Tim Ferriss Please enjoy this live, unscripted working session with a founder, one of only two I’ve done this year. Niels Hoven (@NielsHoven) is the founder and CEO of Mentava, a company building software to support fast learners.
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Tim Ferriss: Niels, it’s nice to see you. Thanks for making the time. Looking forward to this.
Niels Hoven: Thanks so much. I appreciate the chance to be here.
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. And it was fun for me to take a trip down memory lane in a sense, because I remember exactly where I was when we first had our very initial long conversation about Mentava and I got super amped. I was in British Columbia walking around a friend’s cabin. I remember exactly right next to a river, freezing cold outside, snow on the ground. And digging back into the website, looking at the testimonials, watching some of the videos of kids, I was like, “Yes, I remember very clearly why I invested so long ago.” It feels like ages ago. It was quite a while back. And we will get to the bio. I actually want to use part of this working session to go through the bio as I have it here intended for me to read, because I think the wordsmithing may apply to other places, including the website, including potentially paid acquisition.
But before we get to that, why don’t you—let’s hear it from your mouth. What is Mentava? What is the latest draft of your quick explanation of what Mentava is?
Niels Hoven: All right. The latest draft is that Mentava is software that is designed to let kids learn as fast as they’re capable of learning instead of just at the pace assigned to their age. And the first product we have is our early literacy software, which is designed for kids, preschoolers, as young as generally three to get to a second-grade reading level.
Tim Ferriss: And what is a second-grade reading level? Let’s just say I’m a first-time parent. I don’t know what it means. What is an eager to learn, reasonably smart second-grader doing with their reading by the end of second grade?
Niels Hoven: Our finish line is basically able to read easy reader books on your own. So think Green Eggs and Ham, Hop on Pop, the Elephant & Piggie series, the conscious competence level of being able to read.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it. And what are some stories? And I recognize these are not RCTs, right? So for the people out there who are going to try to needle everything, a lot of these are anecdotal of course, but you also have data in terms of performance on the app, right? It’s not just a subjective measurement, but could you just give some stories related to kids learning to read faster than one might expect?
Niels Hoven: Right. We had a set of two-year-old twins who were reading Hop on Pop, Green Eggs and Ham, these early reader books before their third birthday. We have a three-year-old who—
Tim Ferriss: That’s the [inaudible] that I saw where they were standing.
Niels Hoven: Oh yeah, you just retweeted that video.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The parents were projecting the game onto some large screen and the two twins were basically just playing and competing with each other to read. Wild. They were so excited to read.
Niels Hoven: It is really adorable. It’s funny, there’s so much fear around, but if I give my kid these academic opportunities when they’re so young, are they going to stress out? Are they going to freak out? But no, it’s actually fun. Kids are these little sponges. They want to learn everything.
Tim Ferriss: And just as background, well, why don’t you tell one or two more stories and then I want to hear how Mentava came to be, not the Iliad version, like the abbreviated version, but maybe you can give a few more examples because people might say, “Okay, fine. You got the Wonder Twins, but we need more than the Wonder Twins.” So what else have you seen?
Niels Hoven: We had a three-year-old who learned to read in about three months. We had a kindergartner who was behind and his mom asked us, “Can we use this software to help him catch up?” And she came back to me a little later and said, “Yeah, he’s reading now. The teacher says she’s never seen a kid catch up so fast.” What was the phrasing? She was like, “The teacher didn’t actually say this, but I could read between the lines. I could tell that the teacher really wanted to say your kid was just a terrible reader.” The teacher didn’t say that. The parent was like, “But I could read between the lines. I knew what she wanted to say.” And the teacher said she’d never seen anyone catch up that fast.
And the thing that actually really stuck with me from that one was the mom was saying the kid used to come to her and tell her, “Hey mom, there’s this kid in my class who’s so smart. He’s able to read and do all these things.” And then she said, “He came back to me the other day and said, ‘Mom, I can read like he can read now.'”
Tim Ferriss: That’s so cool.
Niels Hoven: That was just really neat.
Tim Ferriss: I was watching the two-minute, maybe three-minute demo. I’m not sure. It’s pretty short. I don’t think you guys publicize or use it much, but the demo video that you sent over.
Niels Hoven: It’s a terrible demo, but yeah, it’s out there.
Tim Ferriss: It’s terrible except there is one slide, let’s call it, it’s text that is a testimonial that is kind of below the fold on laptop on your love letters section with all these parents sharing their experiences, which is roughly more progress in one week with my daughter than in roughly six months of kindergarten. And that’s bananas, but it’s not so bananas as to be outside of the realm of possibility. And you become somewhat of an adept in the sport of sparring with critics on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter. And we may chat about that, to what extent it’s helpful to engage in or even provoke the culture wars. But I have seen a few. I think there’s one notable. You’re good at responding to the critics in a way that gets people to sign up for Mentava. And there was someone who said like, “The learning process, I have a four-year degree that was earned because learning is complex and you cannot simplify it and we’re not focused on outcomes. We’re focused on all this hand wavy stuff.” And certainly—
Niels Hoven: This was an educator who said something like, “You will never convince me that results are the driver of education. You’ll never convince me that efficacy is supposed to be one of our goals.”
Tim Ferriss: People can watch the documentary Waiting for “Superman” if they want to see the part of the sorry state of things. But I was introduced to you. How was I introduced to you? It was Eric Ries, I believe, of The Lean Startup.
Niels Hoven: Also one of our investors.
Tim Ferriss: Also one of your investors because I think he knew or intuited that I’m very much on the same page. You can learn things much, you meaning adults, but also humans, broadly speaking, can learn things much, much, much more quickly than conventional wisdom would suggest. And I could go off on this long list of things, but how do you do it? How do you do it? How did Mentava come to be, short version, and why does it work? How and why does it work?
Niels Hoven: Short version of how it came to be. Mentava started during the pandemic. At the time, my wife and I, we had three little kids, so we both have full-time jobs. We’re locked down in this 600-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment. My kids want to learn. They’re young kids. They’re these little sponges. They want to learn to read. They want to do math, but I have a full-time job. I don’t have time to teach them and be their teacher every step of the way. What I really want is I want them to be able to teach themselves, which aside from just being practical in that situation is just this life skill that I feel is really, really important. And so, I started looking around for software or apps that could support my kids as they’re learning, and there just wasn’t very much out there. I found a couple of things that were okay and we made it work, and it was honestly surprising how well they were able to learn despite using software that really wasn’t designed for having kids teach themselves.
And so, other parents noticed what I was doing. They asked me questions about it. I pointed them to the same software, and some of them had some success and some of them didn’t. And really what I realized as all of this was going on was that the problem was in the design of the software. No one is designing software for three and four-year-olds to be learning on their own. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it’s really, really hard. But my background is in games. I spent a long time designing games and designing tutorials, and it’s just design problems all the way down. I felt like this is a problem that I could solve, that I wanted to solve for myself, that I wanted to solve for other people, and that’s where Mentava came from.
Tim Ferriss: And what’s the magic sauce? Why does it work? Why is it better than the 12 other things that I’ve seen you rate from a scale of, I think, 1 to 10 in different ways and giving your reasons?
Niels Hoven: Right. I think the key things that Mentava brings to the table is an extremely optimized curriculum and a lot of really good motivation design. I think the curriculum advantage should not be as much of an advantage as it is because reading and math are both basically solved problems. We know how to teach reading. You teach kids letter sounds and then you teach them to blend them together. And honestly, for $15, you can get a book off of Amazon that will let you do that. You have to be the teacher. It’s a lot of heavy lifting from the parents’ side, but it will get the job done. So it’s kind of unconscionable that this has been a debate in education for a generation, but this is very much a solved problem. So we take phonics, we optimize it, we teach it really nicely. We make really good UX. We make it really easy for two, three, and four-year-olds to use.
Tim Ferriss: And this is on, typically, a tablet?
Niels Hoven: Yeah, on an iPad, just as an anecdote is where the bar is hanging in terms of low hang design. In one of the apps that I was using before we built Mentava to have my kids learn, if you have a two-year-old, if you have a three-year-old and they’re using an iPad, they kind of brace it on their belly and they hold it there while they’re tapping away at it. And a very common situation that happens is their little tubby toddler belly hangs over the edge of the iPad and you get all these extraneous touches at the bottom of the iPad. And in one of the apps that we were using, every time that happened, the app would crash. It was just a tap. So you have this—
Tim Ferriss: Belly crash.
Niels Hoven: —two-year-old toddler belly constantly crashing the app. And so we take into account all these little things where you have a kid who doesn’t know how to read trying to use these educational apps. The other piece that we really bring to the table is motivation. I think there’s a lot of people really don’t understand how sophisticated motivation design is. But if you look at video games, if you walk into a casino and you walk through the slot machine aisles, human motivation is kind of a solved problem. We know how to get people to do the things that we want them to do over and over and kind of, I don’t know exactly how to say that.
Tim Ferriss: You mean like variable reward or how does the slot machine example map to motivation design?
Niels Hoven: Right. The slot machine example is probably the crudest example. It’s the easiest way to motivate someone because the metaphor for motivation that I like to use is it’s like trying to get someone to jump through a hoop. And so, you can either increase the size of the reward on the other side or you can lower the hoop. And so, slot machines are kind of the purest example of this where they dangle the biggest reward you could possibly imagine, which is like a million dollar jackpot, and they’ve moved the hoop as low as you possibly can, which is just press this button over and over again. And so for that specific use case, it has been solved. And so our goal with Mentava is, okay, the hoop we want kids to jump through is learning all of these phonic sounds and learning to blend them together.
So how, through really good user experience design, can we lower that hoop as low as we possibly can? And then what can we dangle on the other side of that hoop to make kids want to come back and do this every single day? And for that, we use a lot of insights and design principles from game design about helping kids feel motivation, about visualizing the progress that they’ve made, about twiddling the right reward centers in the brain in just the right way that we celebrate their intrinsic motivation rather than trying to replace it extrinsically.
Tim Ferriss: So Niels, let’s move next to your bio. And if you could indulge me, which might end up seeming like a very pedantic exercise, I’m just going to go through and tell you how I would change certain words because I think we’re going to talk a lot about these magical things that allow us to produce images in brains at a distance. All words. All right. How do you pronounce your last name correctly? Remind me.
Niels Hoven: Hoven.
Tim Ferriss: Hoven. All right.
Niels Hoven: Hoven.
Tim Ferriss: Niels Hoven. On X, if you want to see front lines of the culture wars, @NielsHoven. He’s the founder and CEO of Mentava, a company building software to support unusually fast learners. This phrasing, unusually fast learners, I would actually just scrap unusually and go straight to fast learners. Part of the reason for that is that when I saw this on the website, I was like, “Well, what is unusually fast?” Even if I consider my kid fast, maybe unusually fast is what, 1 out of 100? 1 out of 1,000? And I stumbled. So I made note of things that I read twice or that I stumbled over. And this is a subjective take, but since I’m in the midst of having just recently cut an 870-page book to 350 and now I’m doing all of the fine tuning, this is how my brain is calibrated at the moment.
Okay. So software to support unusually fast learners or support fast learners. High achieving kids are dramatically underserved by today’s education system. I would also, I think high achieving for me at least, I think about pegging to letter grades in high school or college. I might just replace that or you could scrap high achieving. When in doubt, take it out is another writing dictum. So it’s like kids, high achieving kids, eager kids maybe, right?
Niels Hoven: Oh yeah. Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Eager kids are dramatically underserved by today’s education system. And again, I recognize this might be a little laborious for a second, but it’s going to tie into things that come up later. Okay. Niels created Mentava to allow top performing students to achieve their potential. I think we can scrap top performing also, students to achieve their potential. Great. Now I would actually scrap this entire second paragraph, which I’ll explain in a moment, but while most education companies focus on raising the floor, Mentava’s mission is to remove the ceiling. I have very strong opinions about this. I know it’s on the website. I get the turn of phrase and I understand why there’s a degree of clever wordsmithing here. I don’t like this as a positioning for you because what I ended up stumbling over here, I was like, raising the floor, remove the ceiling, remove the ceiling. I guess that’s as high as the best performing students.
So raising the floor, does that mean accommodating and helping the lowest performing students? I ended up dissecting it and just spending a lot of time thinking about it. So I’ve read that line a lot, but let’s move on. Is my understanding of that correct? Am I actually understanding that sense as it’s intended?
Niels Hoven: Yeah, basically you are. I think one of the challenges we are struggling with is how we kind of target what we see as more of a niche audience that deeply values education, is willing to pay for it and has kids that are being unsupported academically. And so we’ve been playing with different turns of phrases to try and speak to these people, but I agree. I don’t think we’ve found the right one yet.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I would also say, I think it’s a big niche, frankly, which you may have already concluded, but their early literacy software, meaning Mentava’s early literacy software for preschoolers is used and trusted by some of the most influential people in the world. Don’t love that. We can come back to that just because it’s something that anyone could claim unless you have things to point to, right? And maybe you do. We can come back to that. Mentava blends careful curriculum design with best in class motivation design. I think, for instance, we are not that far from the beginning of the new year. I think doubling down on motivation design if you’re going to do more X posts around January would actually be very interesting and do some very interesting things there that would drive conversions, but developed through years of experience building mobile and I’m guessing the way you pronounce this is AAA games.
I don’t actually know what AAA games are, but that sounds like a good thing and I have heard it before. This is, I think, the money shot in some respects. Prior to Mentava, Niels worked at Cloudflare, ClassDojo, and Pocket Gems where he ran the highest grossing mobile game in the world in 2011. That says you know what you’re doing very, very clearly. So I would be inclined to scrap that whole second paragraph and then move up the third. And then it goes to mentava.com and it has all the links and everything else. So M-E-N-T-A-V-A, if people are wondering. But I don’t want to belabor the intro, but we are going to spend a lot of time on messaging.
And you very kindly sent a skeleton framework that we could use for going into the conversation. I think we already checked off kids can learn much faster than people think. Problem two, I think, is maybe not immediately obvious to folks, but the problem, and if you don’t mind, I’ll just read it. We waste the low pressure elementary school years and then pour on pressure in high school. And it’s like, okay, maybe I agree with that. Okay, waste low pressure. How should we capitalize on low pressure and are we accidentally turning it into high pressure if we add something like this? I mean, looking at the kids playing it, at least the video I’ve seen, it wouldn’t seem that way. I do like, I know I’m kind of spoiling the delivery by offering the punchline, but if you don’t mind.
Niels Hoven: Yeah, go for it.
Tim Ferriss: So you had two, right? You had two sub-bullets under that. Schools actively slow down fast learners. Yes, 100% agree. They wouldn’t let my son learn algebra, et cetera. Is that your son, your actual son?
Niels Hoven: My son, yep.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. Early acceleration means less pressure later. That I think is super, super, super interesting as a point that could be really used, maybe not in exactly that form. And then number three solution. Mentava lets kids accelerate without requiring parents to become teachers or taskmasters. And that’s through, as you pointed out, the very finely tuned curriculum and motivation design. And I would agree that schools are surprisingly bad at both.
Tim Ferriss: So what are some of the current challenges? How would you lay out the hierarchy of problems to solve, opportunities to capitalize on, however you would like to phrase it or list it out? Where should we go next?
Niels Hoven: Zooming way out. We’ve built a product that we are really proud of that when our customers use it, they rave about it and they tell their friends about it. I think we have not figured out. We are really good at product design and we are not so good at marketing. We are trying to explain a problem that a lot of parents don’t realize that they have, that their kids could be doing so much more, that their kids are going to be held back when they get to elementary school. By the time parents realize that they had this problem, that their kids are bored and not achieving their potential. It’s kind of too late to—or the biggest opportunities to do something about it are now behind them. And then for even the parents who are looking for a product in this space that can help support their kids’ learning, they’re not experts.
And what differentiates our software from a lot of the other stuff out there is really nuanced. And so, how do we differentiate what we feel is a premium product when the differentiates is really nuanced and in thousands of small decisions that customers can’t look at themselves? It’s kind of like trying to explain what makes this video game better than this other video game. It’s a very hard thing to explain or has been for us.
Tim Ferriss: Right. It’s a thousand decisions that add up to a very distinct feeling maybe on some level. Okay.
Niels Hoven: We found a lot of the parents who came to us immediately sort of already feel this problem intensely because sometimes it’s immigrants who come to the US and then are just shocked at how much worse the education system is here than what they experienced. So they just see this immediately and they’re like, “I am not going to have any part of this. I need to start addressing this right away.” Or it’s people who already care about motivation and just recognize that their kid is capable of doing more than they’re doing. We have a lot of parents who are in Montessori who send their kids to Montessori school because they love the values there, but they’re like, “But Montessori school doesn’t focus on academics. My kids could be learning to read and they refuse to give them any phonics, so I want to do it at home.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. So let me just say what’s top of mind and then we can go in a lot of different directions because I think that the fixes in a way are going to be a lot like your product design. I don’t think there’s one thing. I think there are probably myriad things that when moved five degrees in the right direction might reach this breakthrough or step function distinction where suddenly you have better retention, more referrals, et cetera. That’s just my intuition looking at everything in front of me and the website and so on.
Niels Hoven: That sounds right to me.
Tim Ferriss: But let’s start with what came to mind for me, which is related to something that you have, I think is kind of like one of your pain points, which is how do we solve a problem before the customer knows it exists? And a way to rephrase that would be like, how do we educate people about the problem? And there’s a framework, you may have heard it. It was actually introduced to me. I met a doula the other day, someone who’s somewhat like a midwife who helps the birthing process and she was talking about this acronym BRAIN, and it was benefits, risks, alternatives, what does your intuition say, and then N is nothing. What if we did nothing? What if we didn’t do anything about this?
And so, I’ve been applying that to more things and I’m like, “Well, what if you didn’t do any education in—” Rephrasing that, what if that were not the problem? And the reason that comes up for me is when I imagine I want to have kids at some point, it’s like, okay, I would hope my kids are eager learners and curious and maybe have a little embedded software that gives them an advantage. It’s like, okay. I don’t know if you’ve run into this, but my hesitancy, if I had any, I don’t think I would have a ton. I think I would just pay the price and use Mentava, but is I want my kids to be socially intelligent. I want them to be in school with other kids. I’m not going to have child neuro taught by private tutors or whatever. I mean, hopefully not child neuro, but that’s a whole separate conversation.
The point of that being, I want them to be kids and to have time socially. But if I push them three, four years ahead, is school going to be even worse for them because now they’re just sitting there staring at the clock waiting for school to be over? And if so, how do I check the box of maximizing intellectual development while also allowing for kids to be kids plus the social development?
Has that come up at all or is that—
Niels Hoven: This has come up.
Tim Ferriss: Because for me, I’m like, fuck yeah. Let’s pour gasoline on this eagerness to learn. And these kids want to go, go, go and they’re being held back. They’re these thoroughbred racehorses locked in the gate. They’re just not being let out to run. It’s like, “Sure, I want that kid to run, but then what? What form does school take if I give them such a head start?” How do you think about that?
Niels Hoven: So a big part of the reason we’ve designed Mentava the way we did is because of exactly this. So when I was in third grade, I was ahead of my class in math and my school only went up to third grade. So before third grade, in second grade, I would go to the third grade class for math and then I would come back to my classroom. But in third grade, there was no classroom for me to go to. So I started doing independent study in third grade. During math class, I would go to the back of the room, I would study out of a math book for the hour of math class, and then I would come back and join my class for the rest of the day. And I did that for the next four years all the way up until I rejoined classes in seventh grade for pre-calculus. And then I took calculus in eighth grade.
And so, those four years of being able to learn on my own at my own pace allowed me—I didn’t have any homework. I got to go as fast as I wanted. It was really incredible. It also built this skill of teaching myself that I depend on today. And that’s why I think you look at a lot of the other alternative schooling startups that are happening where they’re trying to develop an entire schooling ecosystem that would run parallel with public schools. And I actually really believe in the institution of public schools. I went to public schools. My children go to public schools. I just want them to be supported and allowed to learn at their own pace there.
So to me, really, the ideal case is let’s let our kids go to public school with their peers from their neighborhood. And then for an hour a day during math class, they study Mentava. They do math Mentava for an hour. They get to go at their own pace, and then they rejoin their same age peers for the rest of the day and have a good time.
Tim Ferriss: Am I wrong? As an Austinite, I feel like it may not be exactly this, but Alpha School uses sort of adaptive software on tablets for a portion of the day.
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I think I’m getting that right. But you would also want something that scales that people can use now as opposed to moving to a city that has Alpha School, which is going to be great, but also very expensive and limited capacity, et cetera, et cetera. Right?
Niels Hoven: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Niels Hoven: So Alpha School’s big insight is essentially the same as ours, that if you allow kids to learn at their own pace, you can pack the entire school day into a very small amount of time. When my own son was in third grade, after a lot of back and forth, we finally got permission from one amazing teacher for him to do independent study during math class from an app during the school day. And he finished eighth grade math while he was in third grade. And that’s just the pace of what kids are allowed to do, capable of doing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So let’s hop into it because I love what you’re doing. I have since the beginning. It works. I’ve seen plenty of videos and enough testimonials and the design. This is going to sound maybe arrogant because I’m certainly not an educator, I’m not a computer scientist, I’m not a UX designer, but I look at it, I’m like, “Yeah. From a micro progression logical sequencing perspective, it just makes sense.”
It’s very hard to make and when you see it, you’re like, “Oh yeah. That makes sense like many things.” So I want to be as maximally helpful as possible here. Let’s hop into a real customer. And I’m going to give you an example of a real prospective customer because as chance would have it, it’s such a small world. It’s crazy.
So we’re doing this kind of live workshop on this podcast episode. I’ve only done two of these. You are number two. Number one, I don’t think you’d mind me mentioning is Jake Becraft of Strand Therapeutics. He’s developing mRNA as a programmable layer in medicine and doing all this crazy stuff that’s amazing with cancer.
And Jake is very, very smart, so not shockingly. His kid is also pretty smart. And he reached out to me because he saw me as an investor on the website, and he’s like, “Of course you’re an investor in Mentava.” He’s like, “All right. Well now, I want to ask you about it.” And I encouraged him to try it and then never heard back.
And so I reached out to him, and I was like, “Whatever happened? Did you try Mentava?” And then I just want to read his feedback, and we’re going to just take a bite of the apple from a bunch of different directions because again, I don’t think there’s one—as much as I wish this were the case, like, “Okay. We’re going to change unusually fast learners to fast learners,” and boom, automatically conversion and everything like quadruples. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
But here’s what he said, “Yes, I did.” So they have a 14-day trial period and also try to see if your kid is ready. He put that in quotation marks. A few thoughts. Number one, I won’t give his kid’s name, but let’s call his kid Rob. Rob was super young, two years and two months, but he taught himself the whole alphabet at 17 months so he figured why not try?
Two, there’s a “sequencing milestone” that they explain is important. Rob was likely not fully there. Three, let’s see. Their curriculum sort of made the sequencing tests more difficult than I think they need to be, and then pushed him to easier curriculum, which I couldn’t figure out how to override. That was one sort of annoying part, but it makes sense to make sure people fail fast and don’t pay before the kid is ready.
Four, we ended up pausing at the end of the trial with the plan to restart in three months, which will be soon. Five, he still points to the iPad. This is the most important part of the whole thing by the way. Well, I think there’s a lot in all these bullets, but here’s the last one. He still, this is his son, Rob, still points to the iPad and says he wants to play the letter game.
So clearly, Mentava had some pull for him. So the kid wants to use it. But one question I had, I guess there are two things that pop to mind. Well, before we get to the suggestions, can you explain the 14-day trial period and the sequencing just for folks so they have an idea of what this looks like? People go to the website. They’re like, “Oh my God, totally want to try this.” And so they click on the 14-day trial period. What happens, and what is the sequencing?
Niels Hoven: I think there’s not a question about the user flow, which we know is bad and more about a question of the experience that they’re having as they engage with the software. Is that what you’re asking?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yep.
Niels Hoven: Okay. So the point of the 14-day free trial is that we know we are not good at explaining what differentiates our software. We think what works best is just get it in the hands of the customer and let them try. So I think within 14 days, we think that’s enough time that a customer can figure out if this is going to be a good fit for their family or not.
A very common problem is exactly what happened with Jake where he has a kid who is probably not developmentally ready to learn to read. And so we want the parents to recognize that during the free trial. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the developmental milestones, kids are able to learn letters and letter sounds quite a bit earlier than actually being able to blend those sounds together and be able to read.
So very common that you could have a kid who’s a year and a half, two years old, knows all of their letter sounds, but they are not actually capable of learning to read because they can’t blend those into words. We’ve figured out that there’s a test that we can give the kids to see if they can understand the concept of left to right reading order, basically the idea that directionality is important.
So what do we do is we show them a couple emojis. We show them dog fish, and we show them fish dog and we say, “This one is dog fish. This one is fish dog.” And then we ask them, “Now, we just told you, which one of these is dog fish, and which one of these is fish dog?” And what we found is that for older kids, this is an obvious question.
Of course, you just go this way, “This one is dog fish, and this one is fish dog.” But for younger kids whose brains haven’t connected those neurons or whatever, this is a nearly impossible question. And so in the Mentava experience, fairly early on, you purposely hit this wall where we’re asking your kid, “Do you understand dog fish, fish dog?” And if they can’t, we boot them over to, “We’ll just teach you letter sounds,” and we send the parents an email explaining this developmental readiness.
I think we send the parents an email. We might not. I hope we send the parents an email explaining this developmental readiness issue and ask them to try again in three to six months.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So that was going to be one of the questions I wanted to hit on. And I’ve got plenty. So don’t worry folks who are listening. We’re getting into the weeds quickly, but the weeds are where we have to play this game. What share of failed trials come back like a Jake? And are they prompted three months later or are they just told when the kid doesn’t pass the hurdle, try coming back in three months? I guess how proactive is the outreach and what percentage?
Niels Hoven: There’s zero proactive outreach.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m going to hit something that is going to be related to all of this, which ultimately is going to fold into mock-ups and redesigns of the website as well. But let me give you just a brain dump of some things that I think might be helpful, and I’ll prompt some of them with questions. All right. Is Mentava free for schools or in some capacity free for teachers? Is there any free option? Is there anyone who can use Mentava for free?
Niels Hoven: We have pilot programs running with schools right now. We’re not charging the schools who are in the pilot program. I would like to give Mentava to schools for free. Our philosophy is that if you want to use us as essentially a private tutor to accelerate your kid, that’s going to be expensive. But if you’re a school just using us as a tool to support your teacher, we’d like that to be cheap or free.
We are in the process of getting—may actually have just gone live of having self-serve signups for teachers so that they can get it for their classroom. The main issue we have there unfortunately is just fraud. What prevents just a random parent from saying, “I’m a teacher. Let me sign up and get this for free.” And so that’s why we haven’t really scaled that or pushed it aggressively.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I would say a few things. The first is that if, in fact, you end up offering it at very low cost or for free to schools, even if it’s in some limited fashion and people need to check a bunch of boxes, that could be a useful flak jacket for offsetting the premium cost of the product, which is what right now? What is the cost?
Niels Hoven: I don’t think we’ve mentioned this. So this is a $500 a month product, which I think many people are shocked when they first hear, but also, we have a lot of customers who are like, “Oh, we let go of our tutor. We don’t need our private tutor anymore because we’ve replaced it with your software. You guys should be charging more. This is great.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I don’t think the cost is a problem personally, and we can come back to that. But I do think the free for schools and teachers is interesting. The other thing I would say is that—I probably shouldn’t mention them specifically, but I know someone who has created a spectacularly successful app, and it’s pretty expensive.
On an annual basis for an adult, it’s going to be in the hundreds of dollars, and it’s very, very successful. And he set a policy very early on, which was if you can’t afford it, send an email to this email address, explain why. And chances are, you’ll get it for free. And the fraud has been unbelievably low.
People do email, and I’m sure some of them are fraudulent. But on the margin, it is so unimportant. It’s so trivial and the cost of delivering the product to a handful of fraudulent customers who are unethically kind of abusing things is so low that maybe it doesn’t matter.
At the very least, I think it could be worth the test. I don’t want to belabor this particular point because I don’t think it’s the most important of those we have to talk about. But it might not matter.
Niels Hoven: I think I know exactly the app you’re talking about and I do know that it’s a great program.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a great app. Yeah. I’ll just give another example. Long ago, when I started my first, let’s call it, real business, I offered a 110% money back guarantee if the product didn’t work and never questioned it. Just did it unflinchingly because frankly, the time that it would take me to police it would be so much more expensive than a certain degree of fraud.
Even if it’s like 10%, 20% even of the people who requested it were fraudulent. Also, I should say in this case, this is a hard product being shipped via regular mail, and they would be able to just keep the product because having them ship it back and paying for shipping, it just wasn’t worth it given the cost of goods. People were much better behaved than I expected.
It really didn’t cause a problem. Assuming the product is good, this isn’t a returns situation. So you could offer something like that, frankly. I think that the 110% back is really underutilized, but I feel like you were going to say something else. Yeah.
Niels Hoven: We have something along those lines, but not exactly. When people write, so sometimes, people do the free trial. And then they write into us and say “Essentially, we love the free trial, but we just can’t afford it. Do you have any scholarship programs or anything like that?”
And what we’ve been going to right now is Mentava costs $500 a month, but if you tried the free trial and you loved it and you really want to keep using it and you’re motivated enough to write us, we’ll tell you that you can have Mentava for $100 a month, but we would like you to send us a video of your kid every week using Mentava, enjoying Mentava that we can use in social media, in marketing, because we want to run those ads, but we want to make sure that we have signed releases for any kids that we put into advertising or social media.
And we don’t police that aggressively. I would say not everybody participating in that program has been sending us all the videos we would like them to send us. But like you said, mostly people are pretty good about it.
Tim Ferriss: Where would you like to go next? I can pull up lots of things. We can look at the website. I want to come back to the readiness check. Is there any reason to have people sign up and then do the readiness check as opposed to do an abbreviated readiness check, a two-minute, is your kid [inaudible] type of place?
Niels Hoven: I like that idea a lot. We’ve been talking about that for a long time, just put the readiness check directly on the website.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, because if you had, is your kid ready, take the two-minute quiz, you could still accomplish the data capture of email address and so on and verification so that you can communicate with those people.
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I think that’s reflected in some of the mock-ups that I sent over. On the price, I don’t know if you guys have approached this. I really think that selling the parents relief, not just the kid’s speed is a big deal, that you don’t have to be the teacher because the 500 can be anchored in a few different ways. $500 a month. Is it the same or is it less than a tutor? Well, let’s just say it’s the same.
And let’s say they’re equally effective, but there’s one difference. And one is you’re giving a kid a fish, meaning the teacher is motivating the kid versus you’re teaching the kid to fish, meaning the kid is becoming a self-motivated, self-directed learner, then Mentava still wins, even if they’re equally effective.
And then furthermore, it’s like if you have all these other tools and let’s just say they’re—as you mentioned, you can get books, I don’t know, 10 bucks, 20 bucks, 30 bucks, who knows? And then you’re going to put in that time. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be an absent parent. There are plenty of ways you can spend time with your kids. But if you want to create a self-directed learner and you also put a value on your time, if you can afford $500 a month, it’s also kind of a no-brainer, right? But we can look—
Niels Hoven: I think that’s very true. I think we need to lean into that more because we’ve had people I know personally who could absolutely afford Mentava. Usually, they are parents of only one child. This is their first child, and they say, “I tried Mentava. It works, but I really want to be the one to teach my kid to read.” And so they opt in with another product where they get to be the teacher. They actually want to be the teacher. But for a lot of parents who are busier, who have multiple kids see that value immediately. They cannot be the teacher for every single one of their kids. They want their kids to learn on their own, and we’re the product for that.
Tim Ferriss: I love teaching. It’s one of my favorite things in the world. I absolutely love teaching. But the selling point for me, if I were the stand-in parent, would be extrinsic reward/pressure, teacher making the kid study versus kid becoming self-directed and excited about learning.
I’m like, “Well, that’s a very easy choice for me.” They’re going to have plenty of time with teachers. They’re going to have plenty of time with me coaching them or teaching them or going out and being curious about things in the real world. But it’s like if that. How many minutes a day or per week? How much time do you suggest?
Niels Hoven: Fifteen to 30 minutes a day, depending on age.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So okay, look. You got all day with your kids from when they wake up to when they go to bed, depending on the day and schooling and so on. But it’s like 15 to 30 minutes is just getting them closer to being stoked about learning and able to actually take that stoke and put it into practice. It’s like, okay.
Niels Hoven: Okay,
Tim Ferriss: Is that worth $500 a month? Yeah. For a lot of people, I think the answer is yes.
Tim Ferriss: Do you mind if I just brain dump and then—
Niels Hoven: Yeah, I love it.
Tim Ferriss: Then I want you to steer the ship a little bit.
Niels Hoven: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: So the two minute, is your kid-ready quiz right up front, I think, would be an amazing email capture tool, but it would also be in service of the parents who are running at light speed with a million different things, exactly the kind of people who are probably considering something like this.
I think it’s the type of thing that might also get shared, right? So in a sense you have user generated marketing, lead gen and a filter all at once. The selling the parents relief, not just the kids speed, as I mentioned, like the you don’t have to be a teacher, how much is your time worth? Maybe there’s something there. One of your lines that—I think this is from the website, tell me, but we don’t push kids, we stop making them wait. I think that’s an amazing line.
Other words I’d be a little more careful with, right? So the unusually fast learner, the gifted, any IQ elite top 1% kind of stuff, I think artificially constrains your market in a way that is unhelpful to Mentava and unhelpful to parents. Does that make sense? Yeah, I agree. Because the kid doesn’t need to be a super genius to use Mentava and benefit from it. So I really like the idea of paying attention to that language so you aren’t accidentally excluding a lot of parents whose kids would benefit from the product.
The free to school story, if that ends up being tenable, I think is—it’s a decent adjunct to other things you’re doing, but it’s also an example of playing defense instead of offense in a way. Does that make sense, right?
Niels Hoven: It does make sense.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s like if people say this is just for rich kids, it’s like, “Okay. Fine.” This is not what you’re doing, but if you just focused on people who make 500K a year or more, that’s a huge market. You’re fine at $500 a month. It’s like you don’t. And it isn’t just for rich kids, but I think that given the fact, and if I say anything, I’m not supposed to say publicly, stop me, but you guys have four full-time employees. I’m sure you have other contractors. You guys are going to be spinning a lot of plates, wearing a lot of hats. If you have a lot of unqualified leads emailing you, asking questions, requesting special treatment, that time is incredibly expensive for you guys internally, right?
Niels Hoven: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: I would just be inclined. If I were talking to someone, I had two glasses of wine, so I’m playing a little loose, and someone’s like, $500 a month, I’d be like, “Well, do you want something that really works and makes your kid not just stoked, but capable of learning faster, or do you want a video game that is disguised as education that’s going to do nothing for them?” If you want that, sure. There are a thousand other options.
If you actually want something that works with people who understand product, then suck it up. How much did you spend on your kid’s pants last month? How much does your stroller cost? Really? You’re not going to spend. Come on. So that’s how I would sort of hopefully productively bust their balls.
That’s how I would do it. I’d be like, “Yeah, if you want something that works and you want something that the kid is going to request, as opposed to something that kind of works, that requires you to be a nag and police that the kid might push back on” it’s like, “How much is removing all that brain damage worth to you?” And I understand that’s probably not the text you put on the homepage, but let’s see.
So on the online, you have done a good job of using X specifically, I would say. And the two examples you sent me of social media that had converted was basically a response, if I’m remembering correctly, two examples of responding to people, right? Someone called basically what you’re doing, snake oil and you’re like, “Well, here’s a video of snake oil.” And it was the twins, the two-year olds or two and a half year olds reading.
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And then there was the other one with the educator. Those are good examples. I wouldn’t have any critique around those. I would say that jumping into the culture war, even if it gets a lot of views, in a sense, forces readers to pick a side instead of picturing their own child, which is why I think the video of the two twins works so well.
So that’s just a side note. And I know you have math coming so that you can move from the perception of reading app to learning for kids who are ready to move faster or something like that. I think we can leave that alone for a moment. We can come back to that, but I don’t want to spend too much time on it because I think you get it, and you’re branching out, and it makes sense. The pricing against tutors, I have hired—look, I had two different coaches this week for rock climbing.
I am a connoisseur of teachers and coaches and tutors. I’ve used probably a hundred plus coaches of various types. And getting a tutor, managing a tutor, scheduling with the tutor, none of that is free. Even if the hourly cost of that tutor is commensurate with the cost of Mentava. However, there are other ways to make the price case, but this is one of those examples of what if you did nothing, coming back to that brain acronym that I love so much.
It was the first acronym. I’ve heard all these SWOT acronyms, like strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, all this stuff. But this was the first one where one of the prompts was, “What if you did nothing?” And I was like, “That is such a good question. What if you didn’t justify the price and you were just like,” Let’s just find—” And look, this is going to be very unappetizing, maybe a turnoff for some people listening, but this is how Uber started. This is how a lot of companies start, is go after the easy customers, the people who have plenty of budget.
Later, you can use the initial cohort of wealthy people to subsidize product development, then you get economies of scale, you have more employees, blah, blah, blah, dot, dot, dot, and then you have more offerings at lower cost. But rather than trying to convince the edge cases, it’s like maybe you just talk about the efficacy and take a different tack, I think it’s tack as in the sailing, to get that done.
Look, I could give you six different examples of how you could make the price, could justify the price, but let me keep going. This is coming back to the parent’s role because the parent’s buying it, not the kid, right? Not to overly state the obvious, but you don’t have to teach, you don’t have to nag.
Now, you don’t have to teach, might accidentally elicit a sense of guilt in parents because they’re like, “Oh, I’m just trying to foist the responsibility of education onto an app. I’m a terrible parent. What’s wrong with me?” But if it’s you don’t have to nag, you don’t have to police, you don’t have to reward, you don’t have to give cookies because the kid’s just going to want to play this game, period, full stop, that’s what we spend our time on, right?
That’s a huge one, right? Because some parents—I love teaching. I want to teach a lot. So if the selling point to me where you don’t have to teach, I’d be like, “Oh, does that make me a bad parent? I actually do like teaching. Does that mean I’m not engaged with my kid?” But nagging and policing, nobody wants to do that.
Niels Hoven: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So choosing things that are an easy hell yes for parents, I think, makes a difference, and that’s where the words matter. And that you don’t have to teach. You don’t have to nag. Beats the book. That beats the live tutor. It beats all that stuff. It’s not like, “I don’t want to take the piano lesson with teacher X.” It’s like when you have Jake’s kid being like, “I want to play the letter game. I want to play the letter game.” And he’s like, “Man, we just have to wait a few more months and then, okay, then you can play the letter game.”
Niels Hoven: I kind of want to hop in on this because maybe this is my pathological honesty because I do believe we built a really delightful product that kids will want to use most of the time. But absolutely, sometimes, you do have to push a nag, I think, way less than anything else. But I’m reluctant to say you won’t have to push a nag.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I think that that is where you finesse, right? I’m coming in as—I’m not blind because I’m familiar with the product, and I’ve looked at the website and everything else, but I’m not a parent with a kid who has used the product.
So instead of saying that, you can say parents don’t want to nag. They don’t want to police. They want a kid who can learn as fast. They want a kid who can learn at their own speed, even if that means fast. You can say that.
Niels Hoven: Yep. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a truthful statement, right?
Niels Hoven: Yeah.
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