AngelList that you feel helped you so much?
Ankur Nagpal (20:25.490)
The fact that we were able to close the entire funding round in two weeks from being first listed on Angelist, and prior to that we had spent a month to round up, you know, like one or two other commitments.
So we spent a month to round up one or two commitments and then we go on AngelList and everything is taken in two weeks.
More than that.
As a founder, you're used to kind of pitching people saying, hey, let's meet.
Let me tell you about my company on AngelList.
If things work out, investors come to you saying, hey, I really like what you're doing.
This is why you should take my money.
It's a complete shift in dynamic, which I think is the future of at least early stage fundraising, if not mid and later stage fundraising as well.
Omer (21:12.220)
How much of that $2 million did you raise through AngelList?
Ankur Nagpal (21:18.060)
So we did.
So the $2 million that we raised, we raised it in two rounds.
We ended up raising a million dollars in July, of which I would estimate about 75% was through AngelList, also at 7.
So about 750k was through AngelList.
But off that, only about 250 was actually from people investing online.
The other 500 was just, you know, people being like, hey, saw you on AngelList, let's talk.
And they ended up investing offline.
But the intro happening through AngelList.
Got it.
Omer (21:50.230)
What advice would you give to somebody who maybe is, is kind of at a stage where they are thinking about raising money?
They've never done it before.
You know, from this, people might be like, okay, I'm going to go and check out AngelList.
Ankur Nagpal (22:09.036)
AngelList is not going to help you unless you have one.
You want, you want to convince one person that has, you know, some kind of clout in the fundraising industry, or not even in the fundraising industry.
It could be one person that's built and sold a successful venture backed company before, but you find one ally and then make them your champion on angellist.
I think that's, that's kind of the path you want to take.
Ideally, you want to not be ideally, you want to, you know, have a product, you want to have some basic level of traction.
You find one champion and then with their help, you know, you go, you go on Angelist or you go on other, other similar platforms.
Actually, no, don't go other similar platforms.
Every other one we've looked at is not very Good.
Go on AngelList and you know, then kind of have them champion your cause.
Omer (22:56.920)
Okay, so you raised a million dollars in July 2014.
How did that change things for you and the business
Ankur Nagpal (23:08.920)
overall?
I think it was, it was mostly brought good changes just belatedly, I think the biggest, again tying back to the biggest mistake I made was as I said, I've always known I was a terrible developer, yet I built software for nine months, which not only is that not my strength, when we actually got a team, none of what I had built was usable.
So we're a company that was at the point making 50k or so in monthly core sales.
We had close to 100 customers.
Everything was very solid and moving in a certain trajectory.
But all of a sudden we had to rebuild all our technology from scratch.
And as anyone familiar with software knows, that's a painful problem and that's massive technical debt.
Omer (23:57.150)
So you hire your first developer and they're like, who the heck built this stuff?
Ankur Nagpal (24:03.390)
Absolutely, absolutely.
They soon realized that it's better not even to open the code or work with it, but just kind of understand what the code is supposed to do and start from scratch.
So the first line of code on the new version was probably written, I want to say towards the end of June, right before the AngelList funding happened.
And it wasn't until probably January that we got a stable working version of what I built over the last nine months.
Omer (24:33.130)
But then I think again, that's a really, really important Lesson here that, you know, you don't have to build a perfect product.
Ankur Nagpal (24:44.740)
Yep.
I definitely think part of what I did made sense, but the timing was off.
I mean, you know, I could have validated this in two months instead of seven months.
Ultimately, I think the idea of building something quick and dirty yourself makes sense, but I took that a little too far, did that for too long, and as a result, the company is probably a few months behind where we could have been at this point.
Omer (25:12.380)
Okay, so you've got.
You've got funds now.
You're starting to hire people.
What did you start to do differently to get the word out and start acquiring more customers?
Ankur Nagpal (25:22.780)
I think the biggest change was just realizing that I don't have to build technology myself.
My background, you know, obviously with the Facebook stuff and just in general is being really good at growth and, you know, marketing and that kind of stuff.
So.
So the biggest change was just freeing up my time from having to do everything to focus truly on growth.
So at that point, we realized, you know, we were.
We were doing really well at acquiring teachers from marketplaces.
So it's just about kind of, you know, continuing to dial that up, building the right viral loops into the product and just being able to spend my time on, you know, what I1 really enjoy doing and what I also think I'm best at.
Omer (26:06.140)
What do you think has been one of the hardest things about building this business that you wish you had known when you started?
Ankur Nagpal (26:17.420)
That's an interesting question, and I think this is probably unique to me, but a big learning was like, you're not building Facebook apps.
Things are not going to be as much fun as building a feature and then having a million users next week.
So a lot of the learnings have just been that you're building a real business.
You're building a business for customers you care about.
And your decision making should not be about what gets you an immediate win two or four weeks from now, but what will be relevant in your product 12 to 24 months.
And on that note, the single biggest thing I learned going from like one person to an entire team is the idea of product focus.
Back whenever it was just me and someone requested something, I'd be like, sure, done, built it.
It's only then, you know, kind of looking at six to 12 months later that I realized when we build something, the cost of building it is very cheap relative to the cost of always having to support it.
And it completely changes the way I think about product.
Now where someone requests a feature and we now think is this in our long term best interest.
I mean, what percentage of people does that apply to?
And can we afford not just to build it, but to support it for the rest of the lifetime of the product?
Omer (27:39.390)
Yeah.
And can you give me an example of maybe something that you did which you kind of regretted once you had built it into your product?
Ankur Nagpal (27:47.770)
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, the first version of Fedora, you know, built a lot of stuff we were not ready for.
They're still in the product today, and I think we're finally at a point where they're starting to make sense.
But I mean, the product three months in had the ability to make any student of yours an affiliate and had an inbuilt affiliate program where not only did we.
Not only did it handle like reporting and generating affiliate links, we actually paid affiliates out as well.
Which means.
Which means a school owner that, you know, could be making no more than $200 can have like five different affiliates that we are responsible for tracking, monitoring and paying out.
Which in turn also means, you know, from a taxation perspective, we have to issue them W9s.
Like we have to handle so much stuff, which again, makes sense on a long enough timescale.
But a three month old product should not be building, you know, an inbuilt affiliate program for an online learning management system.
Omer (28:41.220)
Yeah, that's a good lesson.
Ankur Nagpal (28:42.420)
Yep.
Omer (28:43.860)
All right, that wraps up part one of the interview with Ankur Nagpal of Fedora.
You can get to the show notes for this episode by going to ConversionAid.com 67 where you'll find all the links and resources we discussed today.
In part two, in episode 68, Ankur and I are going to get tactical and talk about how you can share your expertise and build an online course which generates revenue and helps you build authority in your market.
