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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

647: Tai Lopez Owns 50% of $89/mo MentorBox.com, 800 Units, $80k In Initial Test for Self Help Box with CEO Alex Mehr

02 May 2017

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0.031 - 9.041 Nathan Latka

This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.

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Chapter 2: What key factors influenced Alex Mehr's decision to keep Zoosk independent?

9.521 - 19.271 Nathan Latka

You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million.

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Chapter 3: How did Alex Mehr and his co-founder manage their partnership at Zoosk?

19.411 - 27.54 Nathan Latka

He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.

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Chapter 4: What unique concept does MentorBox offer for self-education?

27.52 - 43.143 Nathan Latka

I just finished traveling Southeast Asia for 41 days, and I usually always get sick when I travel, and quite frankly, eating is difficult for me. It's hard to find a restaurant, and I'm spoiled in Austin with my personal chef. Well, I took these little packets with me this time, 30 of them, in my carry-on suitcase.

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Chapter 5: How did Tai Lopez and Alex Mehr test the market for MentorBox?

43.203 - 50.273 Nathan Latka

They kept me totally healthy with 11 different secret ingredients. You can see them at nathanlaca.com forward slash juice.

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Chapter 6: What are the pricing and retention strategies for MentorBox?

50.534 - 54.76 Nathan Latka

I'll tell you more later on in the show. That's nathanlaca.com forward slash juice.

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Chapter 7: How does MentorBox's business model ensure sustainability?

54.74 - 65.936 Nathan Latka

This is episode 647. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Peter Aronson of Bailu, which lets Mexicans safely drink tap water for $150. See how he does it.

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Chapter 8: What challenges did Alex face in growing MentorBox's customer base?

66.457 - 82.08 Nathan Latka

Good morning, guys. My guest this morning is Alex Mayer. He is the founder of Zoosk, which filed to go public in 2014, did hundreds of millions in revenue. We'll talk about that. But more importantly, his current venture is called MentorBox, a kind of a unique new service.

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82.06 - 106.043 Nathan Latka

self-help concept before all of that he was an aerospace scientist at nasa a lot of ground to cover alex are you ready to take us to the top ready thanks for having me you bet okay so let's before we get to mentor box and kind of this this new business let's talk about zeus briefly so you decide to file to go public in 2014 i think the prior year did what 180 million bucks in revenue is that accurate

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106.36 - 118.271 Nathan Latka

Um, yeah, 200 actually. 200. So why make, why make the decision to go public? And then we'll talk about why that ultimately didn't work out instead of going and selling to a guy, you know, like Barry at, at IAC.

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120.073 - 146.449 Alex Mehr

Yeah. So, I mean, um, we, we had very high ambitions, ambitions, and one of the things that we really cared about was staying independent so that we could, uh, execute on the mission of the company. Um, and, uh, you know, I'm being bought by a company like I see, obviously that was not a preferred choice, um, for us. So that's the main reason we wanted to stay independent.

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147.17 - 156.165 Nathan Latka

Got it. And then take us through what happened there. So you filed for the IPO, you had big ambitions and ultimately you canceled it in December that year. What happened?

157.748 - 182.25 Alex Mehr

Uh, yeah. So again, you know, uh, Your audience is probably familiar. When you go public, you make projections about the growth rate and what you want to do financially on a quarter-by-quarter basis. So we went through those motions, and end of the day, we decided that in order to run a sustainable, long-term, profitable company,

182.517 - 207.871 Alex Mehr

what we wanted to do and what the public market expected from us, expected from, frankly, other tech companies that were going public were different. So, for example, as one example, we didn't want to push the company too hard on delivering massive quarter over quarter growth. That is something that we cared about, but not as much at the time.

208.232 - 217.524 Alex Mehr

And most importantly, not at the expense of other metrics that matter to us. So we decided it was just basically not a fit. So we decided to pull back.

218.165 - 227.037 Nathan Latka

And it would be remiss not to talk about kind of how you grew that business. It's not every day you talk to someone kind of in the dating space that's grown a $200 million business. What year did you launch that company in?

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