Sameer Shariff discusses how to recruit, vet, and keep tutors for a marketplace like Cambly. He covers early scrappy methods like word-of-mouth and waitlists, how demand-constrained growth scaled supply, automation systems to manage tutors, and strategies to retain top performers by building regular student relationships and directing demand to the best tutors.
Chapters
Thank you for being here, Samir. I really appreciate how transparent you've been this whole time, and especially your story about the 2017 Series A fail year, which I feel like we learned the most from. So I'm building a mentorship matching for startup teams right now, and really interested in how you recruited tutors, especially now that you have, it seems like, 3 markets, like general public, organizations and kids. It seems like all of them would both require very different recruitment and vetting of tutors. So wondering if you can kind of talk through, like, how do you recruit and vet for each of those? Does it change? And if, if needed, how do you, like, take people off the platform? That sort of thing.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, there's a lot here. And actually, like, It's interesting, like we've historically been like a demand-constrained marketplace, so we can kind of grow as fast as we can grow demand. And so, you know, you heard me talk a lot about how we've grown in all these different markets, and I didn't talk as much about supply side. The supply side's super interesting, but it's like, it's generally been like less hard for us. Like, you know, I think in the very early days we would like, you know, post to jobs boards, you know, job boards, things like Craigslist, just like super scrappy stuff to just like get the few, you know, our first few tutors in. But it's a really cool job. Like you get to like talk to interesting people around the world. You can work from home, you can work whatever hours you want. And so honestly, actually a lot of our growth on the tutor side has come through like word of mouth over the years. Like we've typically had a waitlist of people who really want to join Cambly. And it's also easier because one side of the marketplace is paying and the other one's getting paid. And so I feel like there's some inherent things that are easier to recruit on the side that's getting paid. And so, and actually in terms of those 3 verticals, like we, organizations actually kind of share supply. Like we kind of use the same pool of tutors as we do for like end consumers. So that's actually like a single shared supply. Kids is a different set, but we've actually, you know, because we grew our adult product so much before we launched kids, we actually had like an enormous pool of tutors that we could draw from. And so a lot of our kids tutors actually have just come from like the sort of the long list of adult tutors that we've collected over the years. Yeah, I don't know if I have any like— I'm trying to think of like what's one of the useful tips and tricks I could share here. You know, I think we've just spent a lot less energy and effort on the tutor side. I think the one thing I will say is like, we, because we did it like gradually over so many years, like, you know, I don't mean to say that the supply side of our marketplace is easy. It's definitely not. But we just like got really, really good, like, in terms of like managing it. I think there's like a lot of interesting stuff there where, because like my co-founder and I are both software engineers, we just like, we automated every time anything, like we do stuff manually initially, and then anytime anything got like annoying and repetitive, we would just be like, okay, how do I write some code to automate this? And so we've, you know, we've built a lot of systems that allow us to like very efficiently manage a, like an army of tutors. And I think it's allowed us to scale up super efficiently. Dorothy, who John mentioned earlier, I think helped us build a lot of those systems. And we've scaled up, you know, scaled the supply side a ton, really, really efficiently. I know that's not exactly your question, but I think there's a lot A lot of interesting stuff there about like, if you kind of do things carefully and you kind of study the supply side and automate things and build like better and better processes, you know, I think it's a competitive advantage for us for how efficiently we've been able to scale the supply.
Sweet, thanks. Maybe one quick follow-up. Do you have to build— have you had to build anything very intentionally for tutor retention, or that kind of just like grew as you built better tools?
So yeah, tutor retention is really good. So a lot of it, I think, just the initial— the way that our setup worked, like, people stuck around. I think it's helpful that they, like, the tutors tend to build a set of regulars and they have relationships with those regulars. And so they're kind of building, like, their book of business on Cambly. And I think there's retentive properties of the relationships that are built on both sides, like, Students stick around because they have their favorite tutor or tutors, and tutors stick around because they have their set of regular students. So you can think a little bit about in your marketplace, like how to foster those relationships that like keep both sides on the platform. You know, I think like obviously like making money is a good way to retain the supply side of your marketplace. And so like, I think we've built things that have effectively allowed our best tutors to like build their business faster. And so I think like, I think it's valuable to not think of your like supply as like uniform. Like there's always gonna be like a bell curve and a distribution. And so I think things you can do to like make sure like the best supply suppliers on your marketplace have a really good experience. And so, you know, very concretely, like, you've got this, you know, this pipe or this fire hose of demand, like, where do you point it, basically? And if you just point it, like, uniformly across your supply, that's gonna, like, you know, spread the retentive properties of that demand evenly. But if you could point it in a more targeted way where, like, the best supply gets the best experience, you're just going to end up building like a better marketplace because your best supply will stick around. Your less good supply will naturally fall off. And then you mentioned kind of like removing people. Like, we have processes to do that. You can have students report tutors and we can review the incident and so forth. So there's ways to kind of cut the like lowest performers on the supply side. But I think there's a lot of interesting stuff about like, not just like you know, you look at the distribution, you're not just chopping off the like bottom, but you're also figuring out how do I get the top really happy. Because I think you'll just get like, you'll just keep better supply. And those, and that supply is great at teaching students, you'll have a better product. Like in our, you know, I always describe Cambly. Cambly is not about the app, it's about like the tutor. Like everything else is like, is the plumbing to get you to talking with a tutor. And so I think our product is very much like our tutors. And so The better your supply can be, the better experience it's going to be for students. Cool. Yeah, great question, Connie, and thanks for the follow-up because I feel like I, I got you a little more meat to think about there.
