Digital Social Hour - Getting Forbes 30U30, Biggest Failures and Raising $1.7M | Amin Shaykho DSH #280

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Amin Shaykho comes on the show to discuss the balance of friendship and business, how he got Forbes30U30 and how he raised $1.7M for his company as a young entrepreneur. APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All of our tutors, they're all the same age as our students. So their dynamic is not a teacher-student relationship. It's a little friend-friend. From that 14 hours, around 50% is them talking about non-school-related stuff. And that bond is what makes it so powerful. When they actually go to get homework help, they actually enjoy listening to the tutor. They're receptive, and it builds that long retention. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe.

It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests and it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot. Thank you guys for supporting. And here's the episode. Welcome back to the show, guys. Got a special guest for you guys today.

He's up to something big. Amin Sheikho. How's it going, man? How's it going, man? You're about to revolutionize the education space, dude it's been a grind but yes sir that's exactly what we're doing yeah so I found you online you know you just finished that first raise I think when I found you and now it's been some time and you've really grown the company very quickly man it's been a wild ride honestly the thing is for us once we discovered what actually

students want and built a product that they enjoy using it's been growing like crazy since then yeah we were talking outside and you know we probably have some traumatic memories from getting tutored as kids and i feel like that whole space in general it's not something you really want it's forced upon you as a kid really just imagine like i'm sure everybody in the audience listening like what was your experience either your parents or your teacher forced you to go get tutored or you just tried to escape. For us, we were like, what if we can build something that kids actually want to spend time on? That's exactly what we did.

My mom spent 5K on SAT tutoring for me when I was a kid. My score went up barely, 20, 40 points, because I didn't care about it. I feel like when you align the interest of the student and the teacher, there's some growth opportunity 100 like kids gen z especially nowadays like if they're not motivated to do something they're just going to sit there with their eyes closed they're not going to be attention what goes in through this ear comes out of the other ear and so for us we knew like if we can build something where they actually want to

use it themselves because when gen z and i keep saying gen z because most of our students right now are high school and college kids if they're passionate about something that's it like they're gonna put in their full effort right and so um we did that through many things like all of our tutors they're all the same age as our students so their dynamic is not a teacher-student relationship it's a friend-friend so it's like me with my best friend for example talking and you know on average our students spend like 14 hours a quarter and a school quarter so three months um talking to their tutor from that 14 hours around 50 is them talking about non-school related stuff so nfl xfl what what are you doing

for the halloween party right and that bond is what makes it so powerful when they actually go to get homework help right yeah they They actually enjoy listening to the tutor. They're receptive and it builds up long retention, something that we have and a lot of these players can't do. That's cool. You've really seemed to crack the code with tutoring to make it an enjoyable experience for the user. What's the growth been like year over year?

Anywhere between three to five X year over year growth. We launched in 2020. The pandemic was wild like for those who don't you know really i guess i guess in the education space when the pandemic hit schools saw gpas just going down because kids just lost access to all the resources they were stuck at home zoom classes like you know my co-founder was was was finishing up zoom school he would literally be sleeping through his class he had he had this thing that would move his cursor so he could stay online but he wasn't listening to the lecture right and

my third co-founder danny was like i think 17 or 18 when we started so we were all students and we saw grades going down and also we saw the surge of social media all the kids were on tiktok the whole time right and we were like like you know there's a huge opportunity here these kids are all struggling in school everybody's on social media what if we can kind of do something with it yeah so you got a really young co-founding team yeah i do we all made forbes 30 under 30 when we're all under 23 i think i was 23 my co-founder was 21 and then my last one was 19 we were like we're on the youngest forbes list and the education list wow that's dope what's the process to get on there what's that like we had a lot once like we started getting traction a lot of people started nominating for us and then um when people nominate you they reach out to you

and they say hey tell us a bit more about you and you know honestly we just told them what we were doing and they were super impressed and what they really liked about us was our how we cracked social media because we were able to use social media to turn a concept which was tutoring from boring and hated by kids to being loved yeah um like literally like million 50 million to 100 million students um or just people interacting with our with our socials every month right and so that kind of reception to a tutoring company was unheard of yeah we were actually the first education company in the world to hit a million followers on tiktok wow in under three months unheard of and what was the content strategy like there?

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Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash DSH. That's rocketmoney.com slash DSH. Link will be in the description below. Repurposing other people's content to grow. No, so our content strategy was unique. It's also something that nobody was doing before. And a lot of big companies model what they're doing now. We had a lot of big companies actually reach out to us

to learn about what we're doing. What we did was, it's a 10-90 rule. 10% of our videos would promote our product. 90% were in the niche of education, but had nothing to do with our product. So we're education, but who the hell wants to see tutoring videos, right? So what we do is is anything under education is fair

play so what's fun under education well maybe teaching you how to look at your phone to see if your girlfriend is cheating on you by deleting her messages or how to send a snapchat or open up a snapchat without showing that you read it for example right or how you get 50 off shopping at target so we do life hacks that kids love and by definition right if they love it they're gonna engage they're gonna follow you and every 10 videos an ad promoting our products gonna come out and they're like oh like i love this brand i love this page maybe i should go look at their app right um and even when we do our ads they don't look like a normal ad like our most viral ad got us like 20 to 30 000 downloads 4 million views like 20 to 30 000

downloads 4 million views and it was basically one of my co-founders right we put chick-fil-a sauce on an onion took a huge bite you could hear the crunch and then he does this and it segues to three apps that will help you with your homework and in between we strategically put our own app so nobody knew it was an ad wow and that shot us like number two on the charts and then investors start pouring in and that actually was you know one of the biggest catalysts on where we are today that's awesome yeah speaking of investors well what did you learn that first raise because that's something that's not taught so you were just you know it just sort of happened and you had no experience right yeah i do like literally like i was working at apple as a software engineer i was

the youngest engineer there and like keep in mind, when you're that young and in software, you really have no idea how the VC world works. And all of a sudden, we never reached out first to investors. We had investors reach out to us because they saw us on the charts. We're number two or three. And they're like, hey, we'd love to invest in you. And imagine being a 20-year-old that sees that. You're like, oh my god, a few million dollars about to come into my bank.

This is awesome, right? And so you're it's like you think it's it's a perfect world when reality when you start talking to them investors are notorious for leading you on and then just like putting you on red ignoring you right and we at that point that forced us to think about investing because we were like like at that point we started to grow fast too and we're like well now we need to start to put effort here and so i literally like me and my co-founder old bob bunch of bunch of VC books, started to read how that works. And even after reading it, to be honest,

nothing taught us more than actually being rejected by investors. We started to reach out to investors. They reached out to us. And a lot of them would say, oh, we love your product. This is the best thing ever. And then just never reply back to us again.

And that went on for a few months. And eventually, obviously, and this is completely normal, right? You probably get like 100 no's before you get one yes, right? Unless you're really building the next Apple. And in this space, it's really about showing traction. So when we started getting the reach, we didn't have much traction, right? So they were like, okay, come back to us when you have bigger, bigger numbers.

And so we really started doubling our sales every single month until eventually an investor um comes in he's been sourcing companies from white combinator and he's like not a single company is approaching education the way you guys are doing it you guys are adding gamification you're making a fun social learning app and no one actually understand the vision and more importantly was on the app like it's an app it's not a website and he understood that kids are on their phones and social media is tied you know to your phone. We have this whole funnel there. And he was like, I'm going to invest in you guys.

And this was a few months after our first rejection. But in between that process, there were times where I thought, damn, this is never going to happen. You kind of lose hope, but it's part of the game. And now every time I get a rejection, I'm happy. It's literally one step to the next game type of thing. It's like, if you don't take an L, if you don't fail, if you don't lose, you're not working hard enough as a founder.

And a lot of founders expect that it's all going to be just a journey going up. But you don't understand, we made it on fours, but the night after we took a huge L somewhere else, right? So it's always ups and downs, up and downs, but that's what makes it fun. Yeah, it's a numbers game, man. And you got over a billion views, right, on TikTok? Yeah, dude, across our channels, a billion views. That's insane. And the thing is, a lot of over a billion views, right, on TikTok? Yeah, dude, across our channels, a billion views. That's insane.

And the thing is, a lot of people can get views, but they can't monetize. But you guys figured out that the more downloads, the more money you could make. Yeah, no, exactly. My co-founder, Marwan, he's so data-driven. So what we do is we look at the videos, right? Like 7 million views, for example, on one video, or a million views. And then we look at the quality of the conversions, right? And at that point, we really chase which video is going to get us the paying customer right

and we've optimized our apps so much the point where if you're like an 11th grader in high school or a senior in college you're going to get a whole different app experience because your psychology and how you think is different yeah and all those are type of of things that took conversion rate from for example starting off 9% to 15% 20% and up from downloading all the way to pay and kept bringing it up and our attention to detail is what made us actually be able to translate

views to dollars most people can't do that so you're all about the optimization and I think that's something Amazon does really well too if you're a prime customer their numbers are insane if you're all about the optimization, and I think that's something Amazon does really well too. If you're a Prime customer, their numbers are insane. Yeah. Yeah, if you're a paying customer. How did you find good app developers?

That's something people struggle with. I'm fortunate enough where I studied computer science, so I was a software engineer. I worked at Apple, and when I was at Apple, I did a lot of cool projects working with leadership. For everybody who has an iPhone, on iMessage, if you know when you hold on to a reply in a a thread me and two people pitched that to Craig Federico who's right under the CTO you came up with that yeah he's a CTO and we actually had to convince them

because Apple like a lot of the leadership were a bit older they don't understand that Gen Z like spend a lot of time chatting yeah and I basically told them like hey like all these kids are spending all their time texting on Instagram and Snapchat DMsms nobody's on imessage dms we need to make this feel more home right and so we pitched it and literally the next year it comes out on the ios um but the point is like i had that experience right so when i went to go and hire engineers there were no one could bs me they come in for an interview saying yo i can build a good app okay cool here's a quick problem can you solve this get out of here yeah next person and and we had very high standards and it was hard for us to actually like find people and source them so so my co-founder actually built this robot called sir jata and actually has a

whole linkedin profile like his name is sir jata and he reaches out to people 24 7 really and he what he also does is he interviews them. So we built this virtual interviewing process where it basically takes all of our problems, asks them in real time, it records them, and using some AI will give us a score. And if they make it through all those rounds, then they come to me for the final round. And we automated that,

and we hired really good engineers. Holy crap, that's insane. So you used an AI to interview people. And it worked really well, because at the end of the day, I made it interview me, and I'm a technical founder. So I'm not some business guy trying to run technical And I'm a technical founder So I'm not like some like Business guy trying to run technical

I'm a technical founder So I understand right And so like I knew That this thing will work That's so cool Yeah How did you get that job At Apple at such a young age

So I think They gave me the offer When I was like 19 Jeez I actually graduated I studied at the University of Washington Computer Science

I graduated in two years How'd you do that So in high school I took a lot of like AP Like college classes right um and then i i did this program where you actually could do two years at a community college while you're at high school so you graduate high school with an associate's degree and a high school diploma so then when you go into the university you skip the first two years and you go to the third year wow so i was literally like what is it an 18 year old like just chilling with a bunch of 21 to 22 year olds um and and then like um that was hella hard because imagine you go instead of like easing

up from 100 200 300 yeah i went into this some like math theory where they're teaching you how to like basically solve rocket science right and um um so that was pretty stressful but then like i interviewed with apple actually um apple has always been my favorite company i have everything apple yeah um and i interviewed them i think it was like in the fall of 2017 are you interested in coming on the digital social hour podcast as a guest we'll click the application link below in the description of this video we are always looking for cool stories cool entrepreneurs to talk to about business and life click the application link below and here's the episode guys and you know i made it like halfway through and then like i'm sorry like we don't think we're going to be able to hire you

to make the qualifications i was really bummed out about it but i think like some word went in inside that i'm very passionate i have an entrepreneur background a few months later i get a phone call that literally all it says like hey do you want to come to copertino apple park like apple is based in copertino yeah um you want to come and interview us so we skipped like everything that come talk to six people so they put me like an interview i talked to six people back to back a bunch of complicated questions stuff like that and then i go home and um on the way back i get like a call from the director he's like we love you you want to accept this offer wow and they give me this offer literally like i think two weeks before i go

full-time job and keep in mind by the way when companies hire software engineers um out of college it's usually they give you an offer like three to six months before you graduate i was getting this offer like the day i was graduating right yeah it was literally last second i wasn't even expecting it so like i tell my parents oh geez i like i'm leaving to california i was in seattle at that point i'm gonna work at apple and then i fly down and i pull up and i was like 19 to turn 20 and they're like what the hell how young are you bro all of our interns are like 22 23 like where do you come from and it turns out i was actually the youngest person in the entire org wow to ever work at apple

and so so i did that for two years so it was like 2018 till 2020 yeah and the pandemic hit and the story that's how we kind of like our rise to success was from the pandemic because education collapsed and we were actually built i was building the startup while i was working at apple and while i was at school so it was like it was a side project right and even through apple and my entire vision was the moment i secure funding i'm going in full time right because i'm always i'm a risk adverse person right but i work really hard so i don't just like work 40 hours i work for hours apple then another 40 work 40 hours on my startup so i was working 80 hours every single week and until that moment happened where i can go full time so you weren't sleeping dude i had

no life bro i literally i missed all the typical everybody goes out and parties and stuff like that they're all doing this i'm like dude like i'm building this thing it's gonna change the world yeah and i found people who like like the team behind me that all same mentality and it was hard don't get me wrong like um but you know yeah i don't think you miss much man i mean i got through And I found people who like the team behind me, that old same mentality. And it was hard. Don't get me wrong. Like, but you know. Yeah. I don't think you miss much, man.

I mean, I got through that phase quick too. It's nothing special. Yeah. And honestly, once you kind of make it, now you get to enjoy some time you have. Like, I'm sure you have a lot of like, it's like work hard, play hard type of mentality, right? So it's, and it's good because you don't want to work too much

because then you lose creativity. You become too stressed. You need that balance in your life I had burnout I know you experienced it too Young age man Because you're just so locked in But it adds up

What did you learn from Apple Working there two years What did you learn about corporate culture And things like that There's many things I learned in corporate culture But the biggest thing in corporate is It's literally a chain of command type of thing um if you want to do something it has to go all the way up and that introduces a lot of delay things move slow right um something that i

could do in apple in like six months i could do in my own startup in two days um and there's nothing wrong with that's a big company they care about their image and stuff like that but um somebody as me who's like an entrepreneur like like i've taught myself marketing finance everything right and that's who i am i can't just do one thing as a software engineer all day and then just wait for somebody to give me an approval to build a feature right and yeah actually that's why in apple like i came in as a software engineer and within three months my manager told me dude like we're gonna put you on special projects apple it's called special projects where basically like every year on the new ios they always introduce new features and those are special projects because basically like every year on the new iOS, they always introduce new features. And those are special projects because they're anonymous, right?

And the cool thing about the special project is you're not just a software engineer. You have to deal with legal, with design, with marketing, because you have to know like when you build a feature, can you market it well? Will it give you like, is it good from a PR perspective, from a security perspective, right? And that's really what a startup you do. You have to worry about everything. So I was working on those, right? And all that kind of taught me even better how to run a startup because

i was doing an apple with real customers real customer data right yeah nothing like a school project like you know in a business class where they tell you go go um you know here make a fake startup and pitch it right all that is bs it really doesn't translate to the real world would you say you learn more apple Apple Than 14 years of schooling? Dude, what I learned in my two years at Apple Is more than schooling What I learned at my startup is more than everything I've done in my life Listen, there's still more to learn

I'm still nowhere near where I want to be But I feel like Just me going through my startup world If I were to kind of maintain Just a corporate job By the time I hit 40, maybe I won't even have learned what I learned at the age of like 24. Right, doing it on your own.

Yeah. So what do you think can be improved in the education system for entrepreneurs and for business owners? And that's exactly why we're in this education space, dude. Education is so far behind. You know, it's crazy. You can try to spec education.

It's been almost the same for years, right? You know, we have new phones every year, literally new cars every year, new shoes, everything. what's crazy like you you can try to spec educate it's been almost the same for years right now you know we have new phones every year new new literally new cars every year new shoes everything but why is education still the same and you know what's crazy too is now with chad gdp and ai like we did a survey like 40 50 percent of students are literally cheating through school because they realize like what's the point of me doing say well literally the whole class run through all their assignments through this chad this strategy not even learn anything in schools politicians i we spoke to multiple politicians oh we're gonna wait and see what happens right

like nobody's doing anything like this started off last year to this day nobody has done anything so that's every single kid in their freshman year of school right now isn't learning anything right is that not crazy right where like they're paying what is it some in some cases you're paying fifty thousand dollars a year yeah to basically just have a bot regurgitate the answers to submit in yeah there's a lot of change that needs to happen there i think we need a lot of young people um to go in and you know impactful roles um to be able to impact things in school um and even in government right because right now a lot of what they're trying to maintain is just things that don't matter anymore like why are we still learning how to do cursive

why are we still learning how to write an email look i've like i took one marketing class where they taught me how to write emails to sell your social media to clients yeah or to like companies like shopify or target something like that i literally like i've secured multiple like five figure deals with brands because i have my personal social media is pretty big yeah i literally say hey comma on one line i'm here's my rate no sincerely i mean shako no like you know format it's very simple that's how the real world works right yeah that stuff that they teach you is not relevant they need to like they need to go bring in industry realers've done it Why is a business 101 professor Teaching a class but they haven't built anything

That's more than seven figures for example You know what I'm trying to say And this is not an attack on There's a lot of good teachers I've worked with a lot of great computer science teachers Who have been amazing A lot of business teachers But this is a curriculum thing

From the institution itself Nothing to do with the professors because they're all forced to follow what you know is brought down to them but there needs to be a change and there's a lot of people advocating for that bill gates or elon musk there's a lot of people who are saying changes to be done for sure dude when i get those long emails i don't even read them i mean it's obviously copy paste like i don't care at that point you're right right, though. You got to keep it simple. Yeah, somebody like you, do you have the time to read, spend 60 minutes on email?

No, you want to get quick to the point. First line, what's it about? Yeah, catch my attention, and if you do that, I'll read it. But otherwise, I could tell it's copy-paste if it's two paragraphs. I got detention in 10th grade for plagiarism, and now every kid's doing it with ChatGPT. I'm are you serious and by the way don't get me wrong by the way like

i talked about the school i had a 4-0 through school i had a full ride scholarship so like i know how school is i'm not some guy who had a 1.0 trying to justify old school's bad 4-0 all you search up computer science at university washington number six in the nation right i had a 4.2 my last year i ended up graduating with a a three eight but like very rigorous school right yeah so i know how academics works i put in a lot of work so i know both perspectives um and i'm coming in from that i'm not coming in from like an arrogant perspective yeah no that's for someone in your shoes to say this about education it really means something because if you had a one five yeah i mean at that point i'm just justifying my my laziness but no i literally worked hard yeah and do you think working that hard paid off yeah and and i always say to everybody ask me how did you achieve

what you do i tell them i am not the smartest person in the room i work hard i will outwork anybody in the room yeah that's really what it is like there was a lot of people who were 10 times smarter than me in my class right yeah they can solve the math problems faster the physics problems faster i'll just spend more time reading the textbook till i figure it out yeah they've actually done studies on this people that um are smarter, have a higher IQ, they actually don't perform as well as people with a gifted range because they're just too smart.

You know what I mean? They're like mad scientists or whatever. Yeah. And there's always need for people like that because Elon Musk needs to be hiring those people or NASA needs to be hiring those people to send us to the moon, right? Yeah.

But in a general job, sometimes it's too out of scope type of thing right to build a business sometimes like if you're thinking too narrow like that you can't actually be a ceo because you're too focused on too small of a problem right and so you need every every single person has a different role that's what i'm saying like it doesn't matter what your weaknesses are what your strengths there's always a room for you in this world to do something impactful um and so everybody has their role for sure did you have a mentor along the way because you're super young um i didn't have a designated mentor i i'm grateful i met a lot of like great people on the way you know good family

my mom was always motivational from a young age would motivate me to like when i was like eight i think she introduced the concept of business she was like hey like you have all these like toys that you never use how about I like Buy them from you And so I can give them To your brother So she introduced me To this concept Of like selling stuff

I don't want Which translated To a side business When I was in middle school Where I would sell Macbooks I would fix them up And upsell them

Like basically Resell them For a higher markup Right And that And then obviously I come You know

From a background Where you know Arab American From Syria There was like Like a whole civil revolution Where millions of people died Or hundreds of thousands of people Died, millions affected

And refugees, and they lost everything And that taught me from a young age I'm blessed to have what I have Because if I had just stayed there If my parents hadn't moved to America I probably would have nothing right now And so that made me want to help people and that's the whole concept our app katima we are one of the cheapest tutoring apps ever we wanted to make it so people who are underprivileged can use us and those values of business technology being able to help people

stayed with me the whole time and mentors like that um those like came up to me like the ceo of offer up was a mentor um just good friends good team um just people who come in along the way and they've been helping me out and so um and now i just try my best to do the same thing if i see somebody young trying to build something i try to like repay back you know what they did for me yeah that's cool how did you mix friendship and business because i know your co-founders are also friends that's a very risky thing to do how did you pull that off listen y'all do not do it it's hard i don't know me like my co-founders right here behind the scenes marwan he like we've been together since 2016 and dude like like we were friends and then like this this was a a crazy journey. Because like, you know, the problem here is when you're friends with somebody, right? It's two stakes, your relationship business-wise and a friendship.

And I don't want to bring in names right now, but I've had friends that worked with us where like it just ended up well. And like we just don't talk to this day because it's not the thing where like you'll take it personally. Some people will take it personally and um and and there's really not much you can do because sometimes like in business like like in business most of the relationship will not work right it's right to find another um you know co-founder it's a hard thing to do right and imagine if it's your friend because then imagine you both have like different opinions and then you'll take you'll every single day when you're you'll you'll think about it because like it's like it's real life at that point right it's not like oh and nine to five you worry about in the office right but luckily

me and marwan like we've we've somehow we're able to manage those like different um differences in opinion and we learn to respect the difference in opinion where you know one person we could have opposing opinions right and then we were like well okay well when this is always going to happen right so let's just approach this always from a data and analytical perspective and maybe bring in some third parties to come in so no hard feelings let's just approach this always from a data and analytical perspective and maybe bring in some third parties to come in. So no hard feelings. Let's just approach this like the right way. Right.

And obviously here and there, we will kind of get mad at each other, but it doesn't last too long because at the end of the day, we understand like our intentions originally are pure and it's just a conflict with business. Right. And we know that this is going to happen to anybody else. So why take it personally? Yeah. And obviously my brother, he was a third co-founder.

Right. And so dealing with that was a bit challenging but we were able to you know work it through he no longer is full-time with us because um but we're still on good terms we were able to like you know uh you know uh resolve our our difference in opinions the right way damn so you took a level further you brought family dude it's hard dude i again this this hard as hell bro yeah yeah i don't i don't recommend anybody doing it uh but the thing is there's pros to it working with people you've known your whole life could be a while right it's a risk you take yeah um and i think overall like there's only one person we ended up with bad blood everybody else was on good terms so i think i got it yeah easy but some other people like they end like real relationships

like lose siblings Never talk again Damn I mean dude It's part of every big company Like if you go back To their origin story There's like

It's popular with Facebook It's popular with Twitter It happens Like people leave the boat early Yeah yeah yeah Yeah it's part of the game But I like what you said About bringing in third parties

And then being straight up Analytical about it Yeah it's the other way Because once there's emotions It's just a yelling battle At that point Data never lies Imagine we like argued We want to build this And build this right parties and then being straight up analytical about it yeah because once there's emotions it's just a yelling battle at that data never lies imagine we like argued we want to build this and build this right okay cool we can argue all day who has a better idea who's a smarter guy in the room okay let's let the customers decide right that's who decides who the winner is yeah numbers

don't lie exactly so what's next in store for you guys uh what are you working on where do you want to take this thing right now we've literally mastered one-on-one tutoring, a social app where we connect human tutors and human students. Right now with AI, there's a huge opportunity, language learning models, where we can actually take what we have right now and scale it way more. So obviously, the biggest challenge with having in-person tutors is it costs a bit more money than an AI for a student. So affordability. And to compete, we need to be affordable. But what we can do that big companies like, I'm not going to name anybody right now. We've been attacked too many times right now. There's big companies who they can't do what we have in terms of what we have human tutors

on board. So we actually are able to train our AI off real conversations. So guess how our ai speaks so if all of our users are gen z they talk like this what's goody bro how are you doing did you rise up that girl last night that's how our ai speaks because it's trained on millions of millions of conversations and anytime the ai doesn't know how to do something it will connect you to a human tutor in real time who's been overseeing the conversation right other companies you can you know there's companies who are like text-based answers like literally book answers like you know companies like check for example right all they have is that database they don't have human tutors and so they could only rely on that so if it gets it wrong there's

not much you can do for us you'll have somebody that comes in in real time but it also sounds like a gen z because it's trained on that and that that's something that's been doing really, really well. And investors are really excited. We have a lot of investors who have been following our traction and are really ready to hop on the next round. But since we turned our company into a profit actually almost a year ago from today, we haven't been stressed like fundraise. We're taking our time, making sure things are going well and publicly launch it when

the time's right. Is B2B part of the goal? Do you want to incorporate with schools and colleges down the road? The biggest disadvantage of B2B is it's much slower to work with. To get a call back, you could wait 30 days, where B2C, within minutes, we can get basically the results that we were looking for of a conversion to pay. Maybe, sure.

We've talked with schools and institutions and government ish um but a lot of times like you know we're thinking like five years ahead of them and we're trying to be ahead of technology or with technology a lot of stuff in school like you know why are they still using excel 2007 in school i'm trying to say like um it's hard to be they have guy which makes sense because they want to be able to control what's going on but But it forces us To regress our innovation And I don't know

If that's the direction We want to go But maybe there could be A balance on that But right now B2C Is definitely the mission Especially with Our Kodama AI

That's going to be In the palms of everybody's hand Yeah What was your least favorite class? What class do you think Was pretty useless When you were in school? Useless or hard?

I'd say useless Like you don't ever use it i took a random class on rocks bro like how like it was red and blue like like heterogeneous rock i don't know i like i don't like i don't know anything i forgot every single thing about that class to be honest like i already had my buddies in that class just like tell me like what's gonna be on the exam and like before then that's pop in like it's just like i don't even know why i took that class that's hilarious they need to teach more real world stuff i did take one class called family and child where they would bring in a bunch of like five and six year olds and i felt like that was you know there's some value there well you're going to be a dad one day hopefully exactly

so i thought that was decent i thought cooking was decent but then there was one called sewing who the hell sews anymore? Maybe some people sew, but cooking makes sense. I feel like I should have taken a cooking class, bro. I only know how to do two meals. I mean, luckily we have money to outsource it, but yeah, for sure.

But dude, sewing, I broke the machine first day. She put me in detention for like a week, so I couldn't even use the machine. Because you broke the machine? Yeah. Was it intentional? No, I didn't know how to sew.

I think I was sick the first day. So when I came in the second day, everyone already learned how to use it. So I just ended up breaking it. Was this like a fourth class? Or did you like by will? Fourth class. Oh, I see.

Yeah, you had to take sewing and cooking in my middle school. Damn. It was terrible. So do you guys have the best cooks coming out of your school? We must. Chef Ramsay probably won.

Yeah, Jersey is known for good Italian and Indian. So we got some good chefs over there but man it's been fun what's next for you and where can people find you there's a lot in store across and i do multiple things across katama there's a lot of new projects coming within their economy is going to be big um my personal channel i mean shako you know grew that in like a few months so almost like two million followers across my platform so if you want to know any life hacks, shopping tips or anything, follow me there at Amin Sheikho on any platform. But yeah, I'm going to continue to grind.

There's a lot of store right now, right after this. I'm going to hop onto a meeting and then straight to Miami for some more work there. Let's get it, Miami, baby. Thanks for watching, guys. Thanks for coming on, bro. See you next time. Thank you for having me.

Yep.