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: LinkedInChallenger 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 ...
