Everything Sameer Shariff said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Shariff: Optimizing for upfront revenue over product usage is unsustainable
“A lot of the companies that came before us optimize much more for revenue. They kind of just focused on the revenue number. And the challenge with that is. You can sell the dream for a product people don't actually use and make a lot of money in the process. A…”
Shariff: Language learners want friendly conversational practice over formal lessons
“What the two of us wanted wasn't necessarily. A professional teacher or a formal lesson. What we wanted was just a friendly person to practice with.”
Cambly has not touched its Series A or Series B funding
“Just because we haven't touched the series A money and the series B money, it doesn't mean that we sort of behaved exactly the same, you know, had we not raised that money. Like, Having that cash cushion, I think allows us to be much, much more aggressive and …”
Shariff: Burning cash for fast growth teaches startups the wrong lessons
“And if you're kind of blowing through a lot of cash and doing unsustainable things, there's a really good chance you're learning the wrong lessons. And they're not necessarily gonna serve you down the road.”
Shariff: A/B testing does not work for early-stage startups
“The reality is in the very early days of startups you don't really have much data. And so, you know, in theory, you might think, oh, let me just like AB test everything and AB test my way to success. And it doesn't really work because like you're tiny, there i…”
Shariff: 1.5 billion people globally are actively trying to learn English
“There's about 7.58 billion people in the world. Six billion of them don't know English. And by the way of those 6000000001.5 billion are actively trying to learn it right now.”
Shariff: Cambly faced higher VC milestones due to international focus
“I think that the net effect, kind of the combo of those two factors meant that we just had to get, we just had to hit bigger milestones. Then sort of an equivalent company in order to get that fundraise done.”
Shariff: Bloom's study showed 1-on-1 tutoring improves outcomes by two sigma
“Bloom's two Sigma problem. But it's this really interesting study that was done decades ago now where basically they compared one-on-one tutoring To a traditional classroom environment. And what they found is that the traditional the one-on-one tutoring was fa…”
Shariff: Cambly has always been a demand-constrained marketplace
“So we've always been a demand constrained marketplace.”
Shariff: Global language learning market demand is overwhelmingly centered on English
“As we looked at the market, we quickly realized that the world wants to learn English.”
Shariff: Cambly cut prices in half in early test, got one purchase daily
“We ran a test, I think in the really early days where we like cut our prices in half. And I was like, let me try to measure like the price sensitivity of Cambly. And we were getting like, you know, a purchase a day or something. And it was like, you can't meas…”
Shariff: Cambly’s primary North Star metric is paid usage minutes
“So our North Star metric from like the pretty early days was paid usage. So the number, the amount of minutes that students spend actually using the product and every minute there is a tutor teaching and a student learning. And so what I love about that metric…”
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