Ranbir Arora: 0:00

So your job as an entrepreneur is from wherever you've landed with your initial hypothesis find your way to where that oasis is. It doesn't take a lot of money to go and do those activities. It's about talking to customers, putting a solution in front of their face, and if you do those types of activities, it can help you find where that product market fit is before you actually raise the money. If you raise that money before having that product market fit, the only thing that this is going to do is accelerate your worries. It's not going to speed you up finding that product market fit.

‍Amardeep Parmar: 0:34

Today on the podcast we have Ranbir Arora, the founder and CEO of OneDay. We learn his story from growing up in a council estate trying lots of different businesses that didn't work out, before joining Sweatcoin as an early employee, rising up to Chief Growth Officer over five years when they became number one app on the App Store, before leaving to set up OneDay, and OneDay is the MBA for entrepreneurs. Hope you enjoy this episode. I'm Amardeep from the BAE HQ, and this podcast is powered by HSBC Innovation Banking. So great to have you here today, Ranbir, and it's like you've got a really interesting journey and I know people you've worked with in the past as well. But if we go right back to the beginning, what did you want to be as a kid? What were your dreams growing up?

Ranbir Arora: 1:20

So I grew up in a council estate in Feltham, in a place called Butts Farm, relatively deprived place, but because everyone in my school was like roughly also deprived, you don't really get that feeling of being deprived until my cousins from India used to visit and they had cool businesses and I'd always feel like how do these people have so much money? And like we don't. So that's the only time I would ever feel like what the hell is going on here? Why are some people so much more well off? Having said that, because I grew up in that relatively like deprived environment, I would never really yearn for physical stuff Because I just knew my family couldn't afford it. I never wanted stuff because I knew I wouldn't get it. So my body never got used to this feeling. What I did love was, um, uh, doing creative activities, pushing myself, learning new things, and I had a little bit of a wobbly period. So after seven is when I really remember, starting to think what do I want to do when I'm older? Uh, have you seen the movie? So this, no, I didn't have a shark khan movie. Uh, he, and he works for Nasa in this movie. Okay, so, uh, he worked for Nasa. He had this really cool camper van in the movie and I thought the camper van is really freaking cool and if I work for Nasa, I'll be able to get a camper van. So one of the first things I decided, okay.

Ranbir Arora: 2:39

When I was seven. For a while I thought, okay, I want to work for Nasa. It sounded like the most absurd challenge I could give myself was to go and work for NASA. That's what the smartest people would do. So I wanted to do that.

Ranbir Arora: 2:48

For a while, I had a couple of other ideas of things I wanted to do until eventually, when I was about 11 or 12, I got really into these shows Dragon's Den which is, if you're in the US, it's our version of Shark Tank and also the Apprentice, and I used to sit there, watch these shows and, as everyone does, you're playing along. Right, you're thinking I would have done that differently or I would have done this like this, and I found it the perfect mix between creative activities, which I loved, and equally, I loved the more methodical side. I loved the Maths and sciences and these types of subjects at school. So, after playing along with this game on Dragon's Den and Apprentice for many years, eventually, when I was like 13, 14,.

Ranbir Arora: 3:31

I had decided in my head this is the only thing I can imagine doing with my life, as opposed to everyone else where I saw at that point who had the corporate job. How I imagined it back then was you sit in these cubicles, you get told by someone you don't like in a shirt and a tie, what to it. Back then was you sit in these cubicles, you get told by someone you don't like, in a shirt and a tie, what to do every day and you're bored, whereas these entrepreneurs I was seeing on Dragon's Den was so motivated about what they were doing with their life. They were living a purposeful, mission-driven life, trying to create their product into the world and I thought there's nothing more I want to do than this.

Amardeep Parmar: 4:02

And you said that, like most people you knew were doing corporate roles and things like that. When you had this ambition at that time, how did it sound to the people around you? Were they supporting you? Do they think, yeah, you can do it? Or is it more like, oh, this person is just a bit crazy? What were the support like?

Ranbir Arora: 4:15

So actually, most of the people I knew were the friends of my parents and, because we grew up in that area, they had even they were less, they were even lower down on kind of the socioeconomic ladder than corporate roles. They were like manual laborers, worked in factories and stuff like this. So that's the life, like that I knew. When I started telling my friends around me, or my friends parents or my cousins or my mom and dad that this is what I wanted to do, most people just thought, okay, this is a joke. He's a naive young kid, he wants to grow up and do these amazing things. He's going to grow out of it.

Ranbir Arora: 4:44

And I actually remember some of my older cousins vividly telling me these are crazy dreams, you're going to grow out of it. And little did they know I am a very stubborn person and if you tell me like I can't do something, I will make it my life's goal to do that exact thing. And like prove you wrong. And that's when I remember it cementing down for me oh, she said I can't do this. No, like I am doing this now. You watch what happens.

Amardeep Parmar: 5:07

What were your first tastes of trying to do your own thing?

Ranbir Arora: 5:10

So when I was 15, 16, and in my school all my friends group were finding their universities to go to, their colleges to go to to become doctors, lawyers, engineers I tried finding what's my university I'm going to go to that's going to help me become an entrepreneur. And I was very surprised to see that lots of universities claim to teach this entrepreneurship, but they taught this in an academic sense. They taught you how to launch a business through reading books and writing essays. And, worst crime, the person at the front of the room, the professor, was someone who'd never himself or herself actually started a business before. These are people who are lifelong academics, never actually stepped outside of the lecture hall, and I thought this is really, really silly. I cannot imagine doing something more silly than trying to learn how to start a business in a lecture hall, learning from someone who actually hasn't started a business before. Now.

Ranbir Arora: 6:03

By that time in my life I was super overconfident as a 15, 16 year old. So I actually decided you know I don't think I need education, I think, since if the world hasn't built an educational system for me to become an entrepreneur, why don't I just go and try and start launching businesses, which is what I started doing from 16, almost straight after high school or secondary school. I had a bunch of different ideas that I tried with, some of them were hardware ideas, some of them were software ideas, some of them were like services. So I tried a bunch of things between that time and this is when I really kind of hit reality and it turned out what I was watching on Dragon's Den wasn't as easy to do in real life as I thought it was. I was like relatively good at academia as a kid, so if I wanted to get good grades, okay, well, they give you the curriculum, they tell you what this mark sheet is going to be like at the end. You can do practice runs and practice tests and then you come to the end of the year and you can you know if you've done the practice. It's quite straightforward, like it doesn't take a like Nasa engineer to figure figure that out.

Ranbir Arora: 7:05

Whereas entrepreneurship was not the same. It was, if anything, the, the. The education system had anti-prepared me for entrepreneurship, because there is no mock sheet. You're trying to produce something that's never been built before in the world. It's the opposite of what the education system had taught me that thus far, and that that was a massive blow. So I spent the next five years of my life so roughly between ages of 16 to 20, trying to launch these businesses. They were all failing, none of them were getting very far, having part-time jobs in like a grocery store, in Selfridges, in in kind of these one-hour contracts that existed at the time trying to make some type of money so I can survive, while the rest of my friends were graduating, becoming doctors, lawyers, and at that point you can imagine what my Indian parents were thinking about, what their son was doing.

Amardeep Parmar: 8:03

How did you feel about that yourself? Because it's one thing now, once you've got further ahead and things are going well, but there's gonna be a lot of people listening. You're in that bit that you're in at that time right where you're trying out different things and they're not working. How did you find that motivation to keep going or to keep trying when, like you said, people around you were graduating, your parents were thinking was what was my son doing? How did you find that grit to keep going there?

Ranbir Arora: 8:27

Yeah, it's a really good question. There's a few quotes that I always kept on coming back to, and one of the the ones, I had a poster on my wall that had this quote from Steve Jobs Talking about your heart already knows what you really want to become. The rest talking about your heart already knows what you really want to become. The rest is meaningless. So all you have to focus on is what does your heart really want to do? And I knew at any point I wanted I could go and rebound back and get back into like a corporate job if I wanted to. But I had those early years of my life. I had that 10 year gap to go and create a life that was really powerful, something I really wanted to live.

Ranbir Arora: 9:05

And in this talk Steve Jobs gives I'm sure you've seen it this commencement speech he gives at Stanford. He says you're going to die anyway, so you're already naked. There's no reason not to follow your heart and do what you used to do was wake up in the morning and listen to this. To again bring me back to that point zero where I understand I'm going to die anyway At some point in my life. There is no reason why I shouldn't chase what I really wanted to do and set my life on fire. I didn't just want to live a life where I felt neutral, kind of like a robot, going into work at 9 am, coming back at 5 pm, not feeling passionate about what I do. Secondly, I knew I had the talent to make it happen, like I didn't question this for one second. It just hadn't happened yet, I hadn't had my break yet and throughout the rest of my time when I was in school, I'd religiously been doing activities that I wasn't good at, working very hard at them and getting good at it.

Amardeep Parmar: 10:03

I think that's a really interesting thing. I think that's myself as well, where sometimes people talk about like the confidence and vacancy you make it. But I think a lot of that comes from evidence, right is that? Because you've had this track record of and it doesn't have to be to do business, I said, could we do sports? It'd be anything where you find it hard and then you keep practicing and then you get good. You now know I can do that anytime there's something hard I can practice, I can get better at it and I can get good at it. And that's what. Like everything that I do now for example, this podcast I was crap at the beginning.

Amardeep Parmar: 10:31

I had no idea what I was doing and hopefully I'm somewhat okay now. But you do the reps and you get better. But what? Like you said, a lot of people who they because they aren't good at the beginning, then they don't carry on and then they never grow and they never learn. And you must have done so much of that during those periods of we're trying different ideas out. How did you know when to let go of some of those ideas?

Ranbir Arora: 10:52

because that's also another challenge too it's a tough one because if you let go too quickly, you starting an idea is way harder than it looks from the outside, uh, and I'm a massive fan of entrepreneurship, so I encourage everyone to start their business, but it takes a long time before you can figure out like how how those pieces are meant to be put into place. At that time I am, I believe I'm naturally extremely resilient, having lived like a difficult life moving here when I was five years old, growing up like not speaking English when I initially moved here, being bullied at school, always feeling like the misfit, being one of the only two brown people in in my whole school. Naturally I'm very resilient, so I actually, if anything, stuck onto ideas way too long for like two years before I eventually kind of life beat it out of me and I'm like, okay, I have to find like something different to do. If I had to reflect back, I would say that the right methodology here is to have a list of ways of fixing the issues in the business or moving forward, being brave and not being scared to change substantial things about the business. So typically in a business it has three moving pieces the target market that you're building for what the problem is that you're solving for them and what your solution is to solve that problem. Those are the three big moving pieces and if your business isn't working yet and you're generally within the first three years of the business it's generally one of those three pieces you should be moving at any point in time to move forward.

Ranbir Arora: 12:28

It shouldn't be tiny changes Like if you're pre-revenue as a startup and no one wants to buy your product. Your problem isn't the color of your logo. The problem isn't like how the website looks. Most generally, the problem is you're focusing on the wrong customer, you're focusing on the wrong problem to solve for them or you're using the wrong solution to fix that problem. And you should be every month coming up with a new pivot on one of these three key pillars and trying out a new experiment to pivot on one of those pillars until you find something like some signal from your audience that something you have has struck something.

Ranbir Arora: 13:08

At that point you can go into second level of pivots which are a little bit more detailed. They might start being into about what channel are you using, what your price point is, how your branding or ads look, etc. But that comes after you've had some big pull from the market that they want what you have. If you run out of pivots to make or you're getting less excited about the pivots you have available, or you ask yourself the question if I was to restart today, knowing what I know, would I be doing this? And your answer is no. That's the time to start thinking about the next big pivot, and it's not a bad thing at uh, to park that idea and move on to something else.

Amardeep Parmar: 13:48

I actually think that should be celebrated way more often it's one of these things often people don't realize that it's usually not people's first idea. That is the idea that then blows up, but people forget about that first idea and it's a whole. I think what you said about the idea of failure is that you think everyone's going to remember that nobody remembers. I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday, let alone what somebody else has done as their previous company. And I think that whole idea that that shame element of it. Right, people were like, oh, if I change the idea, then people are going to think this or that and just nobody's paying that much attention to you. And if they're paying that much attention, it probably means you have something good. And one of the interesting things you then did after that is you then pivoted away from entrepreneurship for a bit, or your own companies, into a different way as well. So can you talk us through that? Why did you do that?

Ranbir Arora: 14:33

so, yeah, when I was 19, roughly so I'd been at entrepreneurship for about four years trying out my own businesses and it really wasn't working. I was still absolutely adamant that the goal in my life was to start a business, but I completely understood at that point, after trying it for four years and many different types of businesses, that I need some, like a different way to get that. I didn't know what I was doing. I was just a kid 17 year old kid like brainstorming with my laptop, whatever I'm meant to do next and okay. So education for it didn't exist. I couldn't find anything that was practical. So I thought next best thing, why don't I go and find an entrepreneur who's older than me, someone in their 40s or 50s, who's done this before, so they have a track record of it? And why don't I build a practical project with them with my own hands? So it's sat side by side together every day and maybe this way I'll learn hands-on what I'm meant to be doing. And my original plan was I'll do that for roughly one year, digest those learnings and then immediately go back and launch my own business again.

Ranbir Arora: 15:35

At that age I met these two other dudes who'd originally had this idea. It was at idea stage at the point, so they'd had the idea about two months before I met them. It was an idea to create a health and fitness app that would reward you for physical activity. So you walk around, you earn these points, with these points, you earn them from walking, and eventually you'd be able to use those points to spend with partners that we would make on discounts for their products. So the idea was to make movement more rewarding, or make activity rewarding. Sounded really wacky, but when I sat down and talked with them, they both had experience of doing cool stuff before we started brainstorming ways of how it might work together, what might be the types of partners that could make this work. I like them, they like me, and I decided to join them in helping build this company, which ended up being something quite sizable.

Amardeep Parmar: 16:34

What's interesting, too, is that we're talking about the failure element of that as well. Is that because you have these businesses which didn't work out, people then worry oh, does that make me less marketable? But obviously the founders of these company, they chose to hire you and how did that experience that you had in those companies which didn't work out like help you get that role? What did they see in you from that experience to help you get further ahead? Because I think it's quite important to know for some people if you try some kind it doesn't work, that doesn't make you unmarketable doesn't mean that you can't get hired again.

Ranbir Arora: 17:04

If anything, it makes you way more marketable. So I think that's one of like the luxuries of my life, or one of the most positive things that happened to me was because I had those four years of trying lots of stuff. The amount of agency you could see from me, from my experience, from what I'd done for the past few years, even though none of it was quote unquote successful. At that point I and taking that massive risk of not going to university and believing in myself and trying to launch stuff, which, okay, if you're trying to become like a consultant at KPMG, maybe that's not what they're looking for.

Ranbir Arora: 17:41

But if you're trying to build something new, if you're trying to work for a scale up a startup, someone trying to do something new and trying to change the world, that's exactly the personality trait that they're looking for. That's exactly the personality trait that they're looking for. So when I applied, I'm sure they must have had people like graduates from Harvard or Oxford trying to get in, but when they saw that person's CV and experience of what they'd done and that person's character sets that they demonstrated my body of evidence over the last four years trying to start five different projects, getting a CTO, trying to get a product into John Lewis and actually getting relatively far doing it, and then having four failures back to back and still turning up with massive determination in my eyes and looking all steely and resilient Any day of the week, you would hire this person, as opposed to someone who just was being comfortable and rolling along doing. You know what their friend was doing.

Amardeep Parmar: 18:39

We hope you're enjoying the episode so far. We just want to give a quick shout out to our headline partners, HSBC Innovation Banking. One of the biggest challenges for so many startups is finding the right bank to support them, because you might start off and try to use a traditional bank, but they don't understand what you're doing. You're just talking to an AI assistant or you're talking to somebody who doesn't really understand what it is you've been trying to do. HSBC have got the team they've built out over years to make sure they understand what you're doing. They've got the deep sector expertise and they can help connect you with the right people to make your dreams come true. So if you want to learn more, check out hsbcinnovationbanking. com.

Amardeep Parmar: 19:16

So Bank HQ ourselves are going to be hiring a founder associate soon, and if we could find something like you where you are at that point, like you said, it's perfect, because that's exactly what you want Somebody whose agency, I think, is a big point. It's like they just they will take the initiative and get something done, and that's so hard to find in the market. And if somebody's taken the chance to build something of themselves, even if it hasn't worked out, they've still shown that grit and that guts, and that's what we'd be looking forward to, hiring ourselves as well, and you obviously stayed for longer than one year there yeah what?

Amardeep Parmar: 19:46

what kept you there? What were you building while you're there?

Ranbir Arora: 19:50

You guys might have uh, heard of this app. The app's called Sweatcoin. It's now gone over 150 million installs worldwide, roughly to speak chronologically, for the first. So I joined. We started in 2015. And again, my plan was I'm going to like get some learnings and go and do my own thing very soon, started building testing the app. Uh, we started hired some shitty agency somewhere to to start building it for us. They did a really terrible job in building it, so the app looked really crap at first. We needed to figure out how to go get some downloads, so none of us knew what we were doing, really. Um, so this became my job and I walked around our eighth floor of WeWork offices knocking on people's doors and saying can you download this app for me? I got about like 30 downloads this way. That's the maximum. I knew how to do so 30 downloads.

Amardeep Parmar: 20:47

Even that, a lot of people don't have the guts to go and do that. That's scary, right.

Ranbir Arora: 20:57

To just knock on somebody's door and be like do you want to download this app? Uh, I think, like anything, it's a muscle that you have to start building up. So you, this muscle of agency, is like a real thing in life and I think is the number one attribute I've seen in founders that are successful. Um, versus people on not so much. Uh, it's that ability that um or I think bill gates says it really well it's someone with high level of agency, is someone who you would rely on to break you out of a third world prison. It's someone who's going to figure out a way, is not going to stop, is going to brainstorm right, left, middle off the board, will get the job done and roll up their sleeves to do it. So, yeah, we started building the app Up until 2017, the app really wasn't working Like we were concerned.

Ranbir Arora: 21:38

This company is not going to work. We were thinking what do we do? Pivot the business to something else, had a few months of runway left and all this time I'd been listening lots to Gary Vee at that time and Gary Vee was banging on about influencer marketing. So we had no money to spend on advertising. The company was. We were riding off of small angel checks that we had at the time. So I tried influencer advertising twice. At that point I'd give like 2K to an influencer, given them a sharing link they'd post for us. But neither of those times had they got any downloads. So I was pretty upset. But the company was about to like we're about to close down.

Ranbir Arora: 22:19

The company wasn't working so I thought forget it, I'm going to give it another go. Gary Vee keeps on telling me to do influencer marketing. The app's not growing, so let me go out with a bang. I'll do one final like try at this and if it doesn't work we'll go do something else. And this time we tried influencer marketing in a different way. Instead of giving the influencer the money up front and then telling them to go and get us installs, we gave them a sharing link and said go and get us installs first. If you get us 20 installs, you can win this. If you get 50 installs, you'll win this. If you get 100 installs, we'll give you a PS4.

Ranbir Arora: 22:55

At that time that was the latest console and we launched it and then forgot about it. I come back to the office or five days later we came into the office and everyone is running around like crazy and I'm like, guys, what's wrong? Why are you running around? Someone says look into the app store. We were in the top 50 apps in the UK app store that day in the app store charts, and what we'd realized is one of the big influencers it was, I'm Just Bait had started sharing this link Off the back of him. Lots of other influencers had seen him share it, so they'd picked up the sharing link, copied and pasted it into their stories and it just created this chain of events where now all the influencers the major influencers like Puberty and stuff like this were all sharing the same links.

Ranbir Arora: 23:44

I went to bed that day when I checked the app store. We were in the top 20 apps in the UK app store that day. Woke up the next day we're in the top 10 apps in the app store that day. Went to bed that evening. We're in the top five apps in the whole of the UK app store charts that day. Woke up the next morning and we're number one app in the whole of the UK and since then our destiny really changed as a company. After that we launched in 60 different markets around the world. Every market we'd launch in, we had the same playbook so we would get to number one in the app store. It happened in, uh, the usa. It happened in france, italy, germany, spain, australia, back to back and kind of next few years were uh, full of kind of excitement and growth.

Amardeep Parmar: 24:27

So obviously, you're talking about, like learning about entrepreneurship there. Right, learning at that kind of speed is something which many people don't get to experience. There's so much you would have learned on that journey. But then what made you decide, okay, now I'm going to go and build my own thing again?

Ranbir Arora: 24:39

what brought you back to, okay, now it's time to go off and do one day so that was always my goal when I was, uh, when I was 19 and I originally joined oligodenton to to Sweatcoin, my goal was I need to start my own company At Sweatcoin. I was very close to it. I was first employee outside the other two founders kind of as close to it as you can get but at the end of the day, I wasn't the guy who, like called the shots and that, regardless of like the success of the company was facing at that time, that was not didn't fulfill me completely. That's not what I'd envisaged for my life and it had nothing to do with money Like I think I would, uh, had I been optimizing for making the most money in my life. Clearly the best thing to do is not be a founder Like the person who was employee number 50 at Facebook made way more money than like 99.9% of founders, like even in Silicon Valley. So if someone's optimizing just for money, I would advise like probably a different route, which is go and find like cool entrepreneurs, create a strong network and get on board something like relatively early, get a nice stock options package and perform like hell to make it work. But that wasn't my goal. My goal was to wake up every morning and be an entrepreneur. The goal of, let's say, an artist isn't to make a lot of money from selling their art. The core goal of someone who wants to be an artist is to be able to wake up every day and do art for a living. Yeah, that's it, and that's all I ever wanted to do in my life was wake up in the morning and go and be an entrepreneur that day. The monetary success that comes afterwards was never my concern. I would gladly earn less money being an entrepreneur than if even if I, you know had a job or something.

Ranbir Arora: 26:33

So Sweatcoin was going well, but my goal wasn't fulfilled. I needed to be an entrepreneur and run a company. So at that point we'd already hired Taras, who was chief operating officer at Sweatcoin. We'd been working together for a few years. It was five of us as partners. Now the other three guys were in their 40s or 50s.

Ranbir Arora: 26:53

Me and Taras were in our very early 20s. At the time we were 21, 22 years old with running a company that had tens of millions of active users. Roughly half the workforce reported directly to me or Taras. We got on extremely well because we were the only kind of young people as partners there and after a few years of working together, it became extremely obvious that me and him were going to start our next company together.

Ranbir Arora: 27:19

Eventually, when the time came, when we decided, you know, we've got all the major learnings that we wanted to hear, let's go and start our own thing. We brainstormed what are the biggest problems that we see in our friends and families' lives that we want to go solve. Pick the problem that ranked number one, that we were most passionate about, a problem that, again, aside from money, even if in the next 10 years of me building that business, even if I was not to make any money from that, I would still say I'm really glad I spent those 10 years solving that problem in the world. That's the problem we picked and I decided okay, we're going to go build.

Amardeep Parmar: 27:53

Build that so tell us about the problem, because it's. I guess the problem has stayed more or less the same, but the solution has shifted quite a lot over time what was that problem that you decided?

Ranbir Arora: 28:02

That's the one we're going to go for so, um, again, when, when we left sweat coin, me and tara started like making a list of problems that our friends and family were encountering and a problem that we kept on encountering again and again and again, repeatedly, people said to us the same stuff They'd at the age of 16, 17, 18, were forced to pick a career choice almost at random. Who really knows at 15, 16, 17, what you kind of want to do for the next 40 years of your life? They had to pick something in a rush and they picked it based on their friend, like wanting to get become a consultant. So they're like, okay, that sounds kind of cool, I'll also do this same thing. I've heard they have built, they have an office in the shard or something. Okay, I'm gonna go do this. Pick something at random. Now you're in that career track by the time you graduate and use you're like 100k in debt from studying this thing. It kind of makes no sense to not get a job in that thing. So most people are now just kind of sleepwalking into that career, get into that job. Finally, everyone celebrates them. They get to make a nice LinkedIn post about getting that job and by the end of their twenties, early thirties, they turn around and think, jesus, I cannot imagine doing this for the next 40 years of my life. This doesn't set my life on fire. I'm living like a sleepwalking type of life.

Ranbir Arora: 29:20

And when we were to and this problem was happening to my younger brother at the time, um Tarris's wife, my best friend, Uh and when we were to ask these people okay, if you don't want to be a doctor, lawyer, consultant, these types of things, what do you really want to be? And the answers were always around the line of you know, one day I really want to take my mental health podcast that I'm running on the side and turn it into my full-time thing. You know, one day I really want to take my grandma's cookie recipes and get them into Whole Foods. Or one day I want to take my sneaker trading business that I'm doing and make that my full-time gig. I love sneakers. I want to make my living off of this.

Ranbir Arora: 29:56

And these people had tried finding education for this, tried looking at universities that would teach this thing, and they couldn't find any. Again, they had the same problems I had when I was 16. It wasn't practical, theory-based, and the teachers actually hadn't taught this before they tried to find mentors for this. So they went and DM'd random people on LinkedIn saying can you mentor me? And by and large, they weren't getting replies from these people either. So we thought I had the same issue when I was 16. I really needed this product. The next three, four years of my life were really difficult because this didn't exist. If anything, that problem had grown 10x in the last 10 years.

Ranbir Arora: 30:31

More people are becoming entrepreneurs than than ever before. If you ask a kid now what they want to be when they grow up, they're not going to tell you they want to be a doctor or an astronaut or wanting to work for nasa, because they saw sharok can't do it. They'll tell you they want to become a youtuber, a podcast. They want to become like mr beast. They want to start their own business. They want to launch their drinks company, like um ksi did. They want to be an entrepreneur? Um, and if the rest of the world wasn't going to build education for entrepreneurs, um?

Ranbir Arora: 30:59

Me and taris decided to roll up our sleeves and decided we'll do it ourselves.

Amardeep Parmar: 31:03

Could you tell us what you're doing now is quite different to what you did when you started? Could you walk us through the different major pivot pivots you had there?

Ranbir Arora: 31:11

So, um, like I mentioned, there's like three pivots of a pillar, I believe the target market. So who you're solving the problem for what the problem is? Point number two. Point number three your solution. So you could break anything down, any business down into this core statement. We help XX audience solve YY product by building ZZ solution and I find this framework really helpful For us. The problem of this remains static. So the problem we were helping people do was to live a life they loved through entrepreneurship. However, the target audience and the solution that we were offering.

Ranbir Arora: 31:52

We've pivoted on this a number of times. Actually, one day it started off as an app, a podcasting app that would take free entrepreneurship content from podcasts, from RSS feeds, and pass it into courses that people could take for free. Because, again, by and large, lots of the cool entrepreneurs that arrive on podcasts Peter Thiel, these people of the world, they have amazing knowledge. These people don't like create courses and you can't really learn from them unless you take this podcast material and turn it into a course that they can use. Started off with, this app raised about a million dollars for a pre-seed round again, which I don't really recommend people do. It sounded cool at the time. Now it turns out it's a really bad idea to raise a million dollars before you've actually launched a product and seen does anyone want this thing? Raised a million dollars, launched this thing Turns out we could get downloads for it, because my previous experience was as a chief growth officer but retention was really bad. No one was using this thing.

Ranbir Arora: 33:00

We needed to pivot, asked our users. We gave them a list of ideas or features that we could build, or pivots we could create in the business, changes to the product that could make it work. And again, we wanted to keep the user type roughly the same, the problem the same. We offered them a different solution, which was instead of learning through this podcasting app, what if we were to match you with an actual mentor who'd help you build this idea? Pivoted the business into this immediately started like blowing up. So we went from making no money to now having tens of thousands of paying customers. Started growing like wildfire. Revenues became like 100K or so we were making a month. So it started working To some extent.

Ranbir Arora: 33:41

We had pull from the market, but unit economics weren't working. It would cost us roughly like 1,000 pounds to get a paying customer and we would make back from that customer below 2000 pounds. These are not scalable unit economics. You can't build a business this way. So again, we had to make a pivot.

Ranbir Arora: 34:02

We asked our users hey, which one of these things, if we added it to the product, would set your life on fire? And one of those options we had available was well, what if, while working with this entrepreneur, this mentor on building your business, what if we had a partnership with the university so you were earning a fully accredited MBA degree just by building this business no essays, no coursework, no exams the world's first MBA that you earn from functionally building a business. That's it. And once we offered this to users, they started going bananas for this. So these are existing users. Would say here's my money. Like, give me this product now. Here's my pre-order. So after we started getting those pre-orders from these entrepreneurs, we then created a partnership with now two universities, one in Europe and one in the US. We built the world's first MBA degree that's earned just by building a business no essays, no exams. And, yeah, companies taken off really rapidly in the last two years since.

Amardeep Parmar: 35:03

So it's really interesting the different privilege taken there.

Amardeep Parmar: 35:06

One thing she said which is really interesting about that one million pre-seed and what I think a lot of people maybe don't realize too is the reason you're able to do that. It's because of the incredible work you've done at sweat queen before and it's a kind of it's what I think, because one of the conversations I have with people quite often is about when you're looking at your pre-seed the people that raise big pre-seeds like you did it's because you've got such a strong track record that investors know that if they're back you're going to work it out. But that track record that investors know that if they back you're going to work it out but that track record is a really important part. If you just say I'm a consultant from kpmg, that's great, but it's not the same as having that track record within a startup and growing it in that way. And just something to bear in mind when people are kind of making their precede, what they're trying to raise, how to make it realistic. It's like if you are c-suite or you're head of division at a massive global company, yeah, you can ask what you want.

Amardeep Parmar: 35:55

You also mentioned that that was a mistake in some ways. Why was it a mistake for people who aren't familiar with that?

Ranbir Arora: 36:01

Super bad mistake when you raise money pre-seed. Pre-seed basically means that you haven't built the product yet. You have no revenue, you have no customers and most of the time if you build a business, if you build a product without talking to customers, once you put the product in front of them, they will almost certainly I guarantee it to you come back and tell you you've built the wrong thing. They don't want it this way. It doesn't solve the actual problem that they have. The actual problem they have is something else it's too expensive or it's too cheap, um, it doesn't work properly. It's uh, you built something that solves their problem faster, not better. Or it might be vice versa you solve their problem better, but they wanted faster, you wanted a faster solution, um. So what seems so true in your head that this thing sounds like such a good idea? There is a version of it in the universe that will find product market fit, but it almost certainly isn't yours. It isn't certainly the way you've the first iteration of it that you've landed on. So if you think about a good analogy, I find, is you imagine you're, you arrive in a desert and you're trying to find water. You're trying to find the oasis. What are the odds that I randomly dropped you in the desert and you've landed directly in that water straight away? Very low odds that you've landed directly there. So your job as an entrepreneur is from wherever you've landed with your initial hypothesis find your way to where that oasis is, and you have a bunch of tools to help you do that. To where that oasis is, and you have a bunch of tools to help you do that. But almost none of those tools are advanced from the money that you've raised. It doesn't take a lot of money to go and do those activities. It's about talking to customers, putting a solution in front of their face. It can be a mock-up, it can be a website that kind of looks real. It looks like if you press the order button you're going to be able to place the order or download the app, but there's nothing actually behind it. If they press that order button, you just tell them okay, I've added you to the waitlist, here's a 25% discount, I'll launch in a year or something. And if you do those types of activities, it can help you find where that product market fit is before you actually raise the money if you raise that money before where that product market fit is before you actually raise the money.

Ranbir Arora: 38:17

If you raise that money before having that product market fit, the only thing that this is going to do is accelerate your worries. It's not going to speed you up finding that product market fit, because what you've now told that investor is no, no, no, it's a really good idea. I have product market fit. This is what I'm building. That investor is going to join now and you're going to have to report back to them every month and they're going to want to hear your progress in delivering that product to that customer that you promised this investor that you're building. However, that user is not going to want what you have, almost certainly, and all it's going to do is prevent you from making those pivots.

Ranbir Arora: 38:51

So, if anything, your aperture of pivots that you can make drastically become reduced from raising that funding, whereas if you don't have that pressure, ideally you're still in your daytime job, whatever you're doing, and in the evenings you're spending your time talking to customers, offering them different versions of your product sensing. Am I getting closer? Am I getting further away, or am I getting further away? Once you've got orders for that product and you know exactly what you're building, now is the time to go and raise money to go and deliver this product. Ideally, actually, you'll even find a way of delivering that product without raising capital.

Ranbir Arora: 39:26

Why do I think people chase like raising money so quickly? I think it's like a big ego thing. It's nice to tell people look at me, I raised funding. I'm not like a generic entrepreneur who says they're an entrepreneur. I actually it's kind of a little bit of a proof that I'm a serious entrepreneur. Absolutely not the case. Absolute lunatics get funded as well. That doesn't help you. If anything, it's just reducing your chances of being successful. I can concoct that.

Ranbir Arora: 39:55

So I think, if I could go back, the most sensible thing to do is keep your daytime job, be trying to find product market fit with something on the side.

Ranbir Arora: 40:04

It can be really easy to do. It's mock-ups, it's websites that look like it's selling something. But once someone presses an order, you just add them to the wait list. It might be advertising that you, instead of building an app, you build an ad that talks about your app. When someone tries to download it, you tell them okay, you've been added to the waitlist, and keep on doing this. I guarantee you the first version of your idea is not going to be the thing that you end up building Pivot on it a few times and once you have traction, ideally again try and build it without needing funding externally. But eventually, if you do raise funding after that point, your chances of success are going to be way higher than had you raised funding for just an idea, and now you're committed to building something that you have no proof for, that people even want yet so you said earlier how it's been your dream for quite a long time to be in a position you're in.

Amardeep Parmar: 40:57

What do you enjoy most about it day to day now? So if you're in this position now, you do get to have that control and you're building something which people love and people are getting such satisfaction from it. Right, it's really changing their lives. What part of that, or what which bit, do you enjoy the most of that?

Ranbir Arora: 41:16

I like really waking up every day and knowing I'm living a purposeful life, that I'm in the control of. No one can pay me any amount of money for my time Not to offend anyone, but I think of when someone sells their time for money. It's equivalent to prostitution. For me, prostitution is selling your body for money and for me it's equivalent when someone is selling that. It's even worse when you're selling something non-renewable and in prostitution it's renewable Like you're not selling something that goes away. Your life's time is non-renewable. It's the only thing you really own in the world and it's the most valuable thing you own. To sell that in exchange for someone else's money, I think is like a really big crime. So the thing I really like the most is waking up every day and knowing no one can pay me any amount of money to make me not do what I want to do today. I get to choose every day what I want to do.

Ranbir Arora: 42:11

Second thing is and this is to everyone's individual tastes, but our mission at One Day is really exciting to me it's to help people around the world who are stuck in corporate jobs doing something they don't like, turn into an entrepreneur and be able to wake up every day and do something they love, and nothing makes me feel more meaning than reading reviews of our customers, which I read on a daily basis. Like we have a channel in our group Discord server where we post these user reviews, and it's amazing to see when our users are talking about how, through using our product, working with mentors of ours, going through our experience, they end up at the other end in a more meaningful and happy place with their life. It's a really powerful way to wake to, to wake up every day. So I think those are the two most meaningful things to me.

Amardeep Parmar: 43:04

So, just before we go to quick fire questions, could you tell us what are you most proud of what you've done so far and where are you today? And then also, what are you most excited about in the future?

Ranbir Arora: 43:11

So, uh, the the thing I'm most proud of is, uh, in India last year in December, and I have a massive family. My mom has five sisters and I'm the oldest of all of them, of all of the siblings, and every day, while I was there, another one of my little siblings would call me and ask me Bea, what are you doing today, what are you doing this evening? And out of anything that I've achieved professionally, it pales in comparison to the satisfaction I got from knowing I'm really close to my little cousins. The role I enjoy most in my life is not as an entrepreneur, not as a CEO, not as a son. It's being an older brother, and this is the thing that fills me with most joy. It's being an older brother. This is the thing that fills me with most joy.

Ranbir Arora: 43:57

Second to that, I think, is overcoming resilience in my life, from coming up from a council house to now having a medium-sized company. It's not the size of the company that's important here, it's overcoming resilience. I know that I went through a lot of hardship to get here, and when I look at myself in the mirror, I see a person who I respect. I see a person with steely eyes who went through really, really rough shit at times, really rough shit. It didn't get easy and I earned his respect. That guy in the mirror can do things that I'm eventually proud of.

Ranbir Arora: 44:39

Those two things

Amardeep Parmar: 44:40

And then so we're gonna get to quick fire questions now, yeah, so first one is who are three British Asians you think are doing incredible work and you'd love to shout out?

Ranbir Arora: 44:48

First one I'd have to say is um, my friend and uh, he's a partner at Sweatcoin.

Ranbir Arora: 44:53

His name's Shaun Azam. He's currently CFO at Sweatcoin and is a co-founder of now the crypto division of Sweatcoin. Amazing young man, amazing story. He used to work at PwC. He wanted to become an entrepreneur, started his own watch company. He became a partner, sorry, he became a merchant on the sweat coin app. He would offer discounts on his watches in exchange for sweat coins and eventually we poached him, offered him to become our CFO and um, and now he's a. He's a co-founder of of the crypto division. They're doing amazing work, extremely driven again, very mission driven. He wants to create good, positive movement in the world. So so I respect him a lot. Second one is actually someone a previous employee of mine at OneDay and now he's a growth marketer at Eleven Labs, which is a British sorry, it's a unicorn that concept ventures. You had Reece Chowdhury on your podcast. They funded. It's now a unicorn, Amazing guy.

Ranbir Arora: 46:00

I often ask people like for crazy stories in their life or what's the wackiest thing they've done, and it gives me a signal. This person doesn't follow the rules, has high degrees of agency, and Rayel is probably one of the people with highest agencies that I met at uni. His friend was doing a paper on homelessness. They got into a debate about why does homelessness exist? So Rayel did possibly the craziest thing I've like ever heard of someone doing, which is as an 17 or 18 year old. He took his sleeping bag, went out underneath a bridge wherever he lived I think it's in Birmingham and just became homeless for the weekend and like just slept around homeless people, talk to them, became their friends to really understand how they got into this situation. Um, so I'd say, uh, yeah, Rayel. I'd say the second one. Um, not sure I have a third one actually.

Ranbir Arora: 46:49

Um, yeah, I'm sure I have a third one.

Amardeep Parmar: 46:51

Okay, and then, if people want to find out more about you, more about One Day, where should they go?

Ranbir Arora: 46:57

one day. org um is is our website. You can find out what we do there. We can follow the mission that that we're on at one day. io, which is our instagram handle. Uh, we're on a massive mission to create education for entrepreneurs. It's the problem I had when I was 16. It's the problem my friends and family had. Now we are already in the top 30 business schools globally by student headcount. We have almost 500 MBA members now with us. By end of next year, we'll be largest business school on the planet. We'll overtake Wharton and Harvard Business School. They have roughly 1,700 active students. So that's my mission before the end of next year and after that we'll be expanding on to launching our bachelor's product and really reforming education so it's suitable for people who want to be a little bit more in their life.

Amardeep Parmar: 47:46

And if people listen today, is there anybody that could help you on your journey there?

Ranbir Arora: 47:50

We're always hiring again. People with high degrees of agency is who we look for. So if you have a track record of being offbeat, of taking risk, of creating movement behind an idea of, it, can be yours or it can be somewhere where you work. That would be an ideal type of person to help join us on our mission.

Amardeep Parmar: 48:15

So thank you so much for coming on today. Have you got any final words to the audience?

Ranbir Arora: 48:22

I'd really love for people to give it a shot, give their dream life a go. You can do it in a very low risk fashion. You don't have to quit your day job. Keep the day job. Try and launch something on the side where possible and, if it kind of lights you up, make it something that helps other people's lives in some type of way. I think that's a sustainable source of energy. I think trying to just make money is not sustainable. Actually, I'd say it's anti-sustainable. Usually, for most people who are really money-driven that I've met, when you start a business, it's so painful that you will pay almost any amount of money to stop that pain, whereas if what drives you is something deeper than this, it's sustainable. It will last you a really, really long time. So I think a really cool way to live your life is build something that's meaningful. Build something that improves other people's lives in some way. It's the best way, not just for yourself, for sustainable happiness for you, but also for other people around you as well.

Amardeep Parmar: 49:25

Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe. See you next time.

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