How Outschool Has Expanded & Launched New Categories

You mentioned a lot of different categories that you serve. So how do you approach, you know, category expansion?

So there are many different ways to slice categories in Outschool. We went broad initially by both subjects and age because that gave us the broadest possible surface area to serve our initial audience of homeschoolers. Because one challenge was, is every kid is different, so their needs change with time. And so being too narrow would have meant that much harder to build marketplace liquidity. So we decided to pivot around a particular kind of user persona at first and focus on homeschoolers while remaining broad when it comes to subjects and when it comes to time. And like the decisions about where to focus and where to be broad are critical to marketplaces and a bit counterintuitive compared with other businesses. You can't be too narrow in too many dimensions, otherwise you'll stifle liquidity. So you have to choose where to be broad. And wherever you do choose to be broad, that's where you'll get constant questions from investors or others. Oh, you look not focused. But it's actually important to be broad in certain areas. That's one of the distinctions of operating and starting a marketplace compared to starting a regular business. Wherever it is you design from a design perspective, you choose to be broad, that's where you're gonna get constant question of criticizing whether that's the right decision, but it's extremely important to make those decisions. But while we're on the topic, the other thing that's counterintuitive about building marketplaces is usually for most product developments, you focus on creating a really lovable experience and really focus on retention before you put the turn on the gas on growth. You can't do that in a marketplace because liquidity is a core part of your product proposition, the fact that you have supply. So you have to do both in parallel and you have to be growing both supply, demand, and improving the experience in parallel. And getting to a greater scale is a path to getting retention. So again, it's another way in which marketplaces are tough and you look unfocused because you're like constantly flitting between the demand side, supply side, trying to improve the products and why often marketplaces in the early days can look too scrappy and low quality from a, from a disinterested observer because they're not putting themselves in the feet of, in the shoes of the customer where it doesn't matter if the product's a bit janky, if the supply is great. And so again, it's easy to misinterpret or misuse regular startup advice or regular company building advice with marketplaces. Generally, startup building is quite a misunderstood area, even amongst people who are allegedly experienced and close to it, like many investors. Marketplaces are at the next level in terms of complexity. And so I think, you know, trusting in your own insights into your market is even more critical when it comes to building marketplaces than other kinds of business, in my opinion.