How Businesses Actually Work
Cut through corporate jargon to understand the simple engine behind every company. Learn how businesses create value, price for profit, acquire loyal customers, and protect against competitors.
Like Duolingo, but for How Businesses Actually Work. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 12 levels across 2 sections, about 24 minutes end to end, roughly 5 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Making the First Dollar and Keeping the Engine Running. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in How Businesses Actually Work
- Customers only purchase when the benefit they receive feels noticeably bigger than the money leaving their wallet
- A business survives on this surplus value rather than equal, breakeven trades
- Buyers do not care how many hours or raw components went into building an offer
- Purchasing decisions are driven by removing a specific headache or reaching a desired state
- Words and compliments cost nothing and consistently overestimate real buying behavior
- Real validation only happens when prospective customers put down money, deposits, or formal pre-orders
- Cost-plus pricing penalizes efficiency because working faster earns you less money
- Value-based pricing anchors the fee to the massive financial gain delivered to the client, unlocking much better margins
- Narrow audiences experiencing a sharp, urgent pain are eager to pay to solve it immediately
- Broad, generic offers struggle because nobody feels directly spoken to or urgently motivated to act
- Revenue is total money taken in, not money kept
- Direct costs (like ingredients and packaging) are subtracted immediately from sales to find gross profit
- Gross margin represents the cash left over to help pay overhead
- Fixed costs remain constant whether you sell zero units or a thousand
- Direct variable costs only occur when a specific item is produced and sold
- Break-even is determined by how many sales it takes to cover those fixed overhead bills
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives How Businesses Actually Work the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
Why does a healthy business depend on giving customers surplus value instead of an even trade?
Get it right to open this lesson and 11 more in the app.
Where How Businesses Actually Work takes you
- 1
Making the First Dollar
- The Core Value Exchange
- Simple Unit Economics
- 2
Keeping the Engine Running
- Distribution and Retention
- Defending Your Profit
2 sections · 4 units · 12 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
Tomo is in ChatGPT
Tomo is also a ChatGPT plugin: the same playable courses, built and played inside your chat.
Add Tomo to ChatGPT- What to ask
- “Make me a Tomo course on black holes.” “Turn this chat into a Tomo course.”
- What you get
- Quick questions with instant feedback, hearts and stars, ready to play in about a minute.
- Where it goes
- No sign-up to start. Connect your Tomo account and your streak carries on in the app.
You pick the voice
How Businesses Actually Work is taught in the The Professor style: clear, structured, thorough. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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Start How Businesses Actually Work today.
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