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

All of our tutors, they're all the same age as our students.

So the dynamic is not a teacher-student relationship.

It's a friend-friendly 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 like enjoy listening to the tutor, they're receptive, and it builds that long retention.

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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 Shaco.

How's it going, man?

How's it going, man?

You're about to revolutionize the education space, right?

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 like 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 try to escape right and for us we're like what if we can build something that kids actually want to spend time time on?

And that's exactly what we did.

Yeah, my mom spent like 5K on SAT tutoring for me when I was a kid.

And my score went up like barely, like 20, 40 points, because I didn't care about it.

You know what I mean?

But I feel like when you align the interests 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 going to put in their full effort, right?

And so we did that through many things.

Like all of our tutors, they're all the same age as our students.

So the 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 in a school quarter, so three months talking to their tutor.

From that 14 hours, around 50% is them talking about non-school-related stuff.

So NFL, XFL, 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 actually like enjoy listening to the tutor.

They're receptive and it builds that long retention, something that we have.

And a lot of these players can't do.

Wow, that's cool.

Yeah, 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 every year growth.

So we launched in 2020.

You know, the pandemic was wild.

Like for those who don't, you know, really, 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 finishing up Zoom school.

He would literally be sleeping through his class.

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, 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 were 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 we started getting traction, a lot of people started nominating for us.

And then when people nominate you, they reach out to you and they say, hey, tell us a bit more about you.

And honestly, we just told them what we were doing and they were super impressed.

And what they really liked about us was 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.

Like literally like

50 million to 100 million students

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 tick tock wow in under three months unheard of and what was the content strategy like there were you Shout out to today's sponsor, Rocket Money.

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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 was like, like, it's a 1090 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 that hell wants to see tutoring videos, right?

So what we do 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 off shopping at Target.

So we do life hacks that kids love.

And by definition, right, if they love it, they're going to engage, they're going to follow you.

And every 10 videos, an ad promoting our product is going to 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?

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 catalys 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 like the youngest engineer there.

And, like, keep in mind, like, when you're that young and in software, you really have no idea how the VC world works.

And all of a sudden, like, we never reached out first to investors.

We had investors reach out to us because they saw us on the charts with 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.

Like, this is awesome.

Right.

And so

it's like you think it's a superficial world.

When in reality, when you start talking to them, investors are notorious 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 actually put effort here and so I literally like me and my co-founder old bought a bunch of like VC books started to read how that works and even after reading it to be honest we like it wasn't like nothing taught us more than actually being rejected by investors.

Like 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.

Right.

And that that that went on for a few months and eventually like obviously and this is completely normal right um you probably get like a hundred no's before you get one yes right unless you're really building the next apple yeah um and it's in this space it's really about showing traction so you know when we started getting the reach we didn't have much traction right so they're like okay come back to us when you have bigger bigger numbers and so we really started doubling our our sales every single month until eventually an investor comes in he's been sourcing companies from wide cobinator 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 understands the vision.

And more importantly, it 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.

So we have this whole funnel there.

And he was like, I'm going to invest in you guys.

And this was like a few months after our first rejection.

But in between that process, like, there were times where I thought, damn, like, like, this is never going to happen, right?

You kind of lose hope.

Yeah.

But it's part of the game.

And now every time I get a rejection, I'm happy.

It's really 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.

Like, you know, 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.

See, 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.

And like 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, like we really chase which video is going to get us the paying customer, right?

And we've optimized our app so much to 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.

And all those are type of things that took like conversion rate from like, for example, starting off like 9% to 15%,

20% and up right from like downloading all the way to pay, right?

And kept on 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.

Nah.

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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you're a paying customer.

How did you find good app 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 like when I was there at Apple, I did a lot of cool projects working with leadership.

For everybody who has an iPhone on iMessage,

you know when you hold on to reply in a thread, me and two people pitched that to Craig Federici, who's right under the CTO.

You came up with it?

Yeah, he's the CTO.

And we actually had to convince him 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.

And I basically basically told them, like, hey, like, all these kids are spending all their time texting on Instagram and Snapchat DMs.

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.

But the point is, like, I had that experience, right?

So when I went to go and hire engineers, there would 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 we had very high standards, and it was hard for us to actually find people and source them.

So my co-founder actually built this robot called Sir Jata and actually has a whole LinkedIn profile.

His name is Sir Jata.

And he reaches out to people 24-7.

Really?

And 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're using 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 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 dude how did you get that job at apple at such a young age um so i i think they gave me the offer when i was like 19.

um i i actually graduated i i studied at the university of washington computer science i graduated in two years so i was how'd you do that um so in high school i took a lot of like ap and 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 to 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.

And then like, that was hella hard because imagine you go, instead of like.

easing up from 100, 200, 300, I went into this some like math theory where they're teaching you how to like basically solve rocket science, right?

And

so that was pretty stressful.

But 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 well 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.

You didn't 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 entrepreneurial background.

A few months later, I get a phone call.

Literally, all it says is like, hey, do you want to come to Cupertino, Apple Park?

Apple is based in Cupertino.

You want to come and interview us?

So we skipped like everything.

Like, 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 and stuff like that.

And then I go home and on the way back, I get like a call from the director.

He's like, we love you.

We want to accept this offer.

Wow.

And they give me this offer literally like, I think two weeks before I go a full-time job.

And keep in mind, by the way, when companies hire software engineers 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?

So it was literally the last second.

I wasn't even expecting it.

So like, I tell my parents, oh, geez, I was like, I'm leaving to California.

I was in Seattle at that point.

I'm going to 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

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.

Because

I'm a risk person, right?

But I work really hard.

So I don't just like work 40 hours at Apple.

I work 40 hours at Apple, then another 40 40 hours at my startup.

So I was working 80 hours every single week until that moment happened where I can go full time.

So you weren't sleeping.

Dude, I had no life, bro.

I missed out on the typical.

Everybody goes out and parties and stuff like that.

They're older because I'm like, dude, I'm building this thing.

It's going to change the world.

And I found people who, like, like the team behind me, the 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 it's, it's, uh, um, and honestly, once you, 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.

Yeah, I had burnout.

I know you experienced it too.

At a young age, man, because you're just so locked in, but it adds up.

Adds up.

What did you learn from Apple working there two years?

What did you learn about like 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.

If you want to do something, it has to go all the way up and that introduces a lot of delay.

Things move slow.

Something that I could do in Apple in like six months, I could do in my own startup in two days.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

It's a big company.

They care about their image and stuff like that.

But

somebody as me who's like an entrepreneur, 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 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 going to 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 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, can 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?

Nothing like a school project, like, you know, in a business class where they tell you, go, go, you know, make a fake startup and pitch it, right?

All that is BS.

It really doesn't translate to the real world.

Nah.

Would you say you learned more at Apple than 14 years of schooling?

Dude, what I learned in my tiers at Apple is more than schooling.

What I learned in my startup is more than everything I've done in my life.

Like, listen, there's still more to learn.

Like, 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.

Like,

you can transpect 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.

But why is education still the same?

And, you know, what's crazy, too, is now with Chat GDP and AI,

like we did a survey, like 40, 50% of students are literally cheating through school because they realize like, what's the point of me doing?

They will literally, the whole class run through all their assignments through this ChatGP, not even learn anything.

In schools, politicians, we spoke to multiple politicians.

Oh, we're going to 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?

In some cases, you're paying $50,000 a year to basically just have a bot regurgitate the answers to submit in.

There's a lot of change that needs to happen there.

I think we need a lot of young people to go in and, you know, impactful roles to be able to impact things in school 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?

I took one marketing class where they taught me how to write emails to sell your social media to clients or to like companies like Shopify or Target or 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, Shayko, 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 irrelevant.

They need to like, they need to go bring in industry leaders who've done it.

For sure.

Why is a business 101 professor teaching a class, but they haven't built anything?

Yeah.

That's more than seven figures, for example, right?

Like, you know what I'm trying to say?

Like, it's bad.

And this is not an attack on all, but 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 like but it's it's 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 change needs 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 though you got to keep it simple i mean yeah somebody like you do you have the time to read like spend 60 minutes on email no you want to quick to the point.

First line, what's it about?

Yeah, catch my attention.

And if, if you do that, I'll read it.

But otherwise, I could tell it's copy-paste if it's like two paragraphs, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, I got detention in like, what was I, 10th grade for plagiarism?

Yeah.

And now every kid's doing it with chat GBT.

I'm like, 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 is bad.

4-0.

Search at computer science at University of Washington number six in in the nation, right?

I had a four-point until my last year.

I ended up graduating with a 3-8, 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.

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 1.5.

Yeah.

At that point, I'm justifying my laziness, but no, I literally worked hard.

Yeah.

And do you think working that hard paid off?

Yeah.

And I always say to everybody, they 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 you know are smarter have a higher iq they actually don't perform as well as people with like 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, like NASA needs to be hiring those people to send us to the moon, right?

But in a general job, sometimes it's like 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 single person has a different role.

That's why I'm saying like it doesn't matter what your weaknesses are and what your strengths, there's always a room for you.

in this world to do something impactful.

And so everybody has their role.

For sure.

Did you have a mentor along the way?

Because you're super young.

I didn't have a designated mentor.

I'm grateful.

I met a lot of great people on the way.

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's 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 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 revolution, like it was a whole civil revolution where a lot of like millions of people died or like hundreds of thousands of people died, like, you know, millions affected and refugees, and they lost everything.

And that taught me from a young age, like, I'm blessed to have what I have because, you know, if I had just stayed there for like, if my parents didn't have, hadn't moved to America, I probably would have nothing right now, right?

And so that made me want to help people.

And that's the whole concept.

Our app, Kautama, 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, those that came up to me, like the CEO of Offer Up was a mentor, just good friends, good team,

just people who come in along the way and they've been helping me out.

And so

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.

My co-founder is right here behind the scenes, Marwan.

He, like, we've been together since 2016.

Wow.

And dude, like, like, we were friends.

And then like, this, this was a crazy journey.

Cause 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 um where like it just ended up well and like we just don't talk to this day because it's type of thing where like you'll take it personally some people 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 my won like we've we've somehow were able to manage those like different um differences in opinion and we learned 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 like the right way right and obviously here and there we we will kind of get mad at each other, but like it doesn't last too long because at the end of the day, we understand that 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,

you know, resolve our difference and opinions the right way.

Damn, so you you took a level further.

You brought family in there.

Dude, it's hard, dude.

Again, this, this hard as hell, bro.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't, I don't recommend anybody doing it.

But the thing is, there's pros to it.

Working with people you've known your whole life could be well, right?

It's a risk you take.

Yeah.

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 easy.

But some other people, like, they end like real relationships, like literally 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,

once there's emotions, it's just a yelling battle at the up.

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?

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, right, 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.

You know, 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 rizz up that girl last night?

That's how our AI speaks because it's trained on millions and 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 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'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 tractions tractions and are really ready to hop on the next round yeah but you know we've since we turned our company to a profit actually almost a year ago from today we haven't been stressed like fundraise we've taken our time making sure things are going well and gonna publicly launch it when the time's right yeah is b2b part of the goal like 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 um to get a callback you could wait 30 days where b2c within minutes we can get the basically the results that we were looking for of a conversion to pay.

Maybe, sure.

We've talked with schools and institutions and government issues,

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?

You know what I'm trying to say?

Like, it's hard to be, they have guidance, which makes sense because they want to be able to control what's going on, 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 the line.

But right now, B2C is definitely the mission, especially with our cotton 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.

Rock?

Yeah.

Like,

like it was red and blue, like a heterogeneous rock.

I don't know.

I don't know anything.

I forgot every single thing about that class, to be honest.

I literally had my buddies in that class just like tell me what's going to be on the exam.

And before the end, I just pop in.

It's just like, I don't even know why I took that class.

That's hilarious.

They need to teach more of real world stuff.

I did take one class called Family and Child, where they would bring in a bunch of 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 cocaine makes sense, bro.

I feel like I should have taken a cooking class, bro.

Like, I only know how to do two meals.

I mean, luckily, we have money to outsource it, but

dude, sewing, I broke the machine first day.

She put me in detention for like a week, so I couldn't even do it.

Because you broke the machine?

Yeah.

Was it intentional?

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 forced class or do you like by what?

Forced class.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, you had to take sewing and cooking in my middle school.

Dude, that's terrible.

So do you guys have the best cooks coming out of your school?

We must.

Chef Ramsey, probably one of them.

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 Kautoma.

There's a lot of new projects coming within there.

Katama AI is going to be big.

My personal channel, Amin Shayco, 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 Shayco 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.