Sameer Shariff explains why Cambly chose a managed marketplace and subscription model over open pricing. A subscription approach, he says, encourages usage and simplifies the experience for consumers, unlike open marketplaces where suppliers set prices.
Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Samir. This has been, it's been great.
Thank you.
And I actually just chatted with Dorothy Lee a couple weeks ago who was, was in the early days of Canvas. So she, she gave me a lot of tips. My background, I'm building a coaching marketplace. We've raised $5 million, 10 employees, kind of early, early days, early stages product market fit, but still kind of, you know, testing a lot of things scrappy. My question is about your pricing model, which I think, you know, if you look at a lot of the competitors or other people in the space or other, just if you look at like marketplaces broadly, there's a lot of these flexible models where supply side determines here's my hourly rate or here's like how much a package will work. And you guys opted for a subscription model, which I imagine comes with a lot of advantages with conversion and other things. I'm curious if you could talk to how you see that. like subscription model versus a more open-ended pricing model being an advantage or maybe some of the disadvantages and how you thought about that?
Yeah, totally. Well, first off, I'm glad you got to talk to Dorothy. She probably would say, you know, she's amazing and she knows Cambly in and out. And so she was our employee number 3 at the company and a lot of things I'm talking about, like she built that stuff from the ground up. So she's a great person to chat with. Yeah, the pricing stuff is really interesting and I think really powerful. You know, you see a lot of the people in our space kind of follow more of like an open marketplace model. And there's actually a lot of like really interesting advantages of doing it that way. I think you get kind of better like price discovery. You kind of can let your supply set their own price point. And so there's a lot of interesting things you get from an open marketplace. You know, we've gone for this sort of like highly managed marketplace, if you want to describe it that way. Like, largely because it just like makes for a really simple consumer experience. Like you don't have to, you just kind of sign up for Cambly and then you have like thousands of tutors to choose from and talk to. And so I think the simplicity is a big driver for us. In terms of the subscription, I think like, you know, I think when you, we basically, we want to encourage people to use the product. And I think we always felt like we actually were pay-as-you-go in the very earliest days. But we always felt like we were like pushing people away because like they were kind of having to justify that each incremental lesson or even minute they spent is like, was that worth this time? And so I think the nice thing about a subscription model is it kind of gives you a bit more of like what I would call like the season pass mentality. Like you already paid the thing, you might as well use it. And so I think it's good from a business perspective because people pay upfront for stuff. And it's good from a consumer perspective because they've kind of already made the decision that, hey, I'm going to use this thing and I want to— I might as well use it, basically. I already paid for it. And so I think that's— I think those are the kind of two in terms of managed marketplace versus open marketplace. I think we've gone for the managed just because I think it's more simple from a consumer experience. And then for subscriptions, I think we like, you know, I really like the, like, the season pass mentality of like, you know, I paid for this thing, I might as well use it. So that, I think those are kind of some of the big driving factors for us.
