The Art of Selling Online Courses

243 The Job Market Is Changing. Are You Ready?

• John Ainsworth • Season 1 • Episode 243

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The job market is changing fast. My guest today thinks we've got about 6 months before it looks very different to what it does now.

Hemanand Vadivel is the co-founder of Code Basics, an EdTech platform out of India with 650,000 registered learners and over 6,000 five-star reviews for their courses and bootcamps in AI and data. They're doing about $2 million a year in course revenue... bootstrapped from day one, no outside funding, and no sales team.

What I love about Hem's approach is how straightforward it is. 80% of everything they put out is completely free. The idea is simple... if people genuinely love what you're teaching them, they'll come back and buy the paid stuff. And it works.

We got into how his whole team has shifted in the last few weeks, with everyone vibe coding and shipping products at a pace that would've seemed impossible not long ago. Development time that used to take six weeks now takes three days. They've built over 30 internal products recently with 12 already in production.

We also talked about why institutional education is struggling to keep up with the rate of change in the job market right now, and what course creators should be thinking about to stay ahead of what's coming.

Hem is a genuinely thoughtful guy and this ended up being one of the more interesting conversations I've had on the show in a while. Hope you enjoy it.

🔗 https://www.codebasics.io
📺 https://youtube.com/ ⁨@codebasics⁩  

A Job Market Tsunami Warning

SPEAKER_01

There is a tsunami coming. The tsunami is a big wave where the job market is gonna change a lot in the next six months. We have built over 30 products in the last few weeks and 12 of them are in production. If they want to be optimally profitable, at the same time, people don't feel there's too much burden for them to pay the feet. We make 80% of them compete the feet. There should not be a financial barrier for someone to notice it. We don't make people about our courses. We don't do that. We have a 30 days open today. They can cancel anytime. And a refund rate is 32%. The development time has released. Earlier let's say I think it's expected to take three days to build it. The thing is too soon that you cannot adopt it to the rate of things that's happening in the job market right now. It's too fast.

SPEAKER_04

Hello and welcome to the Art of Selling Online Courses. We're here to winning strategies. Perhaps top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Edward, and today's guest is Hemanan Vaderveld. Now Hem is a co-founder and CEO of the most loved ed tech platform in India, with over 650,000 registered learners on the website, over 6,000 organic five-star reviews for their courses, and bootcamped in AI and data. Now Hem completely bootstrapped CodeBasics and kept it profitable since inception. It's interesting that CodeBasics does not even have a sales team to sell their courses. We're going to find out what is their art of selling online courses. Hem, welcome to the show, man.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you, John. Thanks for having me here. Very excited.

Who They Teach And Job Support

SPEAKER_04

So who is it that you're helping with the courses? What kind of level are they at? Where are they based?

SPEAKER_01

We're helping people who are looking to either get a job or the ones who are already in the job and they're looking for transition. Because a lot of people, a lot of our learners, they want to transition from a non-technical field to a technical field. And they need support and they want to learn the concepts in the most easiest way possible. Of course, there are a lot of platforms, you know, doing things. But our thing is to make it as easy as possible. That anyone should be able to pick up our courses and learn like it's so easy. Wow, why did I not learn this before? So that that's that's the kind of thing we are doing.

SPEAKER_04

And are you targeting India in particular, or is it like is it broader than that?

SPEAKER_01

It's broader than that. We have a global audience. In fact, there are people from 150 plus countries taking our courses.

SPEAKER_04

But the majority of Oh That's big, man.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. Just so glad and grateful for that. But the majority, like uh 60% of our sales, is coming from India.

SPEAKER_04

Okay, okay. So the majority of the audience is there, but it is much, much broader. Okay, cool. And so I saw as we're going through some of the descriptions of your courses on your site. It looks like you're not just teaching people the information, but you're also then helping them to get a job afterwards. Did I understand correctly?

SPEAKER_01

Yes, that's correct. Yes, we are uh providing the job placement support, like you know, preparing the resumes, preparing a portfolio website. And uh everybody who takes a bootcamp with us, they get a website for free. So everybody will have Yeah. Yeah, they will have their own website. And uh that website will talk about them, uh, they'll talk about their skills, and it will also have an interactive piece of work that they have created. So any hiring manager who's looking into the website, they can interact with their work. So that's something we made it uh for our learners so that it becomes so easy for them to sell themselves in the market.

SPEAKER_04

Nice, nice. And then do you know like what percentage of them then go on to get a job or get a promotion, whatever it is they're after?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I mean, for the percentage of people who are completing our course, around 23% are getting the jobs, at least the recorded numbers. These are the recorded numbers we are able to record. But um we are not able to record all the numbers. We we cannot track if a person is really getting a job or not all the time. But yeah, these are when people come and come back to us and say, Oh, we have got a job. And sometimes we see them getting a job and we ask them, hey, how's it going? And we we kind of record it.

The 80/20 Free Content Funnel

SPEAKER_04

Nice, got it. And can you give everybody an idea of the size of your business? Like what's your what's your average revenue at at the moment?

SPEAKER_01

So we are making a couple of million dollars uh annual revenue just from the courses. And apart from that, we also have a few other, you know, few other funnels. But since we're talking about courses, that's about two million dollars.

SPEAKER_04

And is the what's the main traffic source for that? Is it mostly your YouTube audience? Because I know you've got like about one and a half million subs there.

SPEAKER_01

It's mostly our YouTube. I would say mostly it's our YouTube, but I would say it's mostly our model. The model that we have is uh 8020, which means 80% uh I mean we do everything good. The the idea for us is like uh we have to do everything top-notch. Even our free courses, paid courses, we don't have the differentiation. This is a free course, this is a paid course. We want to provide high quality content. And we put it on YouTube, we put it on our website, we put it on our WhatsApp channel, we put it on our emails, whatever. And we make 80% of them completely free. Okay, yeah. So that's that's a funnel. So this 80% of people who take our free courses, free PDFs, whatever free resources, and we we have free tools, right? So they you know, look at these free sources. And if they like, if they like that free thing, whatever they have seen, they can come and buy our paid courses. That's that's how we have kept it.

SPEAKER_04

Do you how do you decide which courses are gonna be the free ones and which ones are the paid ones?

SPEAKER_01

We decided based on the uh the skill, uh, you know, uh the the the time required to gather that skill. So that that's that's how we decided. So I'll give an example. Uh in now, if you go to our uh YouTube channel, all the basics of learning, machine learning, deep learning, conventional neural network, all those topics, that is something we feel everyone should know. So we have kept it free for everyone. There should not be a financial barrier for someone to know these basics. These fundamentals everyone should know. So once you have learned the fundamentals, now let's say you want to do projects, you want to add projects to your resume and go to the real market, you want to practice, then you can take our courses. Even those courses are highly affordable because the the reason to form Code Basics for myself and Double, you know, who's the founder of Code Basics, is to make learning fun, accessible, and affordable. That's that's the core goal of what we're doing, and uh we kept all the courses affordable.

Affordable Pricing And Elasticity

SPEAKER_04

Okay. And what's the average for the paid ones? What's the average kind of price you're charging people?

SPEAKER_01

Uh if you have to uh tell you in dollars, it's gonna be somewhere between$10 to it ranges all the way up to$200,$250, depending upon the boot. But it starts as low as$10.

SPEAKER_04

And the$250 one, that's like where you're also building them a website and you're helping them with the resume and all the other stuff there. That's very reasonable prices. That's amazing, man. Okay.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

How did you kind of figure out that pricing? Is that based on like what it is that people in India because you said 60% of the revenue is from India. So it's like, is that what people there will pay, or is that how do you figure out?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean, uh it's initially based on the gut feeling, we we kind of understand what price is going to be affordable for people. We start from there. And of course, I want to make this uh, you know, this end of the day, it's a commercial business. I want to keep it profitable. So I do my calculations. My I'm myself a data analyst. I worked in the revenue department, pricing department, so I know all the pricing strategies and stuff. So we do it, we do some simulations of the pricing, we compare that with the volume and the price, you know, we play with the numbers and then we launch the price.

SPEAKER_04

Well, that's fascinating. I I have not worked in a pricing department. What's the what are the models? How do people uh how do people play around with this and use that to help them figure out what price decors should be?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it's it's an elasticity, right? Like uh, for example, I'll tell you. So there is a mindset, there is a barrier for people, right? There is a pricing corridor. Let's say if you're keeping the price as$9, people think it's$10. If you keep the price as uh$13, they still think it's$10. So you you you think you you you you kind of keep the price, which is affordable for people, but at the same time you end up being profitable. Because if you cannot be profitable, then what is the point? You have to be profitable, but we don't want to be too much profitable. But we want to be optimally profitable. At the same time, people don't feel there is too much burden for them to pay the fees. So that's it's it's a combination of analytics, bit of a gut feeling, and a bit of a value system all put together.

SPEAKER_04

What's the what's the stuff that you're working on now? So actually, no, I want to go back a step. You mentioned about your YouTube audience. You mentioned about all the free courses that you've got. When you say you've got the free courses, is that on YouTube or is that like on your website separately, or is is it a combination of those?

SPEAKER_01

It's a combination of both. We have our free courses on YouTube. That's the first place we where we launched it. So we specialize in doing projects because I'm I have a lot of industry experience, like 10 plus years in the industry. I've worked in Europe, all the international markets. So I bring that experience. My the other founder is working in the industry as well. So all the people that we like we have a bunch of people working with us. So either they are fully working with code basics or they are part-time. So they're all working in the industries as well. So we bring the industry-based projects. That's that thing that we put on YouTube for free. And on top of that, if they want to do a certification or if they want to do like a further step to that, they can come to our courses. They can come to our boot camps or courses. So it's to answer your question, it's primarily YouTube.

SPEAKER_04

Okay. That makes sense. And then what's the next step? Like, do you get people onto your email list or are you selling directly from YouTube, or how does that work?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, it's funny, I don't think uh we are very uh um strategic that way. Um we are very um how to say, we don't we don't mail people about our courses. We don't do that.

SPEAKER_04

Do you have an email list? No. Okay. Okay. So in my experience, right, and I've not worked as much with the Indian market, but in my experience, we're working with, I don't know, hundreds of course creators, about 80% of the potential revenue is in the email list rather than direct from YouTube. So as in, if you get people from YouTube to an email list through a lead magnet and then promote, then that's like of the potential revenue you could get, that's like 80% of it. And so I would think that there is a very good chance that you could grow revenue significantly by getting having more lead magnets on um on YouTube and then and then mailing those people about your about your paid courses.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. There is a reason. I mean, I'll tell you my reason why we are not doing that uh at the moment. See, what we believe is that uh if people really like our content, what we are teaching on YouTube, and uh we we do add the description. We don't even say it on our video. You know, we rarely say it, especially if if the course is very important or if it's very timely, time-bound, or something like that, then we say to people on the video that we are presenting, but we don't say to buy our courses or something like that. We just add it in the description. And uh but we do run PPC ads. We do we do run that ads. So what what what what is our strategy is that let people learn from us, let people know what code basics is, who's teaching, how they're teaching, let people know that. And later, if they see an ad, which is coming through their Instagram, YouTube, and all the stuff, if they like it, they will click it. And they will anyways go to the website and they will check the details and then they will buy it. So that's that's how we do it. Emails we do for people just before the course launch or something, we we send it to the people who who are in the last 30 days, who have registered in our website last 30 days or something like that. But our email marketing is not like very optimized or you know, very, very sales oriented. Because we don't uh, first of all, in India, people don't open emails that much. We can send WhatsApp, WhatsApp works in India. We can send WhatsApp messages, but um again, we don't want to be too pushy. You know, we we we know that our people, the kind of people that comes to us is like the people who highly trust us. And that's also the reason why for all the courses, I don't think any Indian it tech company is doing that. For even for our boot camps, we have a 30 days open period. Like they can cancel any time. They can they get full money. Yeah. And a refund rate is less than 2%. So that's I mean, people can uh you know, certain people do abuse it. We know that people who are abusing it, they they kind of complete the course 30-40 percent and they they ask for refund. But we look at the people who don't do that. 98% of people don't do that. I mean, not not all the people taking refund, they are abusing it. Some people have genuine reasons, or some people don't like it or whatever. But uh we want to make the uh decision barrier, remove the decision barrier for people. When they are buying it, they they they should know that, okay, fine. If they don't like this or if they find something else in the future, they can just get the refund in 30 days. So that gives a lot of freedom for them. And this can come only from the people who really know what you're teaching, how you're teaching, your teaching methods, and all this stuff. So that's the reason why we don't try to push it to the people because our YouTube is giving us enough audience for us to keep this up and running. So that's that's a strategy, and uh that's not a strategy as well. And that's the kind of thought.

Refund Freedom And Trust Building

SPEAKER_04

Would you yeah, I I'm gonna come back to you about that because I think there's I d I don't know the Indian market, right? And I don't know what percentage of people open email, but I know that like in the US market, a lot of people think, ah, does email marketing really work anymore? And like a lot of people are here say that, and and I know from a lot of testing it works extremely well. So but I don't know the Indian market, so I I don't want to like presume that I do.

SPEAKER_01

It does work in the Indian market too. I I'm not saying it doesn't work. Of course, the open rate is gonna be uh let's let's say it's less than five percent, maybe it's three percent. In US market, it's seven or eight percent. And uh we don't do this on purpose, you know. We don't want to be too salesy with our thing, you know. We we do want to sell, we do wanna you know, we do want people to know our courses, buy them and do stuff. Yeah. We just don't want to appear salesy. And uh I don't know whether if you noticed, you can see in our website, we never have something like a sales or we never have something like uh like we don't cross this price and say, okay, it's it's gonna be uh this price or something like that. We always have a standard price. And uh yeah. So that that that way we we wanna we wanna keep a honest pricing and transparent pricing and then and then stick with it. So we don't want to do like discounts or something like that. So that i i people will obviously expect that and uh so we wanna do that from the beginning. We tried doing that and it worked and we stick to that. We didn't change it. It's been three years.

SPEAKER_04

What's the plan for what's next? Because you've I know you said you wanted to grow revenue by like about 25% in the next year. What's your what's your plan of how you're gonna do that?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, we started uh doing live courts. We we did not do live courts before. We were mostly in uh self-paced courses, but we started doing live codes because with self-paced courses, the problem right now uh is that AI is changing a lot of things uh and the shelf life of the self-paced course is is reducing significantly. So we are moving towards a live course where we can teach the most updated ones and we are also learning them and teaching them simultaneously. And the second thing is we are moving towards products. We are building products like uh one one of the products we are building is uh it's around the interview preparation, practice arenas, and where people can uh practice like in a very highly customized manner. So it's very adaptive. We are building an internal tool right now, and uh, we have our own engineering team to do this. So this AI tool which we are building is like it's gonna be very specific for John. It's gonna understand John's learning, your learning patterns, and uh it's gonna customize the roadmap for you, the customize the curriculum for you. The curriculum which you see and which I see is gonna be very different. It's gonna be your experience, your LinkedIn profile, your resume, your past experiences. So we are building such a thing, and uh and and and it's gonna be more like a SaaS product, subscription-based product, and that that's that's another thing we are building right now. And we are also building another subscription product, which is which we're calling Code Basics AI Pro, which we're gonna launch on the 2nd of April. So we're in about$10 a month, um, we are giving like regular updates on AI, what tools to learn, and there's a lot of hype in the market. There is a lot of reality. So people cannot separate between hype and reality. So we are going to do that for them. You know, we are going to have a human eye, our expertise, we're gonna add it to that and tell people, okay, these are things we can learn, this is how the job landscape is changing, this is what you can try. Because we are connected with a lot of uh hiring managers in India and across the world as well. So we can get those insider news and put it in the form of a subscription so people are staying up to date.

SPEAKER_04

With the SaaS that you mentioned, the changing the curriculum for each person, is that for your courses or are you building that for other course creators to use to adapt their own uh curriculum?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, definitely we are keeping it open for others as well. And initially we want to test it with our own audience uh because we have a good base, good uh learner base, and we want to test with them first. And if it is working well, why not? Uh we are okay, we are open to share it with others, others as well.

Adaptive AI Products And Subscription Plans

SPEAKER_04

How's that gonna work? Like which parts, what what what elements are going to be adapted? Because I'm is it gonna like make AI videos so the actual video that someone sees is different? Or is it just saying, oh no, you only need this module, this module? Like what kind of parts is it gonna be able to adapt? Or is it too early to say for certain how it's gonna work?

SPEAKER_01

It's I can say something because uh some of the parts we are still you know working. Of course, we even want the video part to be optimized because we keep we do have the models, we do have our avatars and stuff like that. We are experimenting with that. But we don't want to keep it too, too, too much AI when it comes to video. We want human touch there.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And the parts which are gonna be adaptive is is the practice, the the practice that you're gonna do and exercises you're gonna get. And uh and then the instructions you're gonna get. It's gonna be very adaptive. And uh it's kind of it's it's a combination of something which is uh deterministic and stochastic, where certain things will be deterministic, which means if you are a person who has an experience in uh working with machine learning models, you would skip some parts of basics of machine learning. That that will be deterministic. It's it's rule-based. Some portion is gonna be stochastic, which is like, okay, it based on your learning patterns, you know, how fast you're learning. So you're gonna get exercises based on that. So that is gonna be like it it it can't be determined by a formula. It will be based on that particular moment. So it's it's a combination of both at the moment.

SPEAKER_04

That's fascinating. I love that. We've had it's something I want to start covering more on the podcast is people who are using AI not necessarily just in their marketing, but in their uh delivery of the courses. We had someone on um maybe a few months ago, something like that, who um has built out an AI tool, or she's she's using an existing AI tool on the market that allows her to build a chatbot for her course. So she's teaching people how do you learn a new language. And she's not teaching French or German or Spanish, she's teaching how to learn a language. So that's like she speaks 11 languages and she's kind of got a way that she learned them, yeah, and then she knows lots of other people who speak lots of languages, and they all learn in a slight, they've all got their own style. So she's trying to help people to figure out their style of how to learn a language. And she was selling courses and she switched over to just selling um at this AI tool instead, and that's built in one way, you know, and so it's a chat bot, and you can check you can message back and forth with the chat bot, and that's loaded with all the information. And you're talking about a different way of teaching it with AI, and you know, like adapting the curriculum to people, and it's still videos, and there's different exercises, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

Vibe Coding And Building Faster Than Ever

SPEAKER_04

And I'm I think there's a a massive amount of mileage in this. I think this is something that is going to become the norm, like in five years' time, this will just be normal. How exactly it is and what people who are listening who are currently just selling a straightforward video course can do, like, should they do something with it now? Should they wait for six months until there's new tools out? Like that, I think I want to kind of cover a little bit more of. What do you what do you think about that? What do you think people how do you think people should think about this?

Why Universities Cannot Keep Up

SPEAKER_01

I think the first step is to have a chat box. Uh we are building something called uh chat buddy, and uh it's it's almost in the beta, it will be rolled out in a in a week or two. So, right now what's happening, John, is that the predict development time has reduced like 10x. So earlier, let's say if you are taking six weeks, it's gonna take like less than a less than three days to build it, build the same thing because my entire team is wipe coding now. It's not just the developers. Everybody's wipe now. They are using cloth and all those things, you know, GPT and all those things, and they are white coding stuff and uh we are shipping things faster. So with this with this rate of change, uh, we should be able to produce the other steps. Even we wipe code an app and we are going to release an app in in in in in a few days, you know. We didn't have an app before. So we wipe in a mobile app and uh we are going to release it soon. So the people who are listening to this, what they can do is uh they should step out with uh they should start doing it on their own because the people who are doing it are the product owners, right? They know how the product should look like. They know their learners, what they need. And uh they can work with something like clawed code and they can build a product on their own. They don't need a developer, developer. They need a developer within the phase of deployment, and uh they need one person at least to deploy because for deployment, still you need somebody to do that so that there are no you know surprises. So that's what I would suggest. And uh you you can go wild in imagination. There is nothing, there are no norms like it used to exist before. You can be completely wild, even I'm thinking like, okay, what uh I mean I have some wild, wild ideas and I don't want to discuss it right now because it it's too wild in my head. And uh but it's it's there, you know. You know, you can you can really get uh I mean the at the core of it, uh one one mindset I I would like to talk about is that learning is something that has never changed in the last, I don't know, since the human uh recorded timeline, right? Like uh 100,000 years, it it never changed. Learning is always constant. So earlier you see people used to write these manuscripts, right? And they and they used to write this uh on the sculptures they used to write. And uh so and then there used to be this gurus who teaches this person, and uh that person teaches other person. There is a lineage of people who keep on teaching to the others, and it's only this lineage of people. Um, you know, they become cobblers, they you know we we have this uh you know people, right? Like tailors, cobblers, and all those things. And uh then we started having this institutions and schools and stuff like that. I don't know, right now we I think we are going back. So the learning is gonna be there, but the way the people are gonna learn, I don't think the schools, the institutions, the institutional learning, I don't I don't think. It's gonna work anymore. I feel it's broken because the institutional learning cannot adopt to the rate of change that's happening in the job market right now. It's too fast. Even even in in my work, you know, in my team, we changed a lot in the last 45 days. Like the titles have been changed. I told people to remove the titles. Uh you're just gonna have like three titles now. Either you're gonna be a builder or you're gonna be an orchestrator or distributor, all three of them together. But by default, everybody's a builder. Everybody should build stuff. So that's that's why I told my team and uh that's what I'm telling my learners too. So all the boot camps that you're doing now, it's changing to a builder bootcamp. On top of building, I'm teaching them how to build their personal brand, which is very important. If they don't build a personal brand, they cannot distribute themselves. And at the same time, they need to orchestrate. Not orchestrating only among people, also orchestrating among the tools and people together. So if somebody is able to build the skills, they're going to be relevant in the market. And now coming to the delivery of teaching, we are still figuring out what's what's the best way, you know, what's what's the best way you can teach them. You know, the things are changing so fast, and uh we are applying some scientific methods, we are understanding the science behind learning and all those things, and we are trying to do our best.

SPEAKER_04

I just did a session this morning with my team about um starting to use Claude code. So they've all been using Claude and Chat GPT for for you know, since they came out. Yeah. No problem there. Using them, they help with with writing, they help with uh ideas, with checking things. Great. And then a few m uh about I don't know, about a month ago, I started uh building some tools myself in uh Replit. And I was just like, oh, the world has changed. Like what I thought was possible is is it's moved forward massively. I think I don't know when it happened exactly, but like maybe when Claude Code came out or something. But like six, eight months ago, something like that, there was just this jump forward. And I heard people talking about it, and I was like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. And then I actually tried it, I was like, no, no, no, no. This is like a this is a completely new game. So I started building tools in that, and I built out a whole range of different tools for within the business to allow the team to move much faster. And so the the talk with the team this morning was right, everybody is now building these these tools. Like it's not just me, it was me, and then it was me and Yosip, and then it was also Eva, and now it's like, no, no, no, it's everybody. Everybody is building tools every week. You're going to make something in the business run better by building an AI tool, building a skill, vibe coding, setting up some processing co-work, setting up an automation, something, because this is just it's incredible what you can do with it. And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, oh, I haven't even looked at this stuff yet, it's like, look at it. This is incredible. So good. I'd start out with if I've I have shown people how to use Clawed code in VS Code, and I know that it's too techy and and and difficult looking for a lot of people. So I would suggest start with if you've got the Clawed, if you use Claude, get the Claude app and in it go to co-work. I think that's the easiest place to start, is co-work. And then code is a bit harder, and then code like in VS Code or in terminal is then another level up as well, more powerful, but a little more techie. But just start with cowork and give it a go and just try something. And you'll go, oh, oh, the world's different now. Like it's the world is not what we thought it was six months ago, eight months ago, whatever it is. It's a different world. You've got to get on the new train. It's like this is how it is now. Totally.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

So powerful. So you're suggesting to people that they actually uh vibe code their own uh chatbot for for how to help people to be learning through it. That's a fascinating idea. I hadn't thought of that. Okay.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, they should vibe code, not the chatbot. You know, they should vibe code everything that they can do with the LMS, right? How do they give the assignments? How do they auto-correct the assignments? How how how can they customize the assignments? And how can they get the latest data from the job portals and optimize their interview preparation tool based on that? We do have agents running 24-7, which gets the latest data from the job portals. And based on that, it is optimizing few information because we don't want our people to miss out on the latest information that's that's stayed on the internet. Yeah. And uh yeah, we are just open for all the changes that's happening in the world. And uh it's it's gonna be a wild ride, uh, what I'm seeing coming through, especially in the ed tech industry, because uh the job market is gonna change because the ed tech industry is primarily dependent upon the job market. If the job market itself is gonna change, this what we're gonna teach is gonna change and how we are gonna teach it to change. So both with both the change, we have to be ready.

SPEAKER_04

I think you've got you've said a few things I want to kind of tap into. So I might now jump around a little bit as I kind of go back to a couple of things you said. But one thing you mentioned was about the fact that the universities and the institutions are like not able to adapt fast enough. Like they weren't able to adapt fast enough 30 years ago. They have no chance now.

SPEAKER_03

It's like, oh my god.

SPEAKER_04

Like some things, fine, like maybe medicine and engineering are a great fit for what you teach in university. They seem from the outside, not having been an engineer or a doctor, they seem like they are a good fit for what it is that needs teaching and what is being taught. But to an extent, I'm sure there's a lot of stuff in medicine that like moves along and the doctors are behind, but to an extent. But you look at marketing or business or or software engineering or whatever, it's just like, really? I are you guys really managing to keep up? Maybe some places are. Like, I don't know, maybe Stanford is like completely on it with with software engineering and is teaching exactly the right thing. But I see so many places where it's like, oh no, you're so much better off going online and learning something. It's so much, so much cheaper.

SPEAKER_01

The the idea, John, is what where it's breaking is that you have to wait for four years or three years to complete your education and then do a job. That's a broken idea. What if you should you should learn something? Let's say you're learning something for two months and then do a job. Do a job parallel. You know, you don't have to wait until you complete something and then do a job. That's such a broken idea. Because the earlier thought, the school of thought, is that okay, somebody has to acquire all the skills for four years, they have to pass all these stupid exams and then do the job, which is so broken. And they learn Excel when they come to work. You know, the you know what happens, you know, they they come to work and they open the Excel. Oh, should I learn Excel? They're not even, I mean, a lot of institutions are doing that, but a lot of them are not still doing that. People don't even know how to use Excel. Yeah. Like they are in the college when they're doing when they're doing the studies, you know. They they learn all this superficial stuff, which is something they're never gonna use. Integral calculus, differential calculus, all this uh, you know, bumbo jumbo stuff, you know, they are not gonna see the side of it. But you know, I mean, uh at least in India, this is the case, you know. I I I I've studied in Germany as well, so it's it was a case there as well, you know. It was still more outdated. Uh, but I would love the universities for networking and uh communication, those kind of things. But um you don't have to spend four years for that or two years for that, maybe uh two months, three months.

SPEAKER_03

Go to networking events every evening for six months, and you're gonna have a better network than you would have done in uh university.

SPEAKER_01

You'll learn a lot by working on some working on a product, working on distribution. You'll learn a lot. Universities are not gonna teach that.

SPEAKER_04

Very, very rare that if I'm hiring somebody that I'm I'm basing my decision on the thing that they have learnt at university. What I do, I I do sometimes use it as a filter because like I generally, the the kind of people I'm hiring are people who have got a some kind of scientific or engineering type uh uh brain. Like they think in that way. So I one of the things I look for is like my my uh at university I studied maths. Um the my right-hand man, Josip, he was a biomedical scientist, neither one of which is relevant, right? The actual topic isn't relevant. But if you can do well at university in as a biomedical science or or um software engineering, or in uh who have we got somebody with structural engineering background, then you probably think in the logical analytical way that we need people to think in. So that's like, but the fact that you st you know, if what you did was study um online marketing at university, I'd be like, well, you messed up there, didn't you? That was almost definitely a waste of your time. Whatever you learnt was like a, you know, is is is out of date, is irrelevant now, you know?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, goddamn.

SPEAKER_04

So what's the what's the um what's the next thing for you guys? You said about kind of growing the revenue. You wanna, you wanna, you wanna boost that up. What's what's anything from a marketing point of view that you're working on? Is there anything do you just focus on the content and making better courses, or is there anything with a, you know, are you working on your funnels, are you working on your sales pages, anything, anything from that kind of angle?

Preparing The Boat For The Wave

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I can explain this uh figuratively. Uh we have this concept in our team, and uh this is what I've been telling my team as well. So there is a tsunami coming. The tsunami is a big wave where uh the job market is going to change a lot in the next six months. And uh so we are preparing a boat. So we are preparing a boat. That's you are now.

SPEAKER_03

Okay, got it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Yeah. And we don't know how the boat should look like because we don't know what kind of tsunami it is. We know the tsunami from a distance. So we are preparing the boat and we are seeing the tsunami and we are changing the boat simultaneously, and we are equipping the boat with all the lifeboats and whatever possible. And the idea is to keep the boat, first of all, as code basics, the company. The boat should let us you know float on the water. That is number one criteria. And then number two, you know, once we are able to do that, you know, of course we should be able to do that. The idea is to onboard as many people as possible on that boat and uh take them to a safer place. Because uh I don't I mean our existence should help people who are going to get hit by this way and uh especially who are going to hit uh get hit by the jobs, uh people who are going to you know get their job delayed or people who are gonna lose their job and find the next job. So we we we want to help them. We want to teach them, we want to sk upskill them in the quickest time possible so that they are in the job market again. And uh it's a very tough task uh looking at the job market, the way it is changing, because uh in India, in India market, uh you see the population is very high. So the the mass hiring used to happen. Like people hire in bulks, like they hire like a thousand people, five hundred people at once. Those things have stopped. So now this has become a very big problem for the freshest, right? The people who are just starting. They're not they're not getting hired in bulk. So we are trying to do everything possible to highlight their skills. We are giving them practical experience. So one of our products is also virtual internships. We run these virtual internships where my video comes or double's video comes, we talk to them as if like they are my reportee, you know, I'm the manager, and uh we are trying to automate, uh, we are trying to keep it dynamic now. It's kind of static now, depending upon the work they do. And we also have a platform where they submit the work, we give them kudos for the good work, we tell them feedback if the work is not good. So we want to move more towards the direction. We want to understand what's exactly the people are looking for in the industry and upskill them. And at the same time, we are also okay for people to start their own business. So we are also teaching them that, you know, how can they build products, how can they sell products? And uh so that's the kind of thing we are looking for. That's the next thing, not the next thing, the current thing we're doing. And that will be our next thing for the next one year. Because this change is something is happening, and uh we are very, very cognizant of that.

SPEAKER_04

That makes sense. That's fascinating. I love that metaphor. Okay. I'm trying to decide whether to tell my team a tsunami is coming or not.

SPEAKER_01

Told my team. I wrote a long email to my team and I told them whatever I felt, and uh it was not an easy email to write, but uh, I think we are at a great place now because in the last 40 days, everybody in my team of skills they all know how to build products now. And uh it's like how you felt, right? Oh, the world has changed. I mean their world has changed now. They all can build a product, and uh we have built over 30 products in the last few weeks, and uh at 12 of them are in production. So the rest of them will go to production as well. So it's it's going well.

SPEAKER_04

I'll tell you how how dramatic it I I found it to be. I went to this conference maybe three weeks ago out in Lisbon, and um at the conference we mostly only talked about AI. It's like it's all it's all business owners, it was like all people running seven-figure businesses, and people were up to various different things, and one person in particular was like really, really pushing the boundaries like with what you could possibly do with stuff. And a lot of us got very inspired, and a lot of us were already doing stuff with AI, but like we were inspired to go, like, right, let's really try and think bigger, try and do more. And so uh my friend Pete came up with an idea of a project that he was he was already doing loads with AI, he was setting everything up with clawed code and GitHub, and he'd been running things, and he came up with an idea for a project, and he thought it was gonna be three months, and one week later he'd shipped it. And it's like just the speed at which you can can implement stuff, and then the same the same uh time, I'd come up with an idea that I thought was gonna be a three-month project, and I'd built version one of it in two hours. And I was like, What? Like, what just happened? I knew that was not the shipping version, but it was like this is this is crazy. And by the this is now three weeks later, I think it's two or three weeks later now, uh, from that, and I built a version and showed it to the team today, and they were just like, What is going on here? Like, I was like, the the future is different than what we thought it was. We are here now, this is happening. This is the future. We need to be on this right now. And the way I think about it is you were mentioning about the tsunami. I was thinking about it's like I think somebody is going to make my current business like irrelevant in in a year's time. And I want that person to be me. I don't want somebody else to do, I don't want somebody else to do it to me. I'm gonna go and do it myself, you know? It's like, right, let's completely upgrade every single bit of the business, get 10 times more output, help people to be able to do much get much better results, help them to be able to implement it themselves and like really, really push on this. Um I'm feeling inspired by your how much you're really going with the with the team and getting everybody moving on this. I really love that. Because that's like I'm starting on it, but it's like I want to I can see I can go further, you know?

Where To Find CodeBasics

SPEAKER_01

Definitely, yeah. I mean, people are awesome, you know, once they are given the tool. I mean, I say the no restriction for anyone getting any subscription, get the best subscription on the planet earth and I will pay for it, but just build. And yeah, they all yeah. So they all got on it and they did a great job. I think they did a great job.

SPEAKER_04

That's amazing. That's fantastic. Man, if people um loved what you got to say and they want to go check out what you're doing, uh, where should they go? What's your website? What's your YouTube?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, they can go to my website, uh, which is uh codebasics.io. And uh our YouTube channel is where you get a lot of information and value if you're in the space of data and AI. And if you even if you're a non-technical person, if you're a business user who wants to learn AI, you our our channel still has a playlist for you. You can go to the Code Basics YouTube channel, C-O-D-E-B-A-S-I-C-S YouTube channel, and uh that's that's our holy grail, and you would find everything about us there.

SPEAKER_04

Perfect. So that's codebasics.io and code basics YouTube channel. Hem, this has been amazing. I really, really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for coming on today, man.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you, John. I mean, uh not uh I was just not sharing information that can be valuable, but I could also reflect on some of the things while I was talking. That was really fun. Thanks, thanks for having me here today.

SPEAKER_04

Absolutely. You're welcome. Thanks as always for listening. Uh, and we will see you guys next time.