How Outschool Has Maintained Growth

Something we're also talking about here in the community is, you know, how big of an advantage it can be kind of having those tailwinds, right? And then at the same time, you know, how hard it can be kind of, you know, facing headwinds.

Yeah. And, you know, we experienced the reverse coming out of COVID right? Because, and it's not that we experienced, it's not the reverse in the sense of headwinds. Like it's more like, you know, when you experience those tailwinds and then the tailwind drops back to kind of Normal levels, the massive danger for a marketplace is your demand's gonna drop. So even if you're positioned very well for the long term, and it's just a natural resetting, your demand drops. Now, what happens when your demand drops? You risk losing your supply. What happens if you risk losing supply? Well, then your product becomes less attractive, and maybe retention goes down. So there's a big danger that you get into death spirals. the other way around. It's incredibly strong when you're growing both sides because you're getting more scale advantages. So momentum is particularly important to startups. But then it's never a kind of a smooth road. So then what's the playbook? And this is something I've kind of learned the hard way over the last couple of years. And now we're out the other end, fortunately. But what's the playbook when you are or do face that declining tailwind and you've got to And you're worrying about retention. I think the playbook is focus on providing a real quality experience for your supply side and your, well, both sides, but it's really, really important to retain your supply side. One. Number 2, you have to invest enough. So even if you've got, you know, all these, you know, declining tailwinds, that's the time, you know, that can be a time when, oh, I've gotta be efficient, right? I've gotta cut costs. Yes, to an extent. But what we did was we invested enough to hold our top line flat despite those tailwinds that allowed us to not get in that spiral. And this is a really tough conversation from an investor point of view, because investors by and large are used to, oh, when things are going well, you invest more. When things are going badly, you kind of take your time to figure it out. And for most businesses, I think that's exactly right. marketplaces, it can be death. And what you have to do is make sure in the good times you raise sufficient money and then don't spend it. And then in the bad times, you kind of soften the blow by continuing to invest in growth and making sure that even though you're not growing your top line, you're still investing to smooth that over. And again, this is something that really most investors Even if they understand intellectually, it feels really hard and risky to do because it goes against our instincts, you know, of hunkering down when things are going not so great and then, you know, being overly enthusiastic when things are good. And as a founder, marketplace founder, you've got to kind of dampen both of those instincts.