IAM1548 – CEO Creates Online Courses That Have Memory-Based Adaptive Technique

Tyler York is an entrepreneur and marketing professional with over 12 years of experience in startups, mobile gaming, and education. He has brought dozens of products and services to market that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Tyler is inspired by connecting customers with products that they love and that help them reach their goals. He is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Achievable, a test prep company focused on opportunity-gating exams such as the GRE, FINRA exams, ACT, AMC, and USMLE.

• CEO Story: Tyler and his partner were roommates at the university, and they really wanted to start something after college, one was food deals but it did not last long. So they went into their own separate fields, education tech and Tyler went into mobile gaming. Their experience, helped them build their company Achievable in 2016 with the goal of applying the method of the memory-based adaptive technique via technology that integrates into the core learning experience.
• Business Service: Direct-to-consumer business. Selling quality online courses with the best technology.
• Secret Sauce: Best type of adaptive learning platform. Spaced repetition is 46% more effective.
• CEO Hack: Training yourself with music, so that when it comes on while working, it helps you get focused. Project management system – Asana and time tracking ( understanding where you invest your most precious resource, time). Book mention: Atomic Habits and Secrets of Sand Hill Road.
• CEO Nugget: Researching your market is so important which is oftentimes overlooked. Double your research market.
• CEO Defined: Basically being the fill-in guy for the job that needs to be done. You are the glue between everybody else. The biggest advocate and evangelist to the company, customers, investors, and partners. Being responsible for everyone’s productivity, happiness, and success.

Website:  achievable.me

Twitter: @achievableprep

Facebook: @achievableprep

Instagram: @achievableprep

LinkedIn: achievable

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Transcription

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00:27 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:54 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Tyler York of Achievable. Tyler, super excited to have you on the show.

01:04 – Tyler York

Yeah, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

01:06 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, I'm excited to have you on and hear about all the awesome things that you're doing. And of course, before we do that, I wanted to read a little bit more about Tyler so you can hear about some of those awesome things. Tyler is an entrepreneur and marketing professional with over 12 years of experience in startups, mobile gaming, and education. He's brought dozens of products and services to market that generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

And Tyler is inspired by connecting customers with products that they love and that help them reach their goals. He is a founder and chief executive officer of Achievable, a test prep company focused on opportunity-gating exams such as the GRE, FINRA exams, ACT, AMC, and USMLE. Tyler, super excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?

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01:52 – Tyler York

Yeah, definitely.

01:53 – Gresham Harkless

Let's get it started then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

02:02 – Tyler York

Yeah. So my business partner and I actually were roommates together at Carnegie Mellon University. And we always knew that we started to want to start something together. And we started a couple of small things after college. They didn't really go anywhere. I think the only one that was kind of interesting was we made a daily deal site for food. That actually turns out the problem with that is shipping. But we got crushed by Gilt Taste back when Gilt was a super well-funded competitor. So then we just went on to our separate careers. He went into education technology and I went into gaming.

And then from there, I guess, just to give you kind of the rest of the backstory here. So I was just like an early-stage sales and marketing employee at a bunch of different early-stage gaming tools and vendors for the mobile game industry specifically. And then I switched over actually to the game publishing side, like working for the game companies and doing marketing for the games as opposed to selling to the game companies. When I joined up with a company called Cloudcade and then I ended up moving on to Glue Mobile, which was acquired by Electronic Arts. And while I was at Glue, I ran marketing for the MLB tap sports baseball franchise. And while I was there grew from 74 million in revenue to 100 million in revenue plus in a couple of years.

03:30 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, It kind of sounds like you have like a full range of experience. I imagine that every aspect of your experience and your history and the things that you and your partner went through probably helps you in terms of being able to kind of build everything you're doing now.

03:42 – Tyler York

Yeah. And so that was just like my background. The background of Achievable is essentially that my business partner, through his experience with EdTech, was a founding engineer at a startup, and he was then the director of engineering at a different one called Cerigo. Essentially, he learned about a technique called space repetition, which is like a memory-based adaptive learning technique. And what space repetition does essentially is it trains you to memorize whatever it is that you're learning. And So he felt like that would be a really good thing for these high-stakes exams. Because his partner at the time, worked at a large wealth management firm.

And in order to be a frontline salesperson and be licensed to give financial advice, you need to pass what's called the Series 7 exam. It's a FINRA exam. And that exam at the time had a national pass rate of 65%. And if you failed this exam twice, you would lose your job. So imagine you finally get a job at like some top wealth management firm or bank or whatever, and then you lose it because you can't pass this exam, right? So it's very, very painful. So we built Achievable starting in 2016 with the goal of applying this method via technology in a vertically integrated product that integrates the method into the core learning experience and applying that to test prep specifically for these high-stakes tests.

05:18 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love true entrepreneurial form, seeing that there's a problem, and being able to solve that problem. And I imagine that I think we can guess what the story is that you guys have been able to hit the ground running and be able to do that with and rub. But I imagine so many other similar type tests that people are going through also have that ability to kind of be, I won't say master, but definitely have the opportunity to do a lot better than maybe you would if you hadn't worked with Achiebo.

05:47 – Tyler York

Yeah. I mean, we have industry-leading pass rates and we just, think that every single person should pass every one of these tests the first time. It's a fixed body of content. You know what you need to learn and so our technology is built to help you do that more effectively and more efficiently.

06:06 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more, a little bit more on how, you know, achievable works, how you're serving your clients. Could you take us through exactly what that process looks like for clients?

06:16 – Tyler York

Yeah, so we're primarily what's kind of considered direct-to-consumer business. We sell our chest prep courses online, we deliver them online. We do offer additional things like, if you want, tutoring or live online classes, but we're mostly focused on just the self-serve courses. I mean, the way that we serve our customers is we build a really high-quality course that we're constantly improving for each of our exams. And then we have a best-in-class technology platform that can deliver that.

And so essentially, when you're signing up for Achievable, you're signing up for the whole – like you get a full online textbook, you get hundreds or thousands, depending on the test practice questions, like chapter review questions on individual topics that are mapped to the syllabus. And then we have full-length practice exams that are meant to be essentially completely representative of the real test.

So you get that with every achievable course. Also, most of our courses have videos on key topics. And then whenever you need something special, like for instance, for the GRE, there's an essay section. So we actually built a machine learning essay grader that gives you instant feedback on what you wrote and actionable tips to improve your score.

07:35 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that. And especially again, how you all have kind of hit the ground running with, you know, that opportunity and just kind of ran from there. Do you feel like the technology, the things that you'd be able to build to kind of tap into that expertise, the knowledge, and fuse that experience with the technology, do you feel like that's part of your secret sauce? And it could be for yourself too, but do you feel like that's part of the organization's secret sauce that kind of sets you both apart and makes you unique?

08:00 – Tyler York

Yeah, the technology is definitely our secret sauce. I think that we undoubtedly have the best, not just the best adaptive learning platform, but the best type of adaptive learning for the material. A lot of people when they say adaptive learning, mean that you answer a hard question, you get a harder question, which is better than nothing for sure, right? It's still adaptive learning. But with space repetition, you're factoring in how well we think you remember this information. How much do we think you need to study it?

If you study at the optimal time, it actually improves your memory retention a lot more than if you just study at any time. That's one of the key research-backed things that researchers have found about spaced repetition, it's about 46, 47% more effective than just normal studying where you just kind of study everything at once. And so we are the only platform in this space that has actually taken that and built it into the core learning experience of the product.

09:05 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

09:18 – Tyler York

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if this is a hack for people who are kind of under 30, but it was surprising for me. But I like to listen to lo-fi hip hop on YouTube, lo-fi girl, shout out. It just had something going, like something like that, particularly once you get to the point where you're training it, training yourself where it's like when this music comes on, it's time to work. It really helps me with my focus. And then, I mean, there's so many like little things, but I think the biggest thing for us, I think our project management is really strong. We use Asana, we track absolutely everything that we do.

I think We also use time tracking and it just helps us understand where are we investing our time. As a startup, time is your most precious resource, right? And so some people kind of think of time tracking as like, oh, we're being watched. But like, who's watching us? It's just us, right? I mean, it's like us and our employees, and we're all on the same mission. It's not like a big corporation where it's like, they're just trying to make sure you're clicking for 40 hours a week. It's like, it's really good to use time tracking to help understand where you're investing your most precious resource, your time across the organization. And then, you know, you can make adjustments based on where you're getting the return on your time.

I just wanted to say there's kind of the 2 books that have really worked. Atomic habits are great. That's a really good book for just like productivity habits, et cetera. And then the other book that really, was very helpful is Secrets of Sand Hill Road, I kind of only think about it. Like I have my company and it's this big opportunity and why aren't they interested or, or, you know, do you get kind of emotionally attached? And if you, if you read this book, it'll help you understand their side of the table and the business in a way that then, you know, you realize that it's a business deal, right? At the end of the day. And it'll give you some insight into kind of what they're looking for and that might help you. And it certainly at least helps me not really get emotional about the whole process.

11:23 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. I appreciate you sharing, you know, both of those. So what would you consider to be what I like to call a CEO nugget? So this is a little bit more word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client or if you have to do a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

11:38 – Tyler York

The first thing I would tell myself is to buy all the Bitcoin and sell it at 60k, but can't do that. The second thing I would say is, I mean, this is kind of the most important thing I've learned in doing this process is that, especially when you're starting at the very beginning of starting a startup or starting a company, Even if you already have, like we did, a technology that we wanted to bring to market. So that part was defined. A lot of times both are undefined. And so you're like, what am I doing, and where am I doing it?

But then where am I doing it part, like researching your market is so important. And oftentimes, at least for me, overlooked. We researched 50 markets before settling on doing FINRA as our first one, and There were other ones out there that we missed, right? And there were some that would have been really good opportunities to pursue and we just didn't think about it. Do more market research than you think and then double it. And don't just stop by Googling stuff online. There's X amount of dollars per year, like really getting into the nitty-gritty of the customer needs and goals.

12:54 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. It's so much more expensive, I should say. If you do do that you have to pivot and continue to pivot when you could have spent more time. I think the saying is, would a measure 7 times cut once or something along those lines? And if you continue to kind of do that, then that'll set you up for success. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Tyler, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:21 – Tyler York

I think when you're early on, like, you know, less than 10 or even less than a hundred people being the CEO means basically being the filling guy for everything that needs to get done, right? Like the tax structure of this thing, who has to figure it out? Well, it's you. It, you are kind of the glue between everybody else. And then you're also kind of the biggest advocate and evangelist, both for the company to its customers, but then also to investors, to potential partners, and everyone else basically, like potential hires especially. I think once you get over, I don't know, say a hundred people, but just sort of, these are rough numbers.

Once you get to a certain size, I feel like being the CEO means being responsible for everyone's productivity, happiness, and success in your organization. If you have, this is kind of obvious to say out loud, but maybe people don't act like this. Like if all of your subordinates or managers or directors or whoever you have are hitting their goals, your company is hitting its goals, which is your goal as a CEO, right?

And if that's not true, then you should maybe figure out what your VPs and directors' goals are because that should be aligned. But at a certain point, you transition from being the person who does everything to the person who is instead kind of making sure everyone else does everything well. And I think that like that's a big responsibility and something that comes with a lot of humility, honestly.

14:54 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Tyler truly appreciates that definition. And of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get a whole view of all the awesome things you're working on.

15:10 – Tyler York

We would love for you to take a look at us and see what we're about. You can try all of our courses for free online at achievable.me. You can view different pages in the course. It's not just like you get the intro and then it locks you out. We actually made it so it's flexible. You can go around anywhere And you can really check us out and see if our style is right for you.

We also have a great YouTube channel with tons of educational content, a lot of which is on key topics, like finance, options strategies, and medical, like all the key topics on. And we always update all of our channels as well as our podcasts every day. So just check us out. Check us out at achievable.me. And if you have any questions, we have phone and text support and we'd love to hear from you.

16:02 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. Definitely appreciate that Tyler makes it even easier. We'll have the links and information in the show notes as well so that everybody can follow up with you. Thank you so much again for setting us up for success my friend and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:13 – Tyler York

Great. Thank you so much.

16:15 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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