$1 Million Business Teaching Parents How To Teach

Spencer RussellFounder of Toddlers Can Read $1 million business valuation
Published October 30, 2023 by Niall DohertyContributor: Fardeen Khan

Spencer Russell built a thriving online business in an unusual niche: teaching toddlers to read

According to a recent interview, Spencer has built his Toddlers Can Read brand into a 7-figure business in just 2 years

He mainly sells courses – see them all here – that teach parents how to teach their children.

Spencer was heavily influenced by the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, which recommends focusing your entrepreneurial efforts at the intersection of three criteria

Something you can be the best in the world atSomething you’re excited to doSomething that can provide for your family

Spencer had already taught his 2-year-old son how to read, and his market research looked promising…

he found very few [online courses] tailored specifically to building early reading skills for the toddler demographic.

Despite the massive market of anxious parents eager to prepare their children for kindergarten and beyond, this narrow sub-niche appeared wide open.

After an intensive period of learning about online marketing and course creation…

Spencer pieced together a basic course and began collecting pre-orders at $49… He promoted it verbally to his network of friends and family.

But he didn’t see any sales coming in for the first few days

From the YouTube version of the interview…

I cried in that period of 3 or 4 days of no sales… but to me there was never this concept of this is going to fail in general. It’s just, this launch didn’t work, this strategy didn’t work.

… it sucks, and then you bounce back. You’re like, okay, what do I do next, what’s the thing I need to do to fix this and make sales.

Spencer ended up making 30+ pre-sales, and that was enough to get some feedback and figure out how to improve…

My takeaway from that was I need to make it more engaging and make it easier to access.

He revamped the course for mobile devices and recorded higher quality videos, optimizing the experience for busy parents on the go

Spencer also got busy building an audience on social media, particularly TikTok.

The 17th video he posted on TikTok went viral, and has racked up 1.8 million views to date

Spencer’s channel now has more than 900K subscribers and 7 million likes.

Sounds like he has spent a lot of time getting to know the TikTok algorithm…

If a particular video underperformed, Spencer broke down the data to determine exactly why.

“How many people were still watching after one second? What was the angle? Was there a kid in the shot? Where were the captions? Was it a negative hook?”

A nice productivity hack from Spencer is the “11am rule”…

he ignores messages before 11:00am to reserve mornings for strategic work. This discipline enables him to effectively scale the business.

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