Latest / Marci talks money (and life) / Lifelong Learning and Entrepreneurship with Amit Zandberg
Transcript
- Marci Grossman (01:01) Hello, I am MoneyMarci. Welcome. I am thrilled to welcome today's guest, Amit Zandberg. Amit has always been interested in technology and running his own business. He started running his own businesses when he was still a teenager. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of AllPros, an infrastructure system for online courses establishes a trust standard for online education. Welcome Amit. Amit AllPros (01:30) It's great to be here, Marci. Marci Grossman (01:32) I am thrilled to have you. I know that so many people take courses and you never know what you're gonna get. And if you're trying to take a course to learn something new, whether for potential work or just for something you do as a hobby, you want it to be useful information, you're spending your money and your time to invest in it. So I love the concept of what you're doing. What got you going here? Amit AllPros (01:38) Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's actually a story that I used to tell a lot. I think that if I tell you, you'll think that I'm an idiot, but I think that is a part and journey every Gen Z is going through. Me and my two co-founders, Tal and Daniel, in the span of age from 18 to 22, I think we spent over $10,000 on online courses and coaches and things like that in order to learn and just, you know, figuring out what we don't want to do in the world. And I think that from the course we took, a lot of them are really garbage, but only few of them are really good. And we thought to ourselves, it's so, so, so, we are so unlucky that we don't have any way to check which course is good and which course isn't because that will save us so much money that it would be worth it. And we decided to ourselves and we just, we were thinking about startup idea and we didn't know what to start. And then we just thinking to ourselves, yeah, why don't we start this company and create like a trust system for online courses, which every course is going to be rated. This is our vision. And by that people will have the option to choose course according to real reviews and not only the testimonial that we show on the mentors page. Marci Grossman (03:27) That's awesome. Now, as of the point in time where we're recording this, your site isn't live yet, but it will be by the time this episode posts. So I'm excited from what I've seen of your website. It gives people an opportunity to see what other people who have taken the course think of the course, think of the instructor. And we have to put it out there, 10 people could... take a course and nine people could love it and one person, that teacher doesn't teach that way that works for them. So it's not infallible. You can have a course with amazing reviews and it doesn't work for you. But it is a nice starting point to know that real people, not bots, have pushed up a bunch of likes on a site. It's not my friends just going to my course and saying, wow, she's great, she's great, she's great. It's real people, Amit AllPros (03:58) Yes. Thanks. Marci Grossman (04:19) paid for the course, have rated this course. But how do you start out? Because when you start out, no one's paid for the course through you yet. So anyone taking a course through you is, are they the first or where are you getting those initial ratings to start with? Amit AllPros (04:39) Okay, there is a, in what I'm building, there is a side of supply and there is a side of demand, which we need to provide both of them, and this is called the egg and chicken problem, which every marketplace is having. Everything because you need enough buyers and you need enough sellers in order to make this network to work. And what we decided to do at first is we collected the top mentor that they, a lot of the mentor which are big, have a lot of reviews on Reddit and things like that. Reddit group, Facebook, YouTube, things like that. And we just decided to put the groups out in public, and take the reviews, only the real reviews, scrape them out of the internet and put them under their own name. And then from then on, you have something to go into. The demand can enter because he already has the supply. And also what we are trying to do right now is we're not just trying to focus on users because yes, users does have trust problems, but the problem is not with the users. They have the problem, we will solve it to them. But the real problem starts with the instructor because they have no incentive to be real. Because let's say I'm Instagram creator that want to sell a course. The best option for me is to sell you the dream and fake testimonials and you know, just doing anything until you buy my course. And I don't care about the result because you don't have anywhere to post it. So unless I'm big and people will post under my name, I have no place to worry. And what I decided to do is to give them a tool that, let's say, if they are trust, if they are worth trust, and if they are real, it's worth for them and they get more sales. So I'm giving them a tool for collecting testimonials and show them off on public only from real students in order to them to chase this credibility and not just try to fake it, but also to earn it. And that is why I'm planning and this is what I'm doing right now. I have over 300 course creators that are waiting in the waiting list for getting into the platform. They are waiting for the tool and from that tool that increase their credibility because they want to be credibility right now, the supply will come and from that supply I'm gonna drive the demand. This is another plan that I think I have a lot to talk about it. Marci Grossman (07:17) Right, but you and your co-creators, you guys are all young guys. You're 24? All three of you are 22? I mean, this is so ambitious. At 22, I had just graduated college. I was starting to do accounting and finding a job and figuring out what type of accounting I wanted to do and all of those kinds of things. And here you are creating a platform for learning. And if anyone can't tell you have an accent, the platform is run in English because that is currently the most common spoken language for business and learning at this point in time. And so you're doing all of this in your second language. That's really impressive. Will you eventually Amit AllPros (07:57) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. ⁓ Marci Grossman (08:13) offer courses in other languages than English or you're not even thinking that far ahead at this point. Amit AllPros (08:19) That's good question. I think this is not my concern because most of the people that take courses in other languages will take courses also in English. So this is not what I'm concerned about because this is just minimizing the market right now. But I'm sure that in the future we will have a lot of languages because there are a lot of fake gurus that we need to eliminate also in Hebrew, German, Spanish or any language that exists. Marci Grossman (08:48) That is right now you started by finding real creators that you were aware of that had real reviews and that's what you're starting building your platform with. Amit AllPros (09:03) Yes. Marci Grossman (09:04) And then other creators are reaching out to you or you said, okay, I'm gonna start with this number and you've got a longer list of people that you wanna reach out to. When you said waiting list, I didn't know whether they were reaching out to you or you were reaching out to them. Amit AllPros (09:18) So in my stage time, because I don't have yet the website, it's a little hard to collect the people to come to you into the waitlist. So I do outreach to them and reach into them. And from that on, I show them what I built and how it help them. And from then, they just want to be there and get it, especially when it's free. Marci Grossman (09:40) Okay, Obviously you're doing this to make money. So is your business model that the creators are gonna pay you? You're gonna get a percentage from the course fee? You'll have advertising on the site? Amit AllPros (09:43) Yeah. That's good, okay. I think I have three main source of income that potentially can be source of income. The first one is giving the creator more because the creator are the, let's call it the flywheel of the platform and they will drive trust and they are the one that need to build the trust. What I want to give them except for the page which show the course and testimonials, I want to give them more tools, more ways to collect insight, more data, and more way to collect testimonials, and more ways to show it off. And that is worth money. A lot of rating platform like that also doing it. So this is one of the ways. The second way is of course sponsorship, but I have a 'Special If' let's call it. If you don't over 8.5 on the platform you are not getting any sponsorship. Because this is not fair that me as the trust factor will promote courses with five or something like that in the overall rating. So let's say for courses with over 8.5 they have places they can advertise their courses and their products. And also about commission, this is not something I'm planning to do right now, but I'm sure that in the future what we're going to do is also I'm going to drive for your traffic, so why don't you pay it for me, the affiliate? Marci Grossman (11:26) Okay, so you must have a team. Marci Grossman (11:30) I mean, in addition to Daniel and Tal, your co-creators. Marci Grossman (11:34) you have a team that's building a website and that's doing all these other things. How big of a team is it to create what you're creating at this point? Amit AllPros (11:43) Okay, so let's talk about the pyramid. So we have me and my two co-founders which created this company and along with us Shlomi, which is an investor and mentor in Israel, joined our company to help us because he saw the potential. And from that on, we also got another co-founder, which is a programmer that can build and take care of all the technical side. And under us, under the, let's call it five founders, we have one designer, one developer that working under the co-founder of developer, and two VA, which are doing administrative tasks like getting courses and things like that. And this is the team right now. So it's nine. Marci Grossman (12:37) And you're able to get everything done and you're ready to go live, you said, in a week or so. Amit AllPros (12:44) Yeah I'm hoping that once this episode is up we're gonna be on live already. Marci Grossman (12:49) That's exciting. What made you decide on the name AllPros? I like the name, I think it's perfect, but how did you come up with that? Because naming things is sometimes hard. Amit AllPros (13:01) It took us one month to find the name. We were thinking what name should be like something like Google or something catchy or should it be like something all the course rated or something that represents the business. And I have two factors that determine the name. First, All pros, it can be... a lot of things. It's not just restrict me to this field, like let's say I will call myself course review, I only have to do course review because it doesn't make sense if I pivot. So I'm always leaving the option for pivot because it's happening a lot of software company. And the second is the domain was available, I checked AllPros.io and the domain is available and it was very cheap, so we decided to purchase this domain and go for it. Marci Grossman (13:54) Yeah, I guess that's a hard thing nowadays. You can come up with a great name, but if someone's already got it, it may not be the right name for you. Amit AllPros (14:02) Actually, yeah, there is a company in Israel which decided on the name. They're a big company, I think they're a unicorn, and they took the name because they found the domain. They have no stopping to think about, they just bought the domain and then think about, oh yeah, which company we should build on it. Marci Grossman (14:20) That's crazy. How long has it taken you from the point in time where you said, okay, we're going to create a business that helps us with this problem that you saw of paying for courses that ended up not being any good to this point of being ready to go live? What's the timeframe? Amit AllPros (14:43) All right, so let's say Tal and Daniel met few years ago and in which stage we thought to ourselves which business we should start and as I told you, we just came with the idea of why don't we have any ranking system for online courses and online learning. I think that was in September, September '25 and from that time we had the ideation. We research, we think about it. We first thought about doing it like Michelin, which we just took the courses and give ratings, like Michelin guide does, if you know it, for the restaurants. And from then on we decided, yeah, it's not fair because we restrict ourselves only to few courses and we don't want only few courses. We want the whole industry to be safe again. And that's what make us decide. So I guess we started on after the small pivot in November and from that on we went into now it's February and I believe that by the end of February or the beginning of March it's going to be live. Marci Grossman (15:49) I know so many people who have taken courses like you guys have and said, my God, what did I just spend all this money on? And And are the other two, Amit AllPros (15:57) Exactly. Marci Grossman (16:00) Did Daniel and Tao also have a history of being entrepreneurs and creating their own businesses growing up or was this a new thing for them? They just didn't know what they wanted to do so they decided, yeah, let's go create a business with Amit because he does this all the time. Amit AllPros (16:17) No, so I've met Tal and Daniel at the age of 18 or it was 19, I don't remember. Daniel and Tal are childhood friends. And I met Tal and introduced me to Daniel and we were thinking about which business we should start. And then we decided, yeah, why don't we, we'll have parties. ⁓ We love going to parties and then we decided why don't we throw a party. So it started with one party which we did. It wasn't the most successful party. We just was break even or even lost some money. And we decided, yeah, it was really fun. It was really amazing. We want to do it again and again and again. And from that on, three of us created one of the biggest party production in Israel. We generated good money in that stage, especially in that age, where we're making more than $1 million gross revenues. In the party industry, this is not a lot but we were making around 1 million dollar in gross revenues and from that on we were familiar with each other and we decided yeah we want to go into the next level of business which of course it's startup world and we decided to do this startup Marci Grossman (17:36) What have you learned creating an online business versus when you were creating a party business? So that's totally, or maybe it's not that different. So how are they different and what have you been learning about creating businesses as you've done these? Amit AllPros (17:52) Yeah. All right, so I think the biggest struggle is the difference between party, everyone like party. The question is whether you market it good or not. And after the product is done, whether people love your product or not. That is the real question because everyone knows partying and everyone love it and it's proven product already. And that is the problem, especially in tech, which I'm something and as far as I'm building it, I'm not sure if it's the right thing. I'm gonna pivot. I know that in some certain point of time, I might have to pivot because of that. And the product development is much longer. This is the second difference between because parties, I wanted this to for a party. If I'm good, it will take me two weeks. If I'm really good, one week. And if I'm beginner, one month. Product is much harder. You need to think and you need to design and you need to do everything. And if the product is not good, people will not come into your product and they will not love it. If they are not getting the wow effect, when they see your product like iPhone and you just say to yourself, yeah, I must have it, they will not have it. And... You can have good ideas, but the product is not good. So you don't know even if you have good ideas. So you need to think about an idea, make the whole thing perfect, and then just analyze, ⁓ well, I don't know if people like it or not, after the product is done. So I think this is the best struggle. Before we did the market fit, which of course we didn't hit yet. Marci Grossman (19:41) you ready for it to hit? Do feel you're ready for it next week? Amit AllPros (19:46) I'm not sure if the market feed gonna hit because this is more about paying and right now we're not charging any money. But I do feel that we have something that help both side of the table, also the supply and the demand because the creator really hype for it and waiting for use it. And I'm also know because I talk with a lot of users that they are waiting for it as well and they want this product and want to use it because this is very tough problem for them. I think in my age everyone has been hurt from online course almost everyone because you learn online. This is the new way of learning Even if you go into college or something you still need to learn online. Marci Grossman (20:32) My kids both took online classes when they were at university. They were fortunate that they were easily able to pivot to online learning. Their professors knew enough of what they were doing or enough of their material that they were able to present it in a way that made it learnable. So yeah, we lucked out. I know a lot of people when online learning happened Amit AllPros (20:49) Yeah. Marci Grossman (20:57) did not pivot well to it. And we talk about YouTube University and there's a lot of content out there that's available for free. And some of it's good content. I I put out a lot of free content. I'd like to think my content is good. But if you're not paying for it, you may or may not have the same expectation of the quality of it once you are paying for something. Amit AllPros (21:05) Mm-hmm. Exactly. Marci Grossman (21:22) You expect it to tick all the boxes of what you expect it to do. Amit AllPros (21:27) Yeah, that's a problem with YouTube and I think I'm not focused mainly on the university side, I'm focused more on the creator side which is more like the promise learn and then you get a degree but more in a way of learn and then you get any results like learn in my place and you get in 30 days you're gonna hit Google job or... hit in my way or you're gonna and then you're gonna hit 1000 followers in a day, things like that. So we are not focused mainly on that side, but I'm sure that you don't value free. That is a real problem. People are missing it. No one is valuing free. Marci Grossman (22:13) Right. I'm looking at some of the types of course areas that you're looking at. I love the fact that you said your name means you can pivot, which allows you, we're not just online courses. We're not sure what else we might be later, but we're not limiting ourselves. And I love that the name doesn't limit it. So some of the things I see, you've got business and technology and finance and investing and personal development, Amit AllPros (22:21) Yeah. Exactly. Marci Grossman (22:39) and who knows where else that might go. Who knows I could sign up for a cooking class at some point in time on your site in the future. Amit AllPros (22:45) Yes. We want also all the type of all the type of learning, which is not only courses, which is coaching, communities, boot camps, all the things that you can learn from, even if it's physical class, know, this is not our focus because we want to be the safe place for online learning, but I'm sure that a lot of places are marketing online and they have program online, and part of that program is also meeting in person. And yeah, this is exactly why AllPros exist, I don't want to limit myself. Marci Grossman (23:18) That makes perfect sense. That's a perfect business model. We're starting this something new and we want to make sure that we haven't limited ourselves before we even start. Amit AllPros (23:26) Yeah, Exactly. Like Facebook or anything. TikTok. Marci Grossman (23:32) Growing up, were your parents entrepreneurs or was this just something that fit you and you've been creating this own path for yourself? Amit AllPros (23:41) So you touch here an emotional thing because my dad is an entrepreneur, he has business, but both of them are just pushing me, yeah, go to college already, go to college, when do you go to college, when do you go to college? And then I'm saying to them, hey, I'm doing well, I'm not going to college yet. Even in the future, I might consider going in to learn in mathematics and physics but right now I don't want college and I'm doing well. So I think they always push me because they believe in me, but I don't know if it's came from the home. Marci Grossman (24:19) Well, and that's something to consider because, I came from a generation where the expectation was you do college and that's what helps you do well. The world has changed and, you know, to do well, especially in technology fields and something like that, you don't necessarily need a degree to do that. You need education, which you can get from various online courses, from experiences, from Amit AllPros (24:26) Yeah. Yeah. Marci Grossman (24:47) internships from learning on your own the way you're doing. I'm just going to start a business and figure it out as I go. It's a different world so I totally feel for them because I know you want your children to be successful and of course we grew up in a different world that defines success to some extent differently. It defines the path to success differently than what it is now. Amit AllPros (24:58) Yeah. Yeah. Marci Grossman (25:12) I mean, my one son is a teacher. He needs a degree to become a teacher. That's just the rule. So college was never a question for him. But if he had wanted to be something else, then maybe college wouldn't have been the right path for him. Amit AllPros (25:34) I do think that college is important. I'm planning to go. In some point of time, I'm planning to go to learn. I think mathematics or physics, this is my way, but I'm not sure about it. And I do think that is important. I do think that if I can just sign on something and get the knowledge of the degree, I would sign. Marci Grossman (25:56) Well right, and the knowledge is great and you're building a business which is great and I love math and physics but on the flip side math and physics isn't going to necessarily help you with your business. Amit AllPros (26:08) I'm not sure because I think mainly those two fields, there are a lot of tech fields that you can do and also, especially with Mathematics and Physics, it's develop your brain in a way that you have the analytics thinking. This is my point of view, I'm not mathematician, so I don't know if it's really like that, but this is from what I researched. It's developed your brain in a way that you do have a different thinking way from people who didn't learn it, and you do have some sort of benefit because of that. Marci Grossman (26:45) I would have expected you to say, yes, I'm going to go in to get a degree in business or to get a degree in technology and programming and stuff like that. And to me, from where you are, math and physics is just because it's fun. So I love that even more, you're just No, this is something I want to explore because who knows what I'm going to learn and where I'm going to go from there. The future is open and the present is open because of what you're creating. Did your dad teach you entrepreneur stuff? Is he saying, okay, we'll make sure as you open this business you want to make sure you have an accountant in place or you learn how to do bookkeeping or Amit AllPros (27:08) Yeah, exactly. Marci Grossman (27:30) Is he helping organize you in that way? Amit AllPros (27:33) Actually he is an accountant. He has his own accounting firm. But not so much. I don't think we talk about these things so much, but he does guide me. Marci Grossman (27:36) Okay. Marci Grossman (27:47) That's great. I love to hear that. And I love what you're doing with AllPros, Amit, and I look forward to visiting the site again when it is fully up and functional. Marci Grossman (28:01) Can you think of anything else you'd like to mention that maybe we haven't covered? Amit AllPros (28:06) Actually no, Marci Grossman (28:08) Okay, fair enough. Amit, you so much for being my guest today. We appreciate you taking the time to join us here. Amit AllPros (28:16) Thank you, Marci. Marci Grossman (28:17) And to my listeners, I will be sharing a link to AllPro's information in the show notes. Check them out and see what's coming up with them. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review and stay tuned. I'll see you next time. This has been MoneyMarci on Marci Talks Money (and Life). You got this. See ya.