The Exchanges

Q Circle's even sometimes tricky. Gather round, right? Whether it's one person meetups and it's random people, video is also sort of tricky. I know actually I have friends. I'm looking at your interface right now. I have friends that use you guys. I mean, did you guys sort of start in the Pat Flynn sort of Amy Porterfield sort of world and expand from there? Did you start somewhere else?

A Yeah, no, you hit the nail on the head. Like, we, we started with knowledge creators who really wanted to build community-based learning, um, and it's expanded, you know, from solopreneurs who are, you know, uh, individual knowledge creators putting learning communities together to, like, really big now organizations are using us, like MakerPad, which is the largest no-code school. It's owned by Zapier. We are the OS for their entire learning community, um, Um, Dribbble, the world's, you know, one of the world's biggest product design communities, they're using Disco to be the OS for their entire Dribbble University, and I think what, you know, um, knowledge creators and organizations are realizing is it, you really want a seamless and branded experience for your learners to go to just one place, right? One place for chat, one place for live video, one place for content, And it's really helpful if you can have mission control to run your entire business from marketing and selling these live learning experiences to merchandising and monetizing different live learning.

AI assessment note: “you hit the nail on the head. Like, we, we started with knowledge creators”

Q from like, you know, the Hoppins, the Bizabos, the VFairs? I mean, all of those companies are moving in on one side on you. You're sort of building a wedge right in the middle, but like Hoppin just pitched me yesterday on sort of a live studio event experience because it's Clear. There's an enterprise play there. You're doing the same thing. What's your wedge to a company like Hopin?

A Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, as far as I understand, Hopin is still very event focused, right? We are really focused on learning communities and giving knowledge creators and organizations the merchandising tools, ah, to actually build a recurring revenue stream, ah, of business against knowledge and learning. And that's really, really unique and different in terms of the, the tools you need to do that versus having an event experience. Uh, so, you know, we're, we're like, there's an entirely new breed of school that's being created today with like micro schools, bootcamps, virtual academies, learning communities, and it requires a different set of, uh, tools to actually operate it as a, you know, Entire empire and, and business journey from, you know, marketing, selling, creating these products, having great experience for your learners, scaling it. And so we do all of that tooling. It's actually quite complex for people to, to sort of piece together a hop in with a slack with a, you know, curriculum tool. And so we just make it super simple in one, in one place.

AI assessment note: “Hopin is still very event focused, right? We are really focused on learning communities”

Q So economics to me, pricing is tough to go to market with. I'm sure you experimented a lot about this at Wattpad. What do people pay you today to use the technology per month on average?

A So we actually have a really interesting, uh, pricing model. Uh, one is, We have a free plan where we take 10%, so you can build your entire live learning experience and, and just only pay us when you make money, so I think that's really appealing to some people, but what's really appealing to the knowledge creators and organizations that are making a business out of live learning is they don't want you to take a huge chunk of their revenue. They want to pay you a SaaS fee, and so we have a pro account Uh, which is 85 dollars a month, um, or we have team accounts and an enterprise account, uh, for bigger customers, and so, you know, we really scale with your business in the way that you want to scale, and then we have a very interesting new arm of our business called Disco Studios, where live learning is actually hard. It's a new phenomenon to build an immersive and engaging live learning business, Is very, very attractive for a lot of people. They want to do that. It's a tremendous unlock of value for thought leaders, for even SaaS companies, for businesses, but they actually need like an agency or a pro-serve model to help them design the experience, operate it, scale it, and so we actually have a really nice business line as well that helps brands and organizations and thought leaders Create and scale these experiences.

AI assessment note: “we have a pro account Uh, which is 85 dollars a month”

Q Why did you feel like you couldn't build this inside of Wattpad before the sale? Obviously.

A Oh, so I left Wattpad a few years ago. Um, I, I helped scale Wattpad to, as I said, eighty million people, and then realized, um, I wanted to do some other things at that point. And so this was, you know, after a few years of, uh, What year was that, by the way, that you left? Yeah. So I left Wattpad in 2017. Okay. And we started, uh, Disco in 2020. And what's interesting is When I left WAPAD, I became incredibly interested in learning because, um, You know, I was so aware that the skills that people are going to need in the future are so different than what they're being taught in institutional ed, and I actually built my very own live learning community after Wattpad, and what Disco is really solving for is it's actually really hard to do that. It's hard to bring a live element and a social element to learning, With the existing tools that exist. And that's what we decided to solve for. We said, let's make this.

AI assessment note: “I left Wattpad in 2017. Okay. And we started, uh, Disco in 2020.”