The First Steps For Starting Cambly As An On-Demand Tutor Marketplace

So what were the actual, like, first steps that you took to start it as a marketplace? And, you know, as marketplaces, you know, we have the challenge of kind of, you know, balancing supply and demand or chicken and the egg. So, you know, what did you kind of start with?

Yeah, so it's a great question. And I think what, you know, what we tried to do basically early on is just fix one side of the marketplace, like just make it work. And so in the very, very early days, actually, Kevin and I were the only 2 tutors. And so, you know, the service— I guess I didn't really introduce what we built. What we built is an app where you press a button and within a few seconds you get a friendly native English speaker over video chat. And basically it's a 2-sided marketplace. So on one side you've got students who pay a subscription fee to access service. On the other side, you have tutors and they get paid for minutes they spend for basically for time they spend talking with students. And so that's kind of the rough setup of the product, the marketplace. So in the early days, Kevin and I were the only 2 tutors. So we basically spent our days either like writing code and building the product, and then constantly be interrupted every time a student called in. We would like run off to the other room and talk to them for a few minutes. And so we were like personally delivering all of the service, you know, all of value on this service. Obviously, like we both lived in San Francisco, And we slept roughly the same hours. And it turns out, you know, those hours when we're sleeping, a lot of people, you know, in different parts of the world are waking up and wanting to practice their English. And so it was pretty broken. Like it didn't work great, but I think it was still like a really valuable thing for us to do because, you know, you, you know, early on, you just like want to talk to your customers so you can like really deeply understand their problem. And it was a way for us to do that. So it was really valuable for us to do. And I think the interesting thing about Cambly is what our customers wanted was to talk to native English speakers, which we happened to be. And so it was actually this sort of symbiotic relationship that was really beneficial to both sides. So I think it was a great way to get started. But we always really wanted the service to be on demand, like press a button anytime, day or night, and you instantly get an English speaker. And obviously that wasn't going to work if, like, Kevin and I were the only 2 tutors on the platform and we were you know, asleep roughly the same hours, right? And so we started to build a community of tutors. And what we did was actually pretty simple. We effectively just paid people to sit around and be available on the off chance that a customer would call in. And we structured it in kind of a clever way, so it was pretty cost-effective. But effectively, we were like, we want to deliver this service to students, even though we don't have very many students at all. We want to deliver this experience. And let's just pay for it, knowing that, you know, as you start to build up the student side, then the economics will start to make sense. And so we just kind of made it, we just, you know, literally we were funding the company out of pocket. And so we were really scrappy. But, but I would tell friends, I'm like, oh yeah, like try Cambly out. Like I'm literally paying someone right now to sit around and wait for, for you to, you know, you to call in just so the thing works. And so I think it was a great way to like sort of hack it so we could get the product, the core product working, and then we could start to learn about, you know, what's— how students valued that kind of service.