In this interview, Lee asks Outschool co‑founder Amir Nathoo about the company’s pre‑tipping‑point go‑to‑market strategy, how they achieved marketplace liquidity, and when they introduced paid acquisition. Amir explains that the first three years of growth (to >1,000 families and ~100 teachers) relied entirely on community‑driven tactics: leveraging influential homeschool parents in Facebook and Yahoo groups, hiring a well‑connected consultant, and recruiting teachers through parent referrals. He notes that because many parents were also teachers, supply quickly caught up with demand, allowing the team to focus almost exclusively on the demand side. When classes didn’t reach a critical mass, early‑adopter teachers were willing to run “speculative” sections, accepting low enrollment or even a single student because they valued extra income and were tolerant of product “jank.” Outschool deliberately avoided building strict auto‑cancel features, letting the market reveal real preferences. This tolerance was possible because the early audience was highly underserved and willing to experiment. Only after reaching sufficient scale (thousands of families and hundreds of teachers) did Outschool launch a paid growth loop in 2018 to accelerate acquisition. Amir emphasizes that discovering the marketplace’s limiting factors and being flexible with early product constraints are crucial lessons for other two‑sided platforms.
Chapters
Lee, do you want to come on? Yeah. Hey, thank you. Wanted to learn a little bit more about the pre-tipping point experiences on go-to-market. You mentioned that you had a period of 4 to 5x growth, generally driven by paid. I was curious, was that the member side or the teacher side? And really specifically, like, what was, what was your approach for when you didn't get a class to critical mass? I'm an Outschool parent and I know that one of my classes didn't move forward. I I have to imagine that was happening all the time in the early days. So if you could kind of combine those 2 questions, I'd really appreciate it.
Great, great questions. Um, I'll actually, you asked about the paid growth loop, but that came in 2018. So 3 years beforehand when we were scaling to get the parent side to above 1,000 and the teacher side into the thousands of teachers, like 100, which, which had nothing to do with paid. And I think it'd be, it'd been wrong to use paid too early in the early days. It, it, it, the first kind of methods to kind of scale were basically, I'd call it community growth. Like meeting influential parents within the homeschool community who ran Facebook groups and Yahoo groups, getting them on side, getting either the ability to post those groups ourselves or, you know, get the organizers to post on our behalf. Or even at one point we paid a consultant who was like a very connected homeschool mom to kind of promote us in these groups. So it's community based. And in the early days on the teacher side, it was similar, but it was very kind of like, go ask parents who they like to work with and then recruit those teachers. And then through that process, we realized a couple of things. At a certain point, we didn't need to worry about teacher growth because there's sufficient overlap between the parents and teachers in this community. So we could basically focus almost all our efforts on the demand side. And secondly, because of the nature of the products, group classes, there was almost always flex on the demand side to add a few more spots. to a popular class. So again, we didn't have to worry about supply constraints like some marketplaces might. So it's important to understand those, and this will vary by domain. What's the limiting factor? And it's very, very specific. But these were the things we discovered about ours. Don't take these as general lessons. It's more like just the process of discovering those limiting factors and those simplifying factors are incredibly important. So we figured out we could, we only really need to support, focus on the demand side in terms of growth. And then secondly, you asked about kind of the liquidity issue, like what happens when there's not critical mass. And this was the cool thing we discovered, particularly with the homeschool community, is they weren't bothered. Teachers were prepared to put sections up, like specific schedule for classes speculatively and see. And if they didn't get any enrollments, fine. They just, if they got only 50% of the sections went ahead, that was a key discovery that they were willing to do that. They just wanted to fill their time. And moreover, they'd set a minimum group size and price per class. But if they only got one enrollment, most of the time they were happy to proceed because they were looking for the extra income. They were setting certain parameters, but they were more flexible. It would have been a mistake if early on we'd built too many features into our product. For example, auto-cancel class if it didn't hit a minimum. We kind of just let it break a bit. And this is kind of part of the jank that you kind of need to introduce to marketplace in order to make sure it's flexible enough to deal with it, so you actually learn what people want rather than assuming it and building features too preemptively. And it's still a bad parent experience when it gets canceled, but again, it was happening less frequently than we expected. I think the other critical piece was a tolerant early adopter audience who was into experimentation, who was so underserved that they were willing to They're willing to tolerate jank that, you know, later customers wouldn't. But then later you're at scale so you can make the experience better. So it's really important to kind of, for us in this domain and probably marketplace in general, to in the early days be serving people who are so underserved, they'll tolerate things like that. Then the paid loop came later once we'd already at sufficient scale where we're really trying to put our foot on the gas and find more scalable methods than the early methods that we used.
So tell me what that scale was like when you turned that on.
So, I mean, I think paid in general is, it's a bad idea to use paid. Well, okay, I'll go with this. It was thousands of families on the demand side, hundreds of teachers on the supply side, and we had the signals of product market fit. There might, I was about to say it's probably a bad idea to use a paid loop specifically until you've hit product market fit or at least have strong use economics. There might be some arguments that in order to bootstrap in certain markets, that some selective use of paid earlier might make sense, but I'd generally be very, very wary of using paid techniques until you've found product-market fit with a strong business model.
