38: Growth Hacking 101 and Creating Epic Courses with Mattan Griffel

Mattan Griffel wasn’t prepared for his first job. After he graduated college, a startup company asked him to be their marketer, but he didn’t know how to be a marketer. Mattan had studied philosophy and finance, but despite years of delving into the life of the mind and the management of money, he couldn’t snag a job in the financial sector. So he sat there, tasked with an entirely different field: marketing. Griffel really wasn’t prepared, so he decided to fix that. He charged into the challenge, devouring books on marketing, consuming online classes, doing everything he could to eat up as much knowledge as possible. In just a year and a half, he says, he learned more about marketing than four years at university taught him about finance. Learn voraciously. A passion for new skills can expand your opportunities and multiply your successes. Griffel’s drive to be good at whatever he did gave him the ability to successfully manage a marketing budget of half a million dollars. Now, that same drive has put Griffel at the helm of One Month, a Y Combinator-backed education startup aiming to provide what he calls a “no-BS first month of learning.” The company has created a contingent of lightweight courses that each teach the basics of a topic—ranging from Ruby on Rails to HTML to growth hacking and more—in 15 minutes per day for 30 days. It was his endeavor to gain marketing skills that exposed Griffel to entrepreneurial education outside the brick walls and stone pillars of formal schooling. Having learned from platforms like Udemy and Skillshare, he eventually began teaching for them. While instructing an in-person class on coding at General Assembly, Griffel met Chris Castiglione, with whom he would one day found One Month. In this interview you will learn: - Epic growth hacking strategies - Key lessons from a Y-Combinator backed startup - Mattan's experience at Y-Combinator - Key Entrepreneurial lessons learned along the journey - How to create powerful and valuable courses that sell - & Much more! I Need Your Help! If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!