Sam Ovens and the classroom that escaped the course

Sam Ovens once had a bed and a desk where the family cars might otherwise have gone. He was building SnapInspect from his parents’ garage in New Zealand. The accommodation was economical. The business was more demanding: property managers needed to inspect rental homes, take photographs and produce reports, and Ovens wanted software to make that work easier. A garage can reduce the rent. It cannot persuade a stranger to buy an app.

His early advantage was a willingness to ask rather unglamorous questions. What did the working day look like? Which task took too long? Which problem mattered enough to pay someone to remove it? He was learning through The Foundation, an entrepreneurship program, and talking to prospective customers before commissioning the solution. In his 2012 account, he pre-sold the idea to twelve companies before the software was built.

The sequence matters. A founder can spend months polishing an answer to a question nobody asked. Ovens had already experienced failed ventures. This time, people doing the work helped define the product. Property inspection supplied a narrow enough problem to examine closely. There were photographs, checklists and reports, rather than the flattering possibility that absolutely everyone might be a customer.

By the following interview, in 2013, he described a first version with fifteen paying customers and about $2,500 in monthly revenue. Development continued, including work needed to serve larger customers. The early sale had opened the door; it had hardly finished the house. His story begins with that distinction between proving a need and supplying something people can keep using.

A tiny bin, a very direct pitch

Ovens also sold digital marketing services. One customer-acquisition tactic had the subtlety of a practical joke: send a business a miniature rubbish bin with its Yellow Pages advertisement inside. The accompanying letter argued that its advertising money could be spent more effectively online. As an opening move, it was difficult to mistake for an invitation to discuss stationery.

Teaching followed the service work. Ovens recalled another entrepreneur, Stanley, paying him $1,000 to explain his approach. He taught over Skype, recorded the calls and shared those recordings through Dropbox with subsequent buyers. A course business began with somebody asking for help and a folder that could be shared.

That modest first package is a useful corrective to the finished appearance of an education business. The lesson existed because somebody wanted to use it. The product could then improve around the questions people brought back. The small bin was a bid for attention; the recordings gave interested people something to work through.

Consulting.com became the more formal expression of that business. Its programs taught people how to start and grow consulting practices. The move from doing work to teaching it changed Ovens’s position: he was now responsible for making an approach understandable to people who lacked his experience. Instructions had to survive contact with someone else’s working day.

A name on the list, a preference for questions

In 2017, Ovens appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list, in Industry, Manufacturing & Energy. The classification was a slightly unexpected address for an online education entrepreneur. The underlying story was more straightforward: a New Zealander had left a corporate job and college, built a business from home and taken his training operation overseas.

The company had offices in New York and Dublin. Those locations marked a considerable geographical change from the garage. They also showed the portability of the work. A training program could travel farther than its teacher, although selling it abroad did not relieve him of the obligation to make it useful.

Ovens’s public manner was less expansive than the familiar image of a business coach might suggest. He described himself as “pretty introverted and shy.” His preference for questions made sense in that light. Listening allowed him to find something concrete to work on without having to dominate every conversation.

He has also described a contrarian streak. Asked about productivity in 2016, he connected it with resisting conventional assumptions; asked about decisions, he favoured examining multiple perspectives. Those are self-descriptions, rather than a personality test administered at a distance. They fit the recurring move in his career: inspect a familiar arrangement closely enough to notice where it might be changed.

There is a difference between enjoying an unconventional idea and accepting the work it creates. Ovens’s early interviews contain plenty of the latter. Software needed further development after its first customers arrived. Teaching needed refinement after people bought the recordings. Each success brought a new set of questions, which is a less photogenic form of progress than a list or an office address.

“I’m pretty introverted and shy.”

Sam Ovens, 2017

The interesting part happened between lessons

While operating Consulting.com, Ovens noticed how much people valued the community around the material. Members were active in discussion and formed relationships that outlasted the course. In his conversation with community consultant Shana Lynn, the emphasis fell on those interactions: people helping one another, comparing experiences and making progress together.

A course gives its author a place to put knowledge. A discussion gives a learner somewhere to bring the part that remains confusing. The two activities have different rhythms. A lesson can be recorded once; a reply belongs to a particular person with a particular difficulty. Combining them creates a different responsibility for the person running the business.

The implication for Ovens was substantial. Once you notice that members value one another, the teacher’s performance ceases to explain the whole experience. A carefully prepared lesson may bring people through the door. What they do after arriving deserves attention too. The founder who had built a business around instruction began concentrating on the space around it.

This also changes the meaning of a successful education product. Completion is one possible measure. Returning to ask a useful question, answering somebody else’s question or finding a collaborator are other kinds of activity. None can be manufactured simply by adding another hour of video. A classroom needs pupils with reasons to speak, and a host who makes the conversation possible.

Building the room

Skool was founded in 2019 by Ovens and Daniel Kang. Ovens is CEO; Kang is CTO. That pairing puts the commercial and technical work alongside each other in the founding story. Ovens had previously commissioned software without being able to code it himself. His next platform again depended on turning a view of what people needed into a working product.

Skool brings community, courses and events into one platform. Hosts can run free or paid communities and charge subscriptions or sell courses. The assortment is deliberate: conversation has somewhere to happen, teaching has somewhere to live and events give members a reason to turn up at the same time. The proposition is easier to understand when described as a place people use together.

Its potential hosts extend beyond the consulting audience that knew Ovens first. Creators, artists, hobbyists and experts can organise around an interest. That broadens the subject matter while keeping the organising idea recognisable. Someone cares enough about a topic to gather people; other people care enough to join them.

Ovens’s own Skool profile places him in Los Angeles and identifies him simply as CEO. It also points to Skoolers, his community for community owners. The invitation is to build communities together. There is something pleasingly circular about that arrangement: the person selling a room uses a room to talk with the people who run rooms.

The circle has a practical purpose. A host is also a user, with questions about getting people to return, participate and find value. Bringing hosts together gives those questions a shared setting. The platform’s premise can be observed in its founder’s own activity, rather than confined to a description of its features.

Company in the room

In 2024, Alex Hormozi partnered with Skool to create The Skool Games. The name gives the commercial side of community building an explicit competitive frame. Skoolers describes competitions and leaderboards showing earnings by category, alongside training, live calls and meetups. There are different reasons to turn up: learn something, meet somebody, or see where you stand.

The event photograph catches Ovens on the left and Hormozi on the right, with a fellow attendee between them. The clothes are casual, the light is purple and the company name is printed across Hormozi’s shirt. A business gathering appears to have negotiated a ceasefire with the dress code.

The image also makes the word community pleasantly literal. Software is generally discussed through screens and diagrams; here are people standing together. Skoolers includes a member map and meetups around the world. The online gathering can lead to an offline one, with all the ordinary pleasures of meeting somebody who already understands what you are working on.

For Ovens, that is a different kind of public position from teaching alone. Kang shares the founding story; Hormozi shares this later initiative; hosts supply the subjects and much of the activity. The platform’s usefulness depends on what others choose to do inside it. A founder can set the conditions, but the conversation requires company.

A caddie, a rock, and the work still ahead

One earlier Ovens anecdote takes place far from a laptop. In 2016, he described spending $100 on a caddie at Bethpage Black, finding the advice valuable and leaving a generous tip. The consultant was quite happy to be consulted. A golf course provides unusually prompt feedback on whether guidance has been useful.

His book recommendation was Randy Komisar’s The Monk and the Riddle, which he associated with pursuing personal satisfaction alongside financial reward. That choice adds a little texture to the business biography. There is room in his stated interests for how work feels as well as what it earns, even when his products address very commercial questions.

Later interviews have kept both sides in view. Jonathan Courtney published a conversation with him in September 2025. A December episode of Skool Stories promised discussion of community building and the mysterious rock Ovens keeps in his pocket. It is a charmingly tangible accessory for someone whose work has largely become software. The episode gives the curiosity a place beside the business.

In July 2026, he sat down with Cole Gordon for a longer discussion covering engagement, Skool’s origins, discovery, product design and company structure. Those subjects suggest the range of work now attached to his title. A platform must attract people, give them reasons to participate and continue making decisions about the experience it offers.

The aspiration running through his community work is to give people a place to connect around shared interests and build businesses there. The garage story is useful because it keeps that ambition concrete. Ovens began by asking people about an awkward part of their day. He later found that the people taking his lessons had much to offer each other. Skool gives that exchange a home. What happens in the room remains the interesting part.