Nicolás Forero

A current parent wants to refer their neighbor. They know your school is great. Then they try to explain why. "Um, the kids are happy. The teachers are nice. It is different somehow." They cannot articulate it. The neighbor loses interest. Your best marketing asset is useless because you never gave them the language to articulate what you are. Word of mouth amplifies what is already clear.

I burned out so badly that my cortisol levels reversed. I'd fall asleep at dinner and wake up at 3 a.m. ready to fight. In 2025, I was running marketing for The Socratic Experience, doing a master's in liberal arts, reading 100 books a year, producing YouTube videos, re-studying economics, and building the foundation of what will one day be a family of more than 2 between my partner and I. I worked weekends. I worked holidays. I had ideas at 1 a.m. and executed on them instead of sleeping. Seven months in, my body quit. My cortisol levels didn't just drop. They flipped. I'd wake up exhausted and spend the entire day fighting sleep. Then at 9 p.m., I'd get a surge of energy. At 3 a.m., I'd bolt awake with enough adrenaline to run a marathon. I fell asleep at barbecues. I fell asleep at family dinners. I fell asleep while my partner was talking to me. It took months before I saw a doctor, and the only reason I finally went was that my partner kept pushing me. She didn't accept my excuse that "it can wait." I'm sharing this because I know school founders live this. You're the founder, the recruiter, the marketer, the teacher, the accountant. You're running on conviction and caffeine, and you're telling yourself the exhaustion is temporary. It compounds. Slowly at first, then all at once. The founders who build schools that last 20 years are the ones who figure out which roles to delegate before their body makes the decision for them.

Being first is a differentiating idea. The first brand in a category gets to own the category in people's minds. Heineken was the first imported beer. Xerox was the first copier. Sun Maid was the first raisin brand. Decades later, they still lead. If you cannot be first in your category, create a new one. The first virtual school for gifted middle schoolers. The first microschool for entrepreneurs. The first learning pod for families who travel. Narrowing your focus lets you be first in something. Being first in something beats being fifth in everything.

21 states now offer education savings accounts. That is $7K to $10K per student that families can spend however they choose. The money is flowing. But almost no alt-ed school is positioned to capture it. Schools do not have a clear story about why an ESA family should pick them. Without clarity, new funding just flows to whoever had the clearest message first.

I was making $0/month and giving marketing advice to business owners on Instagram. They listened. At 19, I'd never had a real job. I was a broke college student in Medellín, eating rice and eggs most days. And I was posting Instagram carousels about digital marketing. Some people actually found it valuable. I was getting 40 to 120 comments per post. Business owners were responding to my DMs. A 40-year-old agency founder hired me to design carousels for him. Why did any of this work? Because I had zero identity in the business world. No reputation to protect. No audience to disappoint. So I just posted what I was learning without filtering it through the lens of "what will people think." I've watched school founders do the opposite. They've got 20 years of educational expertise, a thriving school community, and genuine wisdom to share. And they post nothing. Because they're terrified of looking unprofessional. Meanwhile, the parents they're trying to reach are scrolling past polished content from schools that have half the substance. The founders who win enrollment aren't the most credentialed. They're the ones willing to show up before they feel ready.

In 2023, I decided not to work for a year. In the months that followed, I questioned everything about how I'd been spending my time. By conventional measures, I'd been successful. I started working at nineteen. By twenty-two, I'd helped companies generate millions in revenue, working remotely from Lisbon and Mexico City with startups in California and New York. None of it felt like enough. Someone from St. John's College told me to talk to Michael Strong. Within minutes of our first conversation, I understood why people who work with him stay for decades. Here was someone who had spent thirty-five years taking young people who were anxious, disengaged, and depressed and helping them become happy, self-directed, and whole. Not training them for test scores. Developing them as complete human beings. I joined his school as an executive. I shadowed his classes. I kept notes on everything he said across decades of writing, podcasts, and interviews. Those notes became Raising Free Learners. 1,000 people have it already. If you want a copy, comment "book" below.

When you are helping a founder succeed, you are not just working with them. You are working against their investors' skepticism, the girl who rejected them at lunch, the bad night of sleep they had, the weather, the competing ideas for other businesses dancing in their head. People are always fighting invisible wars. Most help does not account for this.

Started boxing in December 2025. I have not thought for a single moment about rushing into sparring. My brain is worth too much to damage it. I am equally scared of a 15-year-old or a 40-year-old in the ring.

At 21, a top content marketing agency hired me. We wrote articles for Google, Amazon, and Spotify. US salary at 21, putting me in the top 1% of Colombian earners. From saltine crackers and cheese for breakfast to salaries that changed what was possible. It was by far the most "felt" income bracket jump I've ever experienced.

Gary Vaynerchuk distinguishes between two types of social media content. One builds an audience. The other wastes time. In Day Trading Attention, he calls it strategic organic content. The goal is not just to post. The goal is to post content that people actually want to consume. This requires understanding what he calls platforms and culture. Do you know how to speak to the specific cohort you are trying to reach? Do you know what they are paying attention to? Do you know their common behaviors as consumers? I see many alternative education providers posting content that matters to them rather than content that matters to parents. Philosophy of education. Pedagogy debates. Celebration of learning moments. These posts feel meaningful to the founder. They do not stop the scroll for a parent who does not yet know the program exists. Strategic content meets the parent where they are. It addresses the frustration they feel right now. It names the problem they are trying to solve. It demonstrates that someone understands their situation. Only after that connection is established does the audience care about your philosophy or approach. Vaynerchuk recommends starting with the culture of your cohort and working backward to the content. What are they already talking about? What are they already worried about?

The budget meeting happens. Marketing costs $15,000 a quarter. You do not have $15,000. So you ask your teachers: Can you post on Instagram? Can you tell parents why your classroom is different? Teachers did not sign up to be marketers. When you ask them to fill a role they did not apply for, focus on fragments. Your message becomes scattered instead of a coherent story.

Some weeks in college, I saved money for five straight days just to afford a single piece of cheese bread that cost one dollar. That was the constraint I lived inside while simultaneously self-teaching myself marketing through projects with zero revenue. Success and poverty coexisted in the same week. I was broke and building at the same time. One did not invalidate the other.

Website traffic dropped when we cut paid ads. Exactly as expected, and still uncomfortable. You feel the absence of paid traffic in real time. Organic growth, especially if you are starting out, takes months to reach the same level of qualified demand. That patience period is where most education companies lose their nerve and go back to spending. We didn't. The organic growth, ROI, and cost efficiency eventually exceeded the paid traffic it replaced.

The better I get at documented processes with AI, the faster results arrive. This speed creates an illusion that the work is not valuable. I have seen it happen to marketers, salespeople, and HR professionals. They create winning work in five minutes and do not publish it because it feels cheap. The actual trap is confusing speed with worthlessness. Fast work is still good work.

When I was 23, I turned down a consulting retainer that would have doubled my income. I told myself I was being principled. The real reason was muddier than that. Somewhere in my early twenties, I'd absorbed the idea that people who chase money become hollow. I'd seen it among the executives at my university who couldn't afford a vacation despite their high salaries. So I associated ambition with losing something essential. And every time a big opportunity showed up, I'd find a reason to pass. I didn't diagnose this until years later, during a stretch of journaling where I mapped my beliefs about money to the decisions I'd actually made. The pattern was obvious once I looked at it on paper. School founders carry their own version of this. "If we market aggressively, families will think we're desperate." Or: "If we raise tuition, we'll lose the families who believed in us first." These sound like a strategy. They're usually unexamined beliefs wearing a strategy costume. The companies I've helped grow fastest are the ones where the founder was willing to write down what they believe about money, growth, and visibility, then ask: "Is this still true, or am I just comfortable with it?"

When I was twenty, I did SEO work. I would send thousands of messages. Hey, I do SEO. Can you let me do it for your page? If I get results, you can pay me. Many people said yes. Now I speak to friends at twenty-six, twenty-seven. They are still afraid to make an ask. To me, it is natural. Asking is not shameful. If they ignore me, I never sent it. If they respond, that is a huge win. All wins. No overhead. Just ask.

One of our best-performing ad sets featured four different creatives targeting the same audience, each conveying a different version of the same core message. The winning creative was a single sentence about something parents actually fear, written in about 10 seconds after a call with our founder, and it ran for six months without being beaten.

Targeting is not just about finding customers, but about deliberately excluding customers who are not a fit. This feels counterintuitive for alternative education providers operating at small scale. Every family feels precious. Turning anyone away feels like a missed opportunity. But trying to serve everyone means the value proposition gets diluted, the messaging gets vague, and the program becomes harder to explain. The most successful education programs I encounter have a clear picture of who they serve and who they do not. Parents who want structure and clear outcomes should look elsewhere. Families seeking traditional college preparation should consider other options. This clarity is not arrogance. It is respect for the families who would not thrive in your environment. It also makes marketing dramatically easier. When you know exactly who you serve, you know exactly where to find them and exactly what to say. The families you turn away often become your best referral sources. They remember the program that was honest about fit.

Reading real books and having real conversations beats every educational technology invented in the last 50 years. Not apps. Not screens. Not curriculum packages. Not AI tutors. Books. Conversation. Community. I wrote a book about why this works. Free. Link in bio.

I spent a year studying education that actually works. Turned it into a free book called Raising Free Learners. If you want to know how struggling kids become thriving ones in weeks, not years, download it here: happyfewnewsletter.substack.com/p/your-free-co…

The CFO of Pixar once visited one of Michael Strong's schools. He watched the kids working independently, taking initiative, choosing their own projects, collaborating because they wanted to—not because someone was making them. He said, "This is how I want my employees to work." That's the thing nobody tells you about self-directed. When it works the way it's supposed to, it doesn't look like school. It looks like a well-functioning creative workplace. The students are happy. The teachers are energized. And families, usually sidelined in school, are pulled into the center of the experience. Maria Montessori figured out the core principle over a century ago: if you design the environment correctly, freedom becomes productive. A room of twenty-four-year-olds can work with quiet focus for three hours every morning with almost no adult intervention. Michael spent 35 years extending that principle through eight schools in six states. I spent months assembling his insights into one book. Raising Free Learners. $0.99 on Amazon, or comment "book" and I'll send you a free copy.