I wasted two years of my life on a dead-end business - here’s how Berkeley-Haas Professor Aaron McDaniel helped me finally let go.
Hello, and Welcome to the Exemplar Journal!
I know, I know. Not the opening you were looking for. Trust me, keep reading. You won’t regret it. Going back to my boring welcome statement - It’s been an action-packed last few months to get to the point we’re at today, and to say that it’s been a journey would be an understatement. Although The Exemplar Journal was only conceived a few short months ago, its story traces back much further. As far back as 2020…
The Inception
In January 2020, I started teaching Python to my neighbor’s kid every Monday night. After a few weeks, I started wondering how I could continue making the money I was getting from the tutoring job more effectively - without the manual labor. Concurrently, I was reading the book “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. As I was debating this issue, I was reading the last couple of pages of my daily chapter. I flipped a page and in a big block, letters said “ LESSON 1: THE RICH DON’T WORK FOR MONEY. THEY MAKE MONEY WORK FOR THEM.”
As I read through the chapter, the solution to my problem was clear - to increase the volume of kids I was teaching by building a team and switching to a managerial role. Eager to finally try something new, I spent countless hours a night finalizing what the final solution would look like, brainstorming a funny and catchy name, and all the other logistics to make the launch perfect. Finally, in March 2020, I incorporated my first company - Exemplar, L.L.C. Making consumers' local tutors accessible, Exemplar organized available resources related to tutoring into one platform. Although the company started with this goal, I quickly realized it was too similar to companies like Wyzant and Fiverr, which had better quality teachers
than a public, free platform could offer. Rather than trying to beat them at their own game, I switched gears.
I started focusing on teaching specific topics that I personally, as well as many of my well-experienced friends, had expertise in. We started with a team of 3 teachers, slowly but surely accumulating classes of 8-10 kids until we had close to 40 recurring customers, all paying fixed fees per class session. We had a team of 12 high schoolers spread across the nation that were interns acting as ambassadors, promoting the business across the country. By this time, it was late 2020, but as the months went by, the number of customers began to dwindle until we barely had enough to teach a single class. Seeing that the business wasn’t doing well anymore, I went back to the drawing board.
The Fall From Grace
After talking to a few trusted mentors, I realized my big mistake. I was fighting a losing battle with advertising, and the reason for the struggle wasn’t lack of capital or knowledge - it was the fact that the product itself wasn’t unique whatsoever - and our students' peers were progressing much faster than them, through places like YoungWonks and C2 Education. What I should have seen long ago dawned on me - it was impossible to match the quality of tutoring from college graduates with a team of high schoolers, and bridging that gap would cost valuable capital that I didn’t have. Reluctantly, I held my last class on April 14, 2022.
I said my farewells to the last of my students, told them to keep in touch with any needs and shut my laptop. The journey was over. Fear started to creep through my body. For the first time in two years, I didn’t know what the purpose of Exemplar was.
A Foot in the Door
Around a week after I taught my last class, I got an email back from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. I had gotten into a highly selective summer program I applied for, and would be staying on campus for 2 weeks, learning about entrepreneurship and optimizing a business firsthand from some of the most highly touted professors in the world. Excited to gain some extra insight into where the company should go from here, I wrapped up the semester and flew to Philadelphia. By the end of the first day of the program, I was in love with everything about it.
Being around like-minded individuals who had so many diverse and extraordinary stories fueled the fire in me, and I found myself staying up late at night talking to my Resident Counselor, a current student at Wharton who gave me a lot of insight on life in college and what to look out for (coming in a future article ;). The first class was the next morning and I learned that we would be developing real companies with a small cohort, to be judged and ranked by the professors at the end of the program. I was overcome with excitement to get started, especially since my business back home was at a standstill, and we began fueled by a fire like no other.
The next week focused a lot on brainstorming and the design thinking process, and we were challenged to come up with a problem that affected a significant amount of people, and a solution that would solve it. By the end of the week, we had decided on a singular issue.
A Phoenix Rises from The Ashes
By the end of the program, my group and I got up in front of the entire cohort and presented our idea. The average person spends five years of their life waiting in lines. The average lifespan of a human is 73 years, meaning almost 7% of your life is being thrown away. Our market research revealed that the competitors on the market currently were all commercial software that allowed customers to receive notifications when their spot in a virtual line was coming up. These applications were generally used at places like Universal Studios and Disneyland, and completely out of the budget of small to medium-scale businesses.
Upon further analysis of the business models of these tourist attractions, it was revealed that a majority of the revenue generated by these theme parks came from the fast passes that they sold. It was widely known that tourists had no shortage of money to spend, but did have limited time to be at these places, commonly
staying for 2-3 days at a time. Using this same logic, we applied it to the rest of the tourist industry - popular attractions like the Statue of Liberty, the One World Trade Center, and the Liberty Bell.
In theory, our solution would have virtual lines for these attractions, with a fast pass feature similar to the theme parks in which tourists could pay to skip the lines. In this way, tourists would be exchanging their time for money, which they have seemed to have no problem doing historically. An idea was born. After another week of research and perfecting the logistics, we presented it at the Wharton Global Youth Showcase and received 2nd place, as well as commendations on the idea from the Wharton professors themselves.
The program wrapped up and we all headed home.
Arjun (blue tie) is pictured with his team and executive director of the program Taylor Caputo (far right).
A Productive Scolding
In the weeks following my return from the Wharton School’s summer program, I prepared myself mentally to undergo this process once more - this time at UC Berkeley Haas’s School of Business, a program known as the Berkeley Business Academy of Youth - where I would be shown new perspectives of business and finance from real entrepreneurs - each specializing in a different thing. 3 weeks later, still slightly exhausted but ready to learn, I drove the 45 minutes down to the UC Berkeley campus and settled in the dorm. Immediately, A strong dose of deja vu hit me full-on, the “been there, done that” feeling that could cause serious problems at a program like this. I had no idea just how wrong I was.
“YOU GUYS THINK YOU KNOW BUSINESS? YOU DON’T KNOW SHIT!” I heard and physically shifted in my chair. It was the first lecture of the program, from John Danner, an MBA professor at Berkeley-Haas and the recent publisher of a new book, “Built for Growth.” He went on to deliver the most engaging lecture I have ever listened to. In this lecture, he explained that even though the status quo is beneficial for people with status, an innovative entrepreneur can still succeed through telling stories, selling ideas, and creating a team to make startups happen. His lecture emphasized the importance of “You” as the entrepreneur and the need to have a network of people when starting a business.
The next lecture, however, was one that I will never forget.
A Flip of the Switch
It was right after our lunch break, and we had just walked into the lecture hall, tired, unfocused, and ready for the day to be over. The speaker for the next lecture was Aaron McDaniel, the founder of a company known as Tycoon Real Estate, and a concurrent professor at Berkeley-Haas. This company got the chance to appear on Shark Tank - where Professor McDaniel had been told by none other than Mark Cuban, who, after barely listening to 30 seconds of his pitch, blurted abruptly, “I hate it. I’m out.” After turning down an offer from “Mr.Wonderful” himself Kevin O’Leary, Professor McDaniel made his way out of the tank, unfortunately without a deal.
Professor McDaniel pitching his company, Tycoon Real Estate, on Shark Tank in 2015.
You might think that a person like that may not have anything insightful or intellectual to share. You would be dead wrong. As they say, you can’t succeed until you fail, and the lessons that Professor McDaniel shared with us, a small but ambitious cohort of 50 thirsty entrepreneurs, stuck for life. Here’s what he said.
The Pillars
The main purpose of Professor McDaniel’s lecture was to teach the importance of teamwork, intrapreneurship, and entrepreneurship. He also gave us a detailed explanation of the concept of value proposition, which is the cultivation of benefits and value that a company promises to deliver to its potential customers. He explained an insightful approach to creating business ideas and the process that goes into them. The most important takeaway from his lecture was the following principle - that the best way to start a business idea is by identifying a significant problem that people face in their daily lifestyle and creating a solution for that problem. While I found his lecture extremely insightful, it couldn’t compare to the wisdom that he enlightened me with later.
After his lecture, we all gave him a huge round of applause, as usual, and began to disperse. I had gotten in the habit of staying until after the lecture was over to bother each lecturer about their perspective on my struggles with Exemplar and what the future could look like. I waited until everyone left, then approached him.
“I enjoyed the lecture, professor,” I said, getting ready to lay it on him. “Thanks, buddy, appreciate it.” He responded. “What can I help you with?”
I laid it on him, describing Exemplar in detail, the struggles I was having with marketing, and how I wasn’t sure where to take the company from here. As I unraveled my journey, he had a sort of grimace on his face.
“Do you want my honest opinion?” He asked after a point. “Yes sir,” I responded, ready to listen to what he had to say. “It’s time to let it go, man.” He said, shaking his head. “If you want to do something substantial, it has to be a real product or service that people care about as I talked about in the lecture today. Every high schooler ever has done a tutoring business, and the market is so populated that there’s no money for someone in your position left to make. You want my advice - transform it into something new. You seem like a bright kid. I’m sure you can recognize that it might be time for you to let the tutoring gig go. Let me know if I can help with anything.” As he said this, he looked straight into my eyes, and something clicked that hadn’t before.
Arjun ( left ) is pictured with Professor McDaniel ( right ).
I had been so caught up in doing something substantial with the business, and so dialed in and focused on it, that I failed to realize the first step was to take one back. After two long years, I concluded that tutoring was a dead-end path to absolutely nowhere, and it had to be something new. In the following days, we wrapped up the program, and my team’s company was able to place in the top 3 at the Berkeley-Haas Student Showcase.
For the second and last time that summer, I packed my things and headed home, this time with a new perspective.
Forward to today - and you might find yourself asking one question. How does a tutoring business become a business/entrepreneurship-based blog?
The answer is simple. There are so many awesome projects that I’m currently working on - some related to Exemplar, some not - that all follow Professor McDaniel’s pillars of good entrepreneurial ventures. This blog is a platform - for all who want to share their experiences with business and entrepreneurship that can educate and inspire.
So what now?
A Rebirth
The word “exemplar” is defined as “a person or thing serving as a typical example or excellent model.” Today, you’re reading about this blog and the path it took to get here - but tomorrow, it could be a new app, website, service, or product in the works. It could be a new IPO with tremendous potential, or a review of high-performing companies on the stock market and what experts are saying about them. At its very core, this company was built to educate inform, and inspire - and we have so many great things planned for the future.
I’d love for you to be there for the journey.
Arjun Premnath
Founder and CEO of Exemplar L.L.C and the Exemplar Learnings Foundation
Arjun is a management student at the Kelley School of Business who is passionate about business, entrepreneurship, and finance.
In his free time, he loves to read books and work on his ventures.
Views ~ 7688
last updated 7/12/24 at 1:07PM
Arjun ( center ) with his family after placing in the top 3 at the BerkeleyHaas Student Showcase.