How I Built a Company That Could Compete With Much Larger Players

One of the questions I am sometimes asked is how a relatively small company, founded by someone in his early twenties, managed to build a meaningful operation in a market populated by much larger and more established competitors.

There is a short answer to that question:

I never tried to build a smaller version of a large company. I tried to build a different kind of company.

Looking back at the journey since 2019, I believe one of my greatest advantages as an entrepreneur was that I never defined myself as a marketing person, a salesperson, a product person, a technologist, or an educator.

I learned whatever the company needed me to learn.

And over time, that became one of the fundamental principles behind the way I build businesses.

Starting Young Was a Disadvantage — Until It Became an Advantage

I started building what would eventually become Golberg Psychometry when I was around 22–23 years old.

At that age, I obviously did not have twenty years of management experience behind me. I had not previously built a large organization. There was no established playbook sitting on my desk explaining what to do next.

What I did have was an unusually high capacity and willingness to learn.

So whenever the business presented me with a problem, my response was generally the same:

Learn enough to solve it.

When I needed to understand sales, I learned sales.

When the company needed salespeople, I learned how to recruit them, train them, manage them, monitor performance, and improve the sales process.

When we needed customer service representatives, I recruited and managed them and learned how to build the processes around them.

When we needed a better learning platform, I learned enough about product, user experience, systems, and technology to define what that platform needed to do and plan its development.

When we needed growth, I learned digital marketing, funnels, landing pages, advertising, automation, analytics, messaging, and branding.

When operational complexity increased, I learned how to connect systems and processes so that information could move through the organization rather than remain trapped inside individual people.

I did not study these subjects because I wanted to collect knowledge.

I studied them because there was always another real problem that needed to be solved.

That distinction matters.

But the Business Actually Started With Something Much Simpler

Before the systems, automations, learning platforms, books, analytics, marketing funnels, and operational infrastructure, there was something much more basic.

There was me and there were students.

On a personal level, communication has always been one of my stronger abilities. I learned how to teach well, how to explain complicated ideas clearly, how to understand what the person sitting across from me was struggling with, and how to build trust.

That was enormously valuable.

But being a good teacher and communicator is still a very long way from building a complete educational operation.

And that is an important part of the story.

The first students in 2019 and 2020 did not choose us because we had the most sophisticated technology.

They did not know that one day we would build better systems.

They were not comparing the architecture of our learning platform with the architecture of a competitor's platform.

They did not enroll because I could show them an elaborate operational structure.

In many cases, they enrolled because they connected with me.

They trusted me.

They understood the way I explained things.

They felt that I cared about what happened to them.

And when they became students, I was there for them.

That was the starting point.

The challenge was what came next.

The Founder Cannot Remain the Product Forever

Personal trust can get a business started.

It cannot, by itself, build a scalable educational company.

If students initially trusted me because of the standard of teaching and support they received directly from me, then everything we built around that experience eventually had to reach the same standard.

That created a very simple but demanding question:

Can the company become as good as the experience that caused the first students to trust the founder?

The books had to reach that standard.

The recorded lessons had to reach that standard.

The written learning modules had to reach that standard.

The vocabulary-learning tools had to reach that standard.

The syllabus and study plans had to reach that standard.

The practice materials had to reach that standard.

The simulations had to reach that standard.

The explanations and solutions had to reach that standard.

The personal support system had to reach that standard.

The technology had to support that standard.

And then, once one part improved, the standard for everything else increased again.

That has essentially been an ongoing process since 2019.

The goal was never simply to add more features.

The goal was to make sure that every part of the student's experience reflected the same level of thought.

And the standard has continued to rise from year to year.

The Advantage of Seeing the Entire System

There are excellent entrepreneurs who are primarily marketers.

Others come from finance.

Some are exceptional technologists.

Others are outstanding salespeople or product builders.

There is nothing inherently superior about one profile.

My path developed differently.

I wanted to understand the entire chain.

When a potential student sees an advertisement for Golberg for the first time, a process has already begun.

What did that person see?

What message did we communicate?

Why would they click?

Where do they arrive?

What happens when they leave their details?

Which systems are triggered?

What information do we collect?

When does a human being enter the process?

What happens during the sales conversation?

What does the potential student understand about our philosophy before deciding whether to enroll?

What happens immediately after enrollment?

How is the student onboarded?

What do they see on their first day?

How is their learning plan created?

How does the platform guide them?

What does the team know about their progress?

What happens when they struggle?

When should technology respond, and when should a human intervene?

What happens during simulations?

How do we use their own performance data?

And finally, what does the student understand about the journey when it ends?

From inside a company, those questions might belong to different departments:

Marketing.

Sales.

Customer service.

Product.

Technology.

Pedagogy.

Operations.

Brand.

But the customer does not experience departments.

The customer experiences one company.

So I learned to think about it as one system.

I Did Not Just Build a Psychometric Course

The educational content is obviously at the heart of an educational company.

But a serious digital learning product is much more than a collection of lessons.

Someone has to design the learning platform.

Someone has to determine how students move through it.

Someone has to design the onboarding process.

Someone has to decide what should be automated and what should remain human.

Someone has to build the customer-service workflows.

Someone has to define the relationship between instructors and students.

Someone has to create the monitoring systems.

Someone has to determine how performance information becomes an intervention.

Someone has to design the marketing funnel.

Someone has to protect the brand.

Someone has to make sure that the promise made in an advertisement is connected to what happens three months later when the student is preparing for the actual exam.

Throughout the years, I have been deeply involved in almost every one of these layers.

That does not mean that I personally write every line of code, answer every service request, design every graphic, or perform every function in the company.

That would not be entrepreneurship. Eventually, it would become a bottleneck.

The important capability is different:

I want to understand every critical system well enough to define it, evaluate it, improve it, recruit the right people around it, and understand how it connects to everything else.

That is a very different skill from simply "doing everything yourself."

Marketing Changed the Economics of Building a Small Company

I started becoming deeply interested in digital marketing around 2016–2017.

By 2018–2019, it had become increasingly important to the way I thought about business.

Digital advertising, landing pages, video, automation, analytics, CRM systems, and marketing funnels were giving relatively small companies access to capabilities that historically had been much harder to build.

One influence on my thinking was Russell Brunson, co-founder of ClickFunnels, and the broader philosophy of building funnels around progressive value rather than simply asking a stranger to purchase immediately.

I adapted that idea to education in a way that made sense to me.

Instead of approaching prospective students and immediately trying to convince them to buy a course, I wanted them to experience the way I thought first.

That became the logic behind our free training.

Before I asked someone to buy my method, I wanted to show them the method.

A student could see me teach.

They could hear how I approached the psychometric exam.

They could understand the reasoning behind the methodology.

They could receive something useful before becoming a customer.

Then we could talk.

If they connected with the approach, great.

If they did not, that was also useful information.

Over time, I realized that this was much more than a marketing technique.

It was a filtering mechanism.

Today, We Are Not Trying to Convince Everyone

As the company matured, selling actually became conceptually easier.

Not because every person is easier to persuade.

Because I became less interested in persuading everyone.

Today, when a prospective student speaks with us, a large part of the conversation is about explaining how we believe learning should work.

We believe the student should be at the center of the process.

We believe different students progress differently.

We believe the learning system should respond to the individual rather than forcing every individual through exactly the same experience.

We believe performance should be monitored.

We believe students should learn from their own mistakes rather than simply consume more explanations.

We believe students need to develop the ability to work independently.

And we believe our job is to support that independence rather than replace it.

We do not do the work instead of the student. We build the conditions in which the student can learn to do the work better.

We guide.

We monitor.

We support.

We intervene when intervention creates value.

But the ability ultimately has to belong to the student.

Some people hear that philosophy and immediately connect with it.

Others want something different.

That is okay.

A strong business does not necessarily need every possible customer.

It needs enough of the right customers.

That Is Also Why Referrals Matter Differently to Me

The same principle applies when students arrive through friends.

Naturally, we want students and families who had a good experience to recommend us.

But I do not think a recommendation should mean:

"Send everyone you know to Golberg."

It should mean:

"If you know someone for whom this way of learning makes sense, tell them about it."

A friend may introduce someone to us.

A family member may recommend us.

Someone else may discover us through Google, an advertisement, a video, or a piece of content.

The origin matters less than what happens next.

Eventually, the person encounters the philosophy.

And values have an interesting property: when they are genuine, they can connect organically regardless of how the relationship started.

Someone can hear about us from their best friend and decide the methodology is not right for them.

Someone else can encounter us through an advertisement with no prior relationship at all and immediately feel that the philosophy makes sense.

Both outcomes are legitimate.

I would rather build a company with a clear educational philosophy that is extremely meaningful to the right students than dilute that philosophy in an attempt to be moderately attractive to everyone.

Then COVID Accelerated a Change That Had Already Started

In 2020, the environment changed dramatically.

COVID forced students, teachers, employees, businesses, and institutions around the world to become comfortable with remote interaction at extraordinary speed.

For a company already interested in digital education, this accelerated something important.

Suddenly, learning from home no longer required the same conceptual explanation.

People had used Zoom.

They had studied through screens.

They had received professional services remotely.

They had experienced digital workflows because, for a period of time, they had no alternative.

The psychological barrier became lower.

But I never thought the interesting question was simply:

Can we move a classroom onto the internet?

That is the least interesting version of digital education.

The more interesting question is:

What can we build digitally that would be difficult to build in exactly the same way inside a traditional classroom?

Individual pacing.

Personal task plans.

Performance monitoring.

Large libraries of content.

Repeated access to explanations.

Data.

Automation.

Structured error analysis.

Different interventions for different students.

A combination of independent learning and human support.

The ability for a student to consume one type of material in one format and another type in a different format.

The possibility of designing an educational journey rather than merely scheduling lessons.

That, to me, is where digital education becomes genuinely interesting.

Then AI Became Another Accelerator

A few years later, another technological shift arrived.

The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence beginning in 2022–2023 dramatically reduced the friction involved in many forms of knowledge work.

For me, the important idea was never that AI would somehow "run the company."

It was almost the opposite.

AI increases the leverage of a person who already knows what he wants to build.

Research can become faster.

Prototypes can become faster.

Specifications can be developed and challenged faster.

Information can be processed faster.

Content workflows can become faster.

Data can be analyzed faster.

Ideas can be tested faster.

Routine work can be reduced.

The distance between an idea and something you can actually examine becomes shorter.

This matters enormously for smaller companies.

Things That Once Required a Large Company No Longer Always Require a Large Company

Twenty years ago, building a sophisticated digital educational operation could require substantially more capital and technical infrastructure before the first customer ever received the product.

Development.

Hosting infrastructure.

Payment systems.

CRM.

Email infrastructure.

Video delivery.

Analytics.

Automation.

Design.

Content production.

Customer support systems.

Today, cloud infrastructure, SaaS platforms, APIs, no-code and low-code tools, and increasingly AI make it possible to assemble sophisticated systems with much smaller teams and dramatically shorter development cycles.

That does not mean building a great company has become easy.

In some ways, expectations have increased.

What has changed is the relationship between resources and capability.

The amount of capital required to test and implement an idea has fallen, while the importance of knowing what to build has increased.

For a small company with strong execution capabilities, that is an enormous opportunity.

So How Can a Small Company Compete With Much Larger Companies?

Not by trying to become larger than them overnight.

If another company has more employees, more capital, more offices, and decades of history, a small company will probably lose a competition based purely on who has more.

But size is only one type of advantage.

A smaller organization can make decisions faster.

It can modify a product faster.

It can identify something happening in customer service and turn it into a product improvement without passing through multiple management layers.

It can test a message quickly.

It can identify a recurring problem among students and design an intervention around it.

It can keep product, pedagogy, marketing, service, and technology unusually close to one another.

And when the founder understands all of those functions, information can travel very quickly.

A comment from a student can become a product hypothesis.

A sales objection can reveal a communication problem.

A support question can reveal a flaw in onboarding.

Performance data can reveal a pedagogical problem.

A pedagogical insight can become a new feature.

A feature can change the way the product is marketed.

The advantage is not simply being small. The advantage is being integrated.

My Communication Skills Helped Bridge the Gap

There is another part of this story that I think is important to acknowledge.

Systems alone do not build trust.

Technology alone does not make students feel understood.

And especially in the early years, my interpersonal abilities helped bridge the enormous gap between the company we were and the company I wanted us to become.

I could communicate.

I could teach.

I could explain difficult things simply.

I could listen to students.

I could understand what they meant even when they did not necessarily know how to articulate the problem themselves.

I could create trust.

That mattered enormously when we were small.

In 2019 and 2020, students could forgive the fact that everything around the educational experience was not yet as sophisticated as it would eventually become because they trusted the person delivering that experience.

But that created a responsibility.

If the personal experience was excellent, the infrastructure eventually had to become excellent too.

And that is what we have spent years building.

Every Year Raised the Standard for the Next

This is perhaps one of the strangest things about building a company.

At the beginning, solving a problem feels like progress.

Later, solving that problem simply reveals the next standard.

Once the recorded lessons improved, the written materials had to match them.

Once the books improved, the solutions had to match the books.

Once the solutions improved, the learning platform had to present them properly.

Once the platform improved, onboarding had to prepare students to use it correctly.

Once monitoring improved, we had to become better at deciding when and how to intervene.

Once the educational methodology became clearer, our marketing needed to explain it more accurately.

Once the marketing became more precise, the product had to make sure that the promise and the actual experience remained aligned.

So the company did not evolve through one giant breakthrough.

It evolved through successive increases in standards.

What seemed excellent in 2020 would not necessarily satisfy me today.

And I hope that what satisfies me today will not satisfy me several years from now.

Seven Years Later, I Am Not the Same Founder

We are now approaching seven years of activity since 2019.

When I think about that, I find it slightly funny.

Seven years is long enough to have made an enormous number of mistakes, solved an enormous number of problems, worked with many students and employees, built systems, replaced systems, changed assumptions, and learned what I would never have been able to learn from a business book.

But it still feels like we have only started.

At 30, I am obviously not the same person who began this journey at 22 or 23.

I make decisions differently.

I understand people differently.

I understand organizations differently.

I understand technology differently.

I understand education differently.

My ability to evaluate opportunities has changed.

My ability to identify unnecessary complexity has changed.

My ability to onboard students has improved.

My ability to communicate our philosophy has improved.

And perhaps most importantly, I have accumulated evidence that when I encounter something I do not yet understand, I can learn it.

That creates a very different relationship with problems.

I Still Do Not Believe My Job Is to "Know Everything"

From the outside, someone might look at the list and conclude that I do everything:

Marketing.

Sales.

Technology.

Product.

Education.

Customer service.

Operations.

Branding.

Recruitment.

Strategy.

Finance.

But "knowing everything" is not how I think about it.

There are specialists who know far more than I do within their individual domains, and a serious company needs excellent professionals.

I am not trying to replace them.

The entrepreneurial skill I value is different.

I want to understand enough about every critical part of the business that I can ask good questions, recognize problems, define what needs to be built, understand the trade-offs, choose the right people, and connect their work to the larger system.

Sometimes that means learning enough to do something myself.

Sometimes it means building the first version myself so that I understand the problem.

Sometimes it means recruiting someone.

Sometimes it means outsourcing to a specialist.

Sometimes it means automating a process entirely.

The objective is not to prove that the founder can perform every task.

The objective is to make sure the company can.

The Future of Education Is Not Simply "Online"

I believe this distinction will become increasingly important.

I do not think the future of education is simply recorded videos instead of classrooms.

That is too shallow.

I think the future is more individualized, more measurable, more adaptive, and more intelligently supported learning.

The student should increasingly be at the center of the architecture.

The system should know what the student has done.

The student should understand his or her own mistakes.

Different students should not necessarily receive identical interventions at identical times.

Human instructors should spend more of their time on situations where human judgment, explanation, encouragement, diagnosis, and strategy actually matter.

Technology should handle what technology does better.

Humans should handle what humans do better.

And students should gradually become less dependent on both.

That last point is particularly important to me.

The purpose of a great educational system is not to make the student need the system forever. It is to develop a student who can increasingly perform without it.

We build the path.

The student builds the ability.

The Technology Will Keep Changing. The Core Skill Will Not.

The tools I used in 2019 are not the same tools available today.

COVID accelerated digital adoption.

AI accelerated knowledge work.

The next technological shift will create another set of possibilities.

So I do not believe the durable competitive advantage is knowing how to use one particular advertising platform, AI model, CRM, website builder, or automation tool.

Those things change.

Platforms change.

Distribution channels change.

Technology changes.

Customer behavior changes.

The durable capability is something else:

Learn quickly. Understand systems. Identify opportunities. Communicate clearly. Work with people. Build trust. Solve real problems. Connect technology, product, operations, and human behavior into something that works.

That is the capability that allowed me to begin building Golberg Psychometry in my early twenties.

It is the capability that allowed the company to continue evolving as the environment changed.

And it is the capability I expect to rely on for whatever comes next.

In Many Ways, We Have Only Just Started

When someone asks me how I managed to build an operation that could compete in a market with much larger companies, I do not think there was one secret.

It was not one advertisement.

It was not one funnel.

It was not one technology.

It was not one course.

It was not one brilliant strategic decision.

It was the accumulation of thousands of decisions and the willingness to repeatedly enter areas I did not yet understand.

The first students trusted me personally.

Then the teaching had to justify that trust.

Then the books had to reach the standard of the teaching.

Then the digital content had to reach the standard of the books.

Then the platform had to reach the standard of the content.

Then the support system had to reach the standard of the platform.

Then the data, simulations, solutions, onboarding, marketing, and operations had to become part of the same standard.

And the standard kept moving.

That is still happening.

Today, at 30, I have considerably more experience than the 22- or 23-year-old who started building this company.

But I hope one thing has not changed.

When there is a new challenge, I still want to understand it.

When there is a problem, I still want to solve it.

When there is a goal that seems difficult, I still want to work backwards until I understand what would have to be true to reach it.

There are still many things I want to build.

There are still parts of the company that can become significantly better.

There are technologies we have barely begun to use.

There are educational ideas we have not yet implemented.

There are systems that will look very different several years from now.

And there are undoubtedly problems ahead that I do not yet know how to solve.

That does not bother me very much.

Because if the first seven years taught me anything, it is that I do not need to know today how to solve every problem I will encounter tomorrow.

I need to know that when I encounter it, I will learn.

And perhaps that is the simplest answer to the original question.

I did not compete with larger companies by trying to build what they had with fewer resources.

I learned every part of the system that I needed to understand, built around a philosophy I genuinely believed in, used technology to increase what a small organization could accomplish, and kept raising the standard as the company grew.

Almost seven years later, I do not see that as the story of what I built.

I see it as the foundation for what comes next.

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