How Outschool Pivoted To Online Classes & Learning

Can you all walk us through, you know, that pivot to online? Yeah. So we were busy doing everything I just said and building the marketplace, you know, successfully. It seemed like it was growing and, and this was working. And we were doing in-person classes, we were doing field trips. So we'd like book out field trips at museums and offer it to homeschoolers. They loved that because they couldn't get access to it because that's the kind of thing that schools did, blah, blah, blah. And then we, we started, okay, well, this is working, but in order to really grow faster, we're going to need to figure out how to geographically expand. So we started dipping our toes into into the LA market. But, you know, it was hard. It was hard, especially when we're not local in LA. And at the same time, we were noticing, you know, we're working very closely with these customers. We would go to these field trips, we'd go to these classes and see what they were doing and talk to them. And we noticed that a lot of these homeschoolers were also spending time getting together with their friends and hiring a teacher to do an online class like over Skype or Zoom. And that seemed like interesting, but also like weird. Like, this is now a niche within a niche, like a tiny percentage of the activity of these people. But it seemed interesting because the, you know, the video technology was only being used in this way, which seemed really unusual to us. You know, everyone knew about like FaceTime with grandparents or Um, you know, using videos in a work setting like this. It was like, oh, that's interesting. This is like technology that's being applied in an interesting way. So we thought there was something interesting there, even though it was a niche within a niche. We said, okay, well, let's try offering some classes on Zoom. Um, and we tried it, and what we found was that quite quickly, like in a matter of like 3 to 6 months, those online classes kind of ate up the marketplace, and it was becoming— it was growing faster than the call. And we started to realize that these classes had enormous, um, benefits for customers on both sides of the marketplace as well as business benefits. Because from a business perspective, they released a constraint of growth. Like, how do you get concentration? Because these are live classes, you've got a group class, super hard logistical problem. You've got to get a group together at exactly the right time and exactly the right location around exactly the interest. That's a really hard matching problem. And by making, putting them live online, you release the constraint so that it makes sense that it could grow faster. And we also started to realize that, you know, we'd been skeptical at first about online learning being good enough, but this live online learning was different and substantially from like MOOCs or content. The problem with MOOCs and content, as we were seeing from companies like, you know, Udemy and others at the time, was that, you know, they're very not engaging. People would start them, but like very few would finish. Whereas these live classes, like 80% completion rate. And you started to realize that this format had the combined elements of the best of in-person, namely being interactive and much more engaging for kids with the benefits online, like releasing this business constraints and giving access to teachers and content that wouldn't necessarily be available locally. And even more than that, tremendous economic advantages. Parents could pay less than one-on-one tutoring or in-person classes. Because you didn't have the costs of the physical location and the group classes. So the cost of teachers' time was split between families and teachers could earn more. So parents pay less, teachers earn more, engaging, more convenient than in-person classes because you don't have to travel, almost as engaging as in-person, engaging enough compared with alternatives. And what's more, no one had scaled this format. to, um, in any way in, in education. And the technology, we, we thought, oh, we're gonna get loads of support requests, people aren't gonna be able to figure out how to use this stuff. No, kids found it easy. And, and the market was ready because everyone who used video conferencing at work or FaceTime. And so it had this real— and so it gave us this real strong why now, a technical advantage, a real strong differentiator compared with other education options. The only thing we then needed to do was to scale live online learning to many people, which is of course extremely hard in and of itself. But at least that the fundamentals were there in terms of the value proposition and differentiation.