In this interview segment, Speaker B explains Cambly's market expansion strategy. Early on, the founders—two American ex‑Google engineers—realized they could not effectively market their English‑learning product worldwide without local expertise. Their solution was to hire native country managers who understand language, culture, and market‑specific growth channels, and to give them broad ownership and autonomy. The first hire was a Korean country manager; after a few months, Korea became Cambly's top market. Replicating this model, Cambly now has over ten country managers, each driving 100x growth in their regions. The conversation highlights the importance of localized leadership, cultural insight, and empowered execution in scaling a global marketplace.
It sounds like, you know, across so many markets that, you know, there's probably lots of different product ops and even kind of marketing nuances within each market, I'm assuming, right?
Yeah, absolutely. I think like, you know, when we were getting started, like we were 2 Americans trying to like market this English education product to like places all over the world. And as you can imagine, we weren't very good at it, right? Like we had no idea how to like market to Korea or to Brazil or Turkey, right? And so I think that was a, you know, it was a big unlock for us to figure out how to start to do that. And effectively what we, the strategy we took is we hired really amazing like country managers that were from the country, understood the language, the culture, and gave them kind of a broad scope of like, hey, can you make this make this product grow in your market and gave them a lot of ownership, a lot of autonomy. And not just, not just that they understand the language and the culture, but they also kind of knew what are the growth channels that are going to work in, in that market. And so that's the strategy that we kind of explored pretty early on. Like literally our first hire at the company, we were 2 ex-Google software engineers and employee number one was a Korea country manager. It's like pretty odd makeup for a 3-person team. And at the time, we'd been really interested in Korea. We'd gone there and spent a few weeks there just to like study the market after a bunch of people told us that they're really crazy about English education. But we had like 2 customers in Korea or something like literally we'd made no progress there. And then we hired this Korea country manager and within a few months it was our top market. And so I think as entrepreneurs, you can imagine, you know, you look at that and you're like, whoa, that worked. Okay, like, we got to do that again. And so, you know, we've built out now, we have like, you know, 10+ country managers, markets that have scaled immensely, like 100x since we hired those folks. And so, yeah, we've come a long way, but I think that was actually a really big unlock for us to figure out kind of the model that That allowed us to reach our customers much more effectively.
Yeah, that's really interesting. So it sounds like your kind of market expansion kind of playbook is having a country GM.
Yeah, yeah. And I think it's— I think for a business like ours, it's like, you know, I remember thinking like when we were hiring that Korea country manager, the first one, it was like, you know, you're supposed to kind of look at your team and figure out, okay, where are the holes? What are the gaps? And like, how do I fill those gaps? And I remember thinking like, I could spend the next 10 years like studying Korean and like studying the culture and still be like nowhere close to someone who just like grew up there. And so like, it seemed like a really good and obvious thing for me to like, for a gap in the team that like we wanted to fill. And so we found that, you know, we started there and we found that to be really, really effective. And you can't just hire anyone. They need to have like the right set of skills. And they tend to be actually folks like us who are very entrepreneurial, very scrappy. Like, you know, I often describe it as like, hey, you're launching a new company in your country, like, go find your first customers, go start to develop a brand. Like, you've got the support from headquarters where like, that's where product is built, that's where like our tutor operations are run. But outside of that, you're like launching a new thing in your country and yeah, go do it. It's very much, I think you want like the enterprising entrepreneurial type of person to do that.
