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2025-05-04-email-response-to-artie

Subject: Re: Feedback on The Alpha Bet Brainlift

Hi Arthur,

Thanks for sharing the feedback from your conversation with Joe. I'm completely aligned with everything you mentioned and have already begun adjusting our approach accordingly.

Importantly, this iterative process also reminded me that Alpha Schools will be open the entire summer this year—a unique opportunity we absolutely must leverage.

To address your specific points:

  1. I've reviewed each initiative through the lens of "accelerating the parent journey through the funnel or providing the experience at lower cost/higher conversion." This is now explicitly built into our measurement frameworks for each initiative, including the new Summer School Experience initiative which I added precisely because the full summer opening presents such a high-impact opportunity to showcase Alpha's value and inspire parents. We're approaching every mid/lower funnel touchpoint with ruthless efficiency - no vanity metrics, just conversion improvement and cost reduction.

  2. I've incorporated the Marketing SPOVs you shared into our planning. Our entire approach now centers on dramatically reducing customer acquisition costs while simultaneously elevating the premium nature of the Alpha experience. The current CAC is too high even for a premium, early product, and the people I bring on and I will seek to demonstrate a path to reducing it by a lot. To effectively track our progress on this front, I've added a dependency in the Brainlift to collaborate with Finance and Ops by May 10th to establish current baseline funnel costs. We need these benchmarks to rigorously measure our impact.

Beyond these adjustments, I want to emphasize a few key principles guiding our work:

  • We operate on a "show, not tell" basis. Every experiment is designed to deliver tangible, measurable outcomes that either validate an approach or quickly redirect resources.

  • No one's position is guaranteed - including mine and Ron's. The entire department is effectively on trial, with everyone proving their value through results, not promises. Team members who deliver will earn increasing responsibility, budget, and ownership of outcomes.

  • Re: the Summer School experience at Alpha High, it's something I'm eager to take accountability for. With the right team, we can create an experience so compelling that it becomes our most powerful marketing asset thus far. Even with just, say, 20 or so summer program students (and we can easily have more than that if we want to), proper media capture and storytelling can inspire millions to see what education can and should be. This will do more for our funnel than the current marketing efforts so far ever could.

Overall, I couldn't be more excited about supporting the vision you and Joe have been stewarding long before I was aware of Alpha Schools. I'm grateful for the opportunity to work closely with you and humbled by the chance to help make the full potential of Alpha Schools a reality.

Let me know if you need me to make any further edits / have any comments on anything.

Best, Gary