Seventeen thousand emails.
Five demos.
Vin and Adi got on the call with Andrew to fix their messaging.
They left with a much bigger question.
The platform
Vin and Adi had spent a long time building GrowKarma.
The idea was a good one, and they could explain it in one breath. People watch endless videos and take endless courses, and then don’t do anything with them.
GrowKarma was built to change that.
Questions pop up inside the video at the right moment. The community answers each other. Students commit to an action for the week, publicly, and the platform nudges them until they do it.
Think of a boot camp, Vin said. You don’t sign up to watch. You sign up to get it done.
They had pitched it to course creators. Health coaches first. Then podcasters.
And that’s where the 17,000 emails went.
Over twenty people replied that they were interested. Five booked demos. And once those people understood what it would take, the same objection kept coming back.
They didn’t have the time.
So Vin and Adi came to Andrew with a reasonable request.
"We just wanted to pick your brain and take your feedback on how do we message ourselves and position ourselves with the target market, right?"
The question
Andrew watched the demo first.
He liked it. He said so more than once.
"I think this is incredible, what you guys have built here."
He even told them why it resonated with him personally. The night before, he’d stayed up until seven in the morning building something to prove to one of his own community members that all he had to do was take action.
So Andrew of all people understood the problem GrowKarma solved.
Which is exactly why he could see who didn’t.
"Unfortunately, the majority of the market today does not give a shit. They want your money. And then once they have your money, they don’t care whether you actually implement it."
Then he asked who the platform was for. People serious about learning, Vin said.
"And so here’s where the misalignment is. This is that you’re not selling to the student."
They were selling to the creator. And the creator wasn’t the one who wanted the student to finish.
The second way
Adi had an answer ready.
If creators didn’t have time to set it up, GrowKarma could do it for them. Take a creator’s course, rebuild it on the platform, run it, and share the revenue.
It’s the move a lot of founders make when the market says no time. Do more of the work for them.
Andrew didn’t dismiss it. He thought done-for-you was a better fit for a product with real setup.
But he asked the question underneath it.
"How are you going to get them to pay $10,000 or $15,000 to have you do X, Y, and Z or give you a percentage of their revenue to do X, Y, and Z, right?"
If creators wouldn’t pay $297 a month for the core value, a bigger and more expensive version of the same promise wasn’t going to change their minds.
"At the end of the day, what they want and what you want are two totally different things."
The confession
Then came the part that settled it.
Andrew didn’t just argue that creators wouldn’t buy.
He told them what kind of student he was.
"If I just paid six grand for a course, I don’t watch that course at all. I download those videos. I transcribe them. I run them through AI. And then I take out what I need."
The very person paying for a course wanted less friction, not more.
"They want the result. They don’t want the course."
Every pop-up question, every weekly commitment, every nudge that made GrowKarma special looked, to that customer, like a roadblock between them and what they’d paid for.
Maybe you’ve run into this in your own business.
You build the feature you’re proudest of. The thing that makes your product genuinely better. And it turns out the person holding the credit card experiences it as a cost.
Andrew named that pattern too, gently, as something very common among founders and creators.
"I’m creating the platform that I believe is the greatest platform on the planet versus creating the platform that solves the needs of the people that are using it."
The third way
So who actually wants people to finish what they start?
Andrew’s answer was the person paying for the learning, not the person selling it.
"You have to either change the approach from people that are paying for a result to people that are being paid to get the result, which is why I think that Enterprise is the play for you."
A company training its own people has a reason to care whether they complete the training and act on it. It’s paying them while they learn.
He sketched what that could look like. Seats priced per person. A meaningful setup fee for a proper installation. A sales cycle where one good relationship could matter more than thousands of cold emails.
Vin pushed back on one thing. They were technologists, not content people. Wouldn’t they need someone with authority to supply the training?
Andrew pointed out that companies already have trainers and already have content. What they don’t have is a way to know who’s actually doing the work.
And he gave them homework before any of that. Survey the people already on the platform, creators and students both. Get brutally honest feedback and any metrics they could extract. Let the market shape where the company goes.
Confirmation
Near the end, Vin summed up the hour.
"You know, as you can see, Adrian and I have been thinking through a lot of these options, and you just reinforced many of those things that we can’t ourselves say with certainty and conviction from where we sit."
And then Adi said what they’d been circling for a while.
"I think we’re getting to a point that we need to pivot, right? And it’s a good point to make some, you know, key decisions for the organization and where we’re going and the value prop again, right?"
Adi also explained why they’d called Andrew in particular.
"He’s very straight, right? Straight shooter. He’ll tell us what we need to hear."
What this story is really about
Vin and Adi asked for help with their message.
Seventeen thousand emails had told them the message wasn’t working.
But the message wasn’t really the problem. The buyer was. They had built a product whose best feature was valuable to someone other than the person they were asking to pay for it.
Andrew could have helped them write a better email to creators. It would have been the easier conversation.
Instead he asked who pays, and why they’d want what this does.
And he answered it with the most convincing evidence he had.
Himself, downloading the course, skipping every video, and taking only what he needed.