When Chuck Cohn was struggling with a difficult college calculus class, he had a hard time finding the right place to access resources to help him improve.
So he decided to take matters into his own hands.
Chuck launched Nerdy, a direct-to-consumer platform connecting students and subject matter experts, with $1,000 from his dorm room. Now, Nerdy is a publicly traded company with a $1.7 billion valuation.
In this episode of The Empowered Challenger, Chuck discusses the path from upstart challenger to industry leader.
“It might just be how I'm wired, but I've always felt like I had a target on the back or a little bit of a chip on the shoulder,” he says.
Even as an industry leader, Nerdy recognizes it must operate with urgency to continue to maintain its position as learning activities continue to go virtual.
Chuck explains: “We want to make sure we capitalize on this unique moment in time as learning shifts aggressively from offline to online — which of course in an online world where the best product is only a click away, you end up with power law distributions of returns and certain companies that seize that moment disproportionately benefiting from such a shift.”
When Chuck started Nerdy in 2007, people doubted the concept. But doubters are part of the challenger journey: “There were countless people I encountered that thought this was a little tutoring opportunity constrained by historical market dynamics that had historically existed, but they failed to realize how transformational the internet could be in this category,” he says.
On this episode, learn about how Nerdy approaches customer acquisition, how Chuck thinks about Nerdy’s competitors, as well as the product changes he thinks will continue to differentiate Nerdy in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
Featured Challenger
👨 Name: Chuck Cohn
⚙️ How he challenges: As the CEO of Nerdy, a direct-to-consumer platform for live online learning, Chuck has created a marketplace where students can access experts across 3,000+ subjects.
📚 Company: Nerdy
💎 Noteworthy: Chuck started Nerdy with a $1,000 loan from his parents and built the company on the side for a while working in venture capital.
🔍 Where to find Chuck: Twitter | LinkedIn
🔍 Where to find Nerdy: LinkedIn
Challenger Wisdom
Highlights from the conversation appear below.
💡 Finding inspiration in your own experience
“The genesis of Nerdy came when I was studying for a calculus class at college, and none of the material made sense to me and I realized that I needed help outside the classroom. I looked around online and just couldn’t find the help I needed. I had this aha moment where I realized that my experience wasn't specific to me, it was a universal problem. Finding the help that you need was just too hard, and there was an opportunity to better leverage technology and the internet to help people learn any subject anywhere, anytime.”
💡 Figuring out when to take a risk
“It was clear that there was a tremendous opportunity to continue scaling the business, but it was my time and attention and focus that was holding us back from growing. I can remember the exact moment I made up my mind and the next day walked in and thanked the managing partner of the venture fund for the incredible experience, but let them know it was time to move on because I was really passionate about what I was about to focus on full-time because I thought it was a once in a generation opportunity.”
💡Growing a marketplace
“In any marketplace, there's a chicken and egg dynamic and you have to appropriately balance supply and demand. In the original offline world [of education], that balance was hard, because you needed an expert in every single zip code in the United States. You're now able to ignore all geographic barriers and find the right expert for a given learner’s needs, regardless of geography. You’re able to leverage each expert on your platform to a much greater extent, because you're not limited to the people who happen to be nearby.”
💡 Streamlining talent acquisition to lead in the category
“There is no market for average quality experts or low quality experts, there's really only a market for experts in the truest sense of the word. People come to us looking for somebody with deep expertise in a subject who's capable of communicating in a way that allows them to learn effectively. Historically, finding those people and then connecting them with the learner who can best benefit from their expertise and their communication style and personality was incredibly labor intensive. And so what we've done that's so unique is figure out how to maintain that super high quality bar [for expert talent] through investments in software.”
💡 Standing out from the competition
“We try to operate with urgency, not because of anything specific to the market dynamic now, but because we are at a very unique moment in time where consumer enthusiasm has never been higher. The industry is shifting from offline to online at a very rapid rate, and we have a really good idea of what we need to do to make our business and our products even better. So we want to make sure we capitalize on this unique moment in time as learning shifts aggressively from offline to online. In an online world where the best product is only a click away, you end up with companies that seize that moment disproportionately benefiting from such a shift.”
💡 From upstart challenger to publicly traded company
“[Going public] was the goal from day one. Our alignment was that when we eventually got to the point where we felt like the business and the company was ready, we would take it public. So last summer, as we kind of looked at what we had accomplished, we started having conversations about the fact that we are now basically proving to ourselves we can be profitable. The business was humming. We had line of sight to how we could continue to drive growth for many years to come.”
💡 Seeing opportunity in hardship
“Contrary to what you might assume, we didn’t benefit from COVID at all from a demand perspective. When COVID hit, we saw a rolling fallout of demand nationwide, because professional testing went to zero and standardized testing went down and applications for universities started falling and schools shut down or went to open book testing so you didn’t actually have to know the material. That was a tough period of time from a demand perspective, but it presented the opportunity to clear out our product roadmap, think about what was most important and then lean into that very aggressively with relentless focus.”
💡 Expanding customer outreach strategy
“We launched this initiative oriented around providing a little bit of continuity to students called ‘virtual school day,’ where we wanted to make free online classes available to everybody even if they didn’t have the resources to pay for them. We ended up seeing this really interesting shift in the retention of all our customers. And the people that actually came in from these free classes ended up starting to buy products. We thought to ourselves, holy cow, this multi-product strategy is actually working to an extent that was well beyond what we expected.”
Top quotes from the episode:
Chuck Cohn:
Quote #1
“The feedback we got from customers right off the bat was outstanding. The work was intrinsically rewarding. We were helping people and I could see a close connection to the products that we built and the investments we made and the feedback we got from customers.”
Quote #2
“I think we’re going to see the level of technological innovation occur in and around education that happened in many industries before us. This is this pivotal inflection point. We come into work every day to work on this problem and help a lot of people.”
Quote #3
“We have pretty dramatic improvements we expect to be able to make to the customer experience in our line of sight. We're going to be in a position in connection with a pending public offering that will allow us to lean into hiring around engineering, data, science, etc, that will allow us to more aggressively pull ahead from a product leadership perspective and provide our customers a better experience.”