Vexpower

We launched subscriptions with Stripe just before I went on Paternity leave with my second child. Up until now all purchases have been lifetime deals, which we've been increasing the cost of gradually. Now instead of paying $499 for all the courses for life, you can pay $70 a month. We're hoping this makes the business more scalable.

I launched the full platform after 6 months of coding (and learning how to code) in JavaScript + React + NextJS + Tailwind. This stack helped me focus on building from the front end backwards, as opposed to the prototype which was Python + Flask and didn't offer the same dynamic elements. With this version we ditched the marketing mix modeling code entirely and focused just on the learning experience because that's what people who pre-ordered were primarily interested in.

I met James via a Python slack community as he answered a bunch of questions I had asked. We had a zoom call and decided to stay in touch. I hired him on a couple of consulting projects, and enjoyed working with him. Since I was a relative novice on the coding side, I thought it'd help us move faster if he could come on board, so we decided an equity split that reflected my prior work on the idea and he started 3 days a week.

I built this in Python + Flask as a simple upgrade to the existing Typeform prototype. The main interface was still Typeform surveys (one per chapter) but my python API interacted with the Typeforms to make them dynamic - I'd create a new survey unique to each user based on what they had answered in the last survey. For example you could upload your marketing mix modeling data and the next survey would show you the column headers you'd uploaded to choose what variables go into your model.

I made about $2,000 in pre-orders from people who took the prototype simulator-based course I built in Typeform. I collected the pre-orders with Typeform's Stripe plugin, and just gave them an idea of what I planned to build. These pre-orders let me know I was onto a good thing and I started doing 3 days a week in January.

I built a prototype in Typeform which tested the simulator-based course concept and got about 100 email addresses. It was in four parts, just one typeform per chapter and it taught marketing mix modeling. I just embedded Typeform in Webflow with a slideout to make it look dynamic.

I was building a marketing mix modeling tool (an attribution method) and realized it couldn't be fully automated. So I was thinking of novel ways to teach them while using the product and hit upon the simulator idea. They would upload their data and it would walk them through how to make the various decisions they needed to make.