How can entrepreneurs make the most of two-sided marketplaces and the gig economy?
Two-sided marketplaces are found across industries and have common pitfalls.
In this episode, Matt Cooper, CEO of Skillshare, shares advice for how entrepreneurs can leverage two-sided marketplaces and the gig economy.
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Scott Case 0:00
Welcome to Founders Focus, a podcast made for founders by founders. I'm Scott Case, CEO and co-founder of Upside, and I created Founders Focus to help share free resources and actionable advice. Together, we're building a community for business leaders, entrepreneurs and founders to come together to tackle today's challenges. This podcast is powered by my awesome team at Upside. Please visit foundersfocus.com to join the live video sessions or to catch up on past topics.
Scott Case 0:28
I'm very excited to introduce our co-host for today, Matt Cooper, who is the CEO of Skillshare. And Matt, why don't you introduce yourself briefly, and then we'll dive in.
Matt Cooper 0:38
Thanks for having me. Matt Cooper, CEO of Skillshare. Coming to you live from Scenic Summit, New Jersey outside of New York. Skillshare is technically now based in New York, but fully distributed complements of COVID. And I think we're going to stay that way. So I'm working in my basement and if at any point you hear children screaming in the background, I'll take care of that later.
Scott Case 1:08
Well, hopefully they're children that you know and are aware of.
Matt Cooper 1:14
No promises there.
Scott Case 1:16
That's fair enough. Well, thanks for joining us. Why don't we just start with how you got to the CEO of Skillshare? You've had an interesting journey and highly relevant to our topic today, which is thinking about two sided marketplaces. So maybe you could just kind of tell us about your journey, and then we'll start to unpack that.
Matt Cooper 1:39
So started my career in investment banking, was at JPMorgan for four years out of business school. It's a great first job, terrible last job. So I sort of realized about halfway through that I really didn't want to be a managing director when I grew up. So 2002, I just kind of had enough and quit and moved out to California with my then girlfriend now wife. And being an unemployed banker in Silicon Valley, a telecom banker in Silicon Valley, in 2002 was not exactly a great place to be. So I wandered around a little while kind of started a small firm doing consulting and advising to startups and ended up joining one of our customers full time, and that was kind of my first true startup experience. We would outsource the internal recruiting function for small to mid-sized companies in the Bay Area, or venture backed companies primarily, I had a great run from 2003 to 2008. Mortgage crisis hit, that Sequoia rip good times deck circulated around the valley, in the recruiting market evaporated in about 15 minutes.
Matt Cooper 2:49
So felt like good time to make a transition. And I was lucky enough to stumble over to oDesk, which became Upwork. So big Freelancer marketplace. And that was my first exposure to the two sided marketplace model. So I started out running operations, to customer service trust and safety, but then ended up building out the enterprise business, ran BD, ran international, so just got to see a lot of different aspects of that business during just a crazy time. I think when I started, we were doing about $6 million a month in top line gmv. When I left in, I guess it was 2014, we were doing $1.1 billion, we had acquired Elance, so just gone through a tremendous growth period.
Matt Cooper 3:37
Left there to be the CEO of Visually, which was a similar freelancer driven model, but we would package up teams of designers, illustrators, animators, technologists to build and develop visual content for brands and agencies. That was a bit of a turnaround situation, so the joke at the time was did I want to be the CEO of any company willing to make me CEO and it did not disappoint. But we did get that turned around, sold it in 2016.
Matt Cooper 4:07
And I joined Skillshare originally as the COO in November 2016. And then took on the CEO role about a year later. I've been here a little over four and a half years. And we've had an amazing run. It's just one of those very unique businesses where it's got that two sided marketplace scalability and efficiency, we've got the subscription revenue model to drive predictability, and it just has a hell of a lot of feel good. We've got a very clear social impact and mission and given how competitive the market is that's an important component for us as we look at bringing in talent and scaling the team.
Scott Case 4:49
Tell us a little bit about that mission. So what problem does Skillshare focus on and how do you use that subscription marketplace model to address it?
Matt Cooper 5:01
We are an online learning community for creative skills. And so I think there's a couple components that drive our business. The open content model, so that two sided model, having the supply side be completely open now, in so anybody can teach on Skillshare, but you have to follow our guidelines and you have to meet our standards. But as a result, we have 200 teachers and 1,000 new classes coming in over the transom every single month. So the amount of depth and breadth of content that we can get from that open community is really powerful.
Matt Cooper 5:38
Being a content driven model, first and foremost, the content is good, we win. If the product is awful and the content is great, people will deal with the product to get to the content. If the content is mediocre and the product is flawless, it's a destination to nowhere. So just keeping the content quality and value front and center is really important.
Matt Cooper 6:00
The community component to what we do is also critical. Creative skills in particular learning and actually putting that on display there's sort of this emotionally exposed moment when you upload your drawing or your picture or your animation or your photo and wait to see if anybody likes it. And so having a very positive affirmative community wrapped around that learning model, in pushing people to do work and expose it. And I am currently creating the world's ugliest and smallest scarf, but when I upload a picture of this to the Skillshare community, they're going to say nice things and give me good feedback, so that's not something you see in a lot of open platforms. So those are a couple of the things that really make us tick. But again, I think when you look at content models, there aren't many out there that are the combination of open platform on the supply side and subscription revenue on the demand side.
Scott Case 7:00
That's really cool. We'll give you feedback on your world's shortest scarf at the end, if we have time.
Matt Cooper 7:07
There might be a Christmas gift in it for you depending on how things go.
Scott Case 7:10
I'd like the third one you make, I'm sure with that one you'll really have gotten it worked out by then.
Scott Case 7:16
I think that the combination of, as you said, we really open on both sides, which means that on the supply side, you have all these teachers and you need to manage the quality of you call it the content, but it's the teaching and it's all of it, right. It's the people that are delivering and then obviously the market that you're creating, the community side is all the people who are learning these new skills and being supportive of each other as well.
Scott Case 7:50
Is there a core insight that you and the team have had that helps to maintain that? There's so many communities that become toxic so quickly. What do you think is kind of keeping this one special? What makes Skillshare unique? Is there an insight or an observation that you had that's a key to it?
Matt Cooper 8:11
Yeah, I mean, this is now my third marketplace model. And I've advised, I'm on the board and I've just seen a lot of these grown in scale over time. And in any of these models, you have that chicken and egg dynamic early on. And I think what a lot of people don't realize is you got to fake the chicken for a while. And Gary Swart, the oDesk CEO, that was his favorite phrase, because they faked the chicken for a long damn time before things really started to take off. So, for us in the early days of Skillshare, it was the supply side. So you had to have supply to get demand but then you had to have demand to get the supply earning money. But from 2014 to 2016, which was before my time, they were just dragging teachers in manually, just anything they could do to get people to come on and teach. And look, the quality control was not the highest priority. It was let's just get bodies in the door. Let's get volume. And then we'll let the marketplace sort itself out.
Matt Cooper 9:12
And I saw the same thing on the supply side of oDesk, where we just needed freelancers, we needed volume, and then we could sort out who was good and who wasn't by letting the marketplace sort itself out. Every marketplace goes through that phase where you just let it in like we'll deal with quality control later. And then you spend the rest of the company's history playing whack a mole trying to get the quality levels up. And so we went through that phase and not long after I started, I was like we have to change our approach, it's time to flip from let it all in and we'll let the marketplace sort itself out to no it's an honor and a privilege to be part of our marketplace and here are the standards that we expect in raising that bar. And there was a point a couple of years ago, we cut, I think, 16,000 classes off of the platform. We have 33,000 classes today. So I mean that's a massive chunk, I think at the time it was probably half of our classes. So having the intestinal fortitude to make that kind of cut to your supply in the interest of just raising the bar overall, it's not an easy thing to do. And again, like I don't know what the solution is, because if you were too restrictive from day one, you just never scale the supply side fast enough to actually generate demand. So there's a happy medium of kind of when you start to turn the dial from it being completely open with little or no rules and let the marketplace sort itself out to on the other extreme, completely closed, application only or we only invite you to participate. You got to find the right balance. And I think it generally starts at wide open and then gradually moves towards tightening up once you've got sort of that gravitational pull that is bringing higher quality supply to the platform.
Scott Case 11:04
So there's a counter example to that. Actually, there's two that might be interesting to get your take on. So one is I think it's called Masterclass, which has decided to go after really super premium like learn stuff from Oprah, which is clearly a high quality premium, you know those people aren't going to put their brand out there unless they're personally creatively happy with what they have created, which is different than the classes you're engaged in but it's in the same learning zone. So let's take that one first. How is their approach different? And why do you think they have been effective at building their business? What's different about it?
Matt Cooper 11:50
They're not a marketplace. They're Netflix for celebrity learning, so they don't have the two sided model. And, we have 33,000 classes, they have 100. Prior to our last raise, we only raised $42 million. We raised $71 last August. I think they've raised $400 now. So I think you see some of the power of the open platform and just what we have to offer and our unit economics and how we scaled and how efficiently we've scaled. In Masterclasses, they're solving a different problem for different set of users. I think of them more is edutainment kind of documentary TED talk behind the music type. There are some classes like the culinary classes where you actually learn hard skills, but a lot of it is I want to see how Steph Curry breaks out a defense, not gonna help my jump shot like nothing will help my jump shot. So I think our content in our classes and our teachers, we try to focus on approachability, practicality, put it to work. So I need to go from zero to effective with Adobe Photoshop, or my job or my passion or my hobby, we want to actually get you learning and doing. So again, I think we're going after different parts of the learning market, but two very different business models under the hood.
Scott Case 13:17
Not only that, as you point out, one is not just curating the supply, but actually creating it, they're actually responsible for the content, which is different than recruiting the teachers in and letting them deliver the content then having a quality metric against it.
Scott Case 13:37
So the other example that comes to mind, it's not quite a two sided marketplace, but it has some of the dynamics to it, which is how Clubhouse went to market, right? Highly restrictive, invite only, you had some people that could be on stage, which arguably is sort of the supply side of your content, and then you've got the audience that's participating and people are moving between being in the audience and being on stage and they're earning their way to those places. How do you see that dynamic playing out if you're an observer of it, and is there something new going on there? Is that just another flavor of a way of getting a marketplace to move? Because obviously, shouting into the void on your audio platform isn't going to do anything unless there's an audience. And obviously, if you're not creating good content, there's no audience. So how do you look at Clubhouse in their more restrictive approach in general and just building out marketplaces?
Matt Cooper 14:38
I think they sort of used exclusivity to drive a lot of the same social platform dynamics that you see on Twitter. On Twitter, the mechanism is the followers, and I think I logged into clubhouse, heard a bunch of VCs talking to each other and it felt like fundraising without the money at the end so I pulled back. So I admittedly haven't spent a lot of time on clubhouse. But my take on it is they've used that exclusivity to derive a lot of that kind of initial social network dynamics to, on Twitter, its followers, on clubhouse, it's sort of that earning points to get on the stage type of approach. I think there a few things work better in Silicon Valley than saying, No, no, no, you can't come in yet. And so they exploited that masterfully to get that flywheel of content and social interaction going.
Scott Case 15:42
Do you see for entrepreneurs who find themselves in a two sided marketplace, are there common errors or mistakes? You talked about you've got to kind of bring the supply in to make sure that you've got some supply in one way so that you can recruit the demand. But are there other either pitfalls or mistakes or observations you've had through living through a few of these marketplaces? Where you'd say, hey, if you find yourself in a marketplace, here are the things you need to keep in mind or the mistakes to avoid?
Matt Cooper 16:23
The biggest mistake I've seen is the "oh, as soon as I get the platform up, people just start to come in," and that idea of faking the chicken and doing the hard manual labor to get at least one side in so it can start to feed the other is just lost on a lot of founders. And I think it kind of goes back to the "Oh, well that can't scale" and all of the sort of famous Airbnb anecdotes about doing things that don't scale, I think apply to every single marketplace. Early days of oDesk, you would call in and say, Hey, I need an engineer, Gary Swart the CEO would answer the call, he would take $100 credit card as a deposit just as a gut check to make sure you were serious. And he would say, all right, our algorithm is going to go find your perfect engineer, he'd hang up, and then the supply team would get on I guess at the time it was Skype, and just start banging out messages to engineers all over the world trying to get somebody to take this job. And so there was actually a manual online staffing service for awhile to get the supply and the demand going. And then finally, they said, Alright, we're going to launch the platform component, each Freelancer is going to have their profile, we'll have a job post. And then they actually went the opposite extreme. So then they said, you cannot talk to anyone. Like they burned the boats, there was no phone number, there was no helpline, there was no customer service, you're on your own. And they made this extreme shift just to force themselves to focus on building the product. And I came in when they sort of realized, okay that now needs to come back the other way. And so I came in to take over customer service and trust and safety and started doing some of these more operational tasks that they had forced themselves to avoid so that they could really build the product. But I think really understanding what you're willing to do that makes no sense, there's no way it can scale, but you just absolutely have to do it. And it's painful and labor intensive. I just think that gets missed by a lot of these marketplaces. The "if you build it, they will come" is not a successful strategy.
Scott Case 18:44
And oftentimes to your point, the manual process, use sticky notes and whiteboards and phones and those kinds of things, they're learning about the marketplace that you're creating. It's a little bit like you're showing up at a flea market, saying someday we're going to create an eBay, but right now I just want to understand what are these people selling? How are they selling it? Why do they care? How do they price things? What's important to them? And I think that being intentional about that manual process that deciding to say, Hey, we're just going to do it like this until we really understand it deeply enough to then take the next step.
Matt Cooper 19:34
I think along those lines, focus is the other component. And I made this mistake coming into Skillshare. Like we had evolved over time to be really good and creative. And at the time, I'm looking at Udemy, and they were creative, they were business, they were engineering, they were data science, like they were the horizontal platform. They were a la carte, we were subscription. And it's like All right, well, iTunes at $1.29 per song is dead, and Spotify is a public company. So if we're subscription and they're a la carte, if we can get to content parity, we should be able to beat them head to head. But what I forgot is that vertical focus, all of our buying and selling was in the creative vertical. And so when we tried to go do things in finance and accounting, or data science, or Python, it was just tumbleweed rolling through. And so we were basically going back to 2014 in those verticals. So we had a clear use case that was working and if we moved into an adjacency so like in business and marketing, marketing was great, we've got a great marketing catalog because it was adjacent to what we already had liquidity in. When we tried to go three steps removed to data science, it just wasn't there. So we ended up just banging our head against a brick wall for two years before we finally said, you know, what, like, let's take ye, for an answer, we are the best in the world at creative. So sure, over time, with enough resources, we can compete in business and tech, or I can just dominate creative on a global basis. That sounds like a hell of a lot more fun. So in the early days of the marketplace, looking at where you actually have liquidity, what are those little vertical slices that really are working, start there, and then expand out gradually into adjacencies as opposed to starting with design and then trying to go to finance and accounting, it's a tougher leap, because you're basically starting from scratch.
Scott Case 21:34
And I think if you're going to do that, recognize you're starting from scratch. Don't kid yourself, that it's there. And I suspect, at this stage, the company's been around long enough where you may be starting to get some of your students becoming teachers.
Matt Cooper 21:51
Yep. And that's been, I think, one of the more exciting and interesting developments over the last couple of years. Of our top 100 teachers, a third of them started as students. So we see people come in and make that conversion and then watch them then convert from student to teacher and then from teacher to top 100 teacher is really gratifying.
Matt Cooper 22:14
We have sort of two content models. We've got the open platform, which generates 99% of our classes. But then we produce what we call Skillshare Originals, where we'll go partner with big names, actually, Lilly Singh is doing a Skillshare Original on Skillshare. And so I think that launches today. And we love those, they drive a ton of engagement, a ton of brand equity, a lot of marketing and acquisition. But we're bringing in big names from the outside and leveraging that to drive engagement acquisition on the platform. That's not nearly as valuable to us as seeing a student convert to a teacher convert into someone who's making $50,000 a month as a side hustle teaching jobs on Skillshare. That sequence is much harder and much more valuable to us over the long term than paying big dollars to go get big names from outside the platform to come on.
Scott Case 23:12
So in a lot of ways, like we talked about masterclass, hey, we're gonna start to have some of these bright spots which benefits your teachers too because that brings more demand in and whether it's a flywheel effect.
Scott Case 23:29
So I'm going to ask a couple of questions specifically that I think are about leveraging some of these marketplaces. A lot of them are, as you point out, so whether they're a side hustle, they're sort of a gig economy piece and this will go back to your Upwork time, but there's lots of marketplaces for freelancers and for people who can supply things for startups. That's a great place to find talent to work on specific parts of your project. So one of the questions we got was – any advice on doing the hard work when you're starting out manually? And I often answer, for sometimes five or $10 an hour, there are people all around the world that are willing to do things like comb through giant spreadsheets of names and look for websites to add to them or whatever it is that you need done to give yourself less. Do you have any tips for people who are using these marketplaces, whether it's for creative or software development, like are there ways to take advantage of that gig economy for startup founders that can help at a relatively low cost sort of help manually create those things? What are the ways that make those marketplaces successful from a user standpoint?
Matt Cooper 24:58
It's the fractional headcount. If you look at any business, I don't care whether it's a startup, a one person startup or a fortune 500, there is a functional organizational chart that most companies have – finance, accounting, marketing, sales, operations engineering product, right? When you're a team of one, you're doing all of those things. So you spend three minutes every hour working on each of those. When you're a fortune 500, you've got 10s of 1,000s of people working on one of those. So there's that gap you have to bridge in the early days where you have all of these fractional headcount needs. You either have to learn it yourself, which is where a platform like Skillshare comes in, so that when you spend that time designing your website or your flyer or your sales deck you actually know what you're doing and you're effective at it, or you outsource it through an Upwork and you use that fractional expertise.
Matt Cooper 25:56
What we saw at Upwork, there is no function within a company that can't be done via one of these platforms, like not a single one. And actually I ran enterprise, we had companies with one company in Austin, literally the entire company was built out of Upwork freelancers, I mean, they had three full time employees, I think they had something like 1,500 people on Upwork, and they had recruiting and HR and finance, and they were contractors, and some of them were in the US, some of them were abroad, and they would go wherever they could find the talent. So they built an entire virtual organization out of this freelance talent. So that was sort of the far extreme of what things could become.
Matt Cooper 26:03
But then we had a lot of, what was an interesting trend is we have a lot of Silicon Valley CEOs who had their skunkworks project that they didn't want to distract their main team with running through an oDesk team on the side. And so we would help them build these small teams. And it could be a I'm going to build this prototype with any three engineers and a product manager or I mean we were doing projects with Google 1,500 freelancers sorting and structuring data that the algorithm couldn't handle, they're doing it manually 24/7/365. So we had this full range.
Matt Cooper 27:22
But as you think about things that you want to hand off or things that don't appear to scale at your hourly rate or your time availability, they actually scale quite well at $5, $10 bucks an hour with a global workforce. So the idea of just throwing bodies of things. But the general formula that we found worked really well was hire five and give them all the same short project, 5, 10, 15 hour projects, but have the project be the exact same for all of them and have it as closely replicate the actual work that needs to get done as possible. So if you're hiring an engineer, having them do engineering work for 5 10 hours. Or if you're hiring a PowerPoint designer, give a bunch of them a 10 page PowerPoint and say redesign this form and make it look awesome and then you get five back and then you keep the two or three that are best and you've now had a very tangible exercise in their abilities that you get to see the work and you don't get that through a normal interview process. It's unbelievably effective. And I had an engineering team working directly on the enterprise product at oDesk, and what we did we hired the first three. And then each time we wanted to add an engineer, they came in for a two week trial. So they'd go through two weeks, and at the end of the two weeks, the other three engineers said, in out or I need another two weeks. And at the end of the second two weeks, it was either in or out. But the other three engineers having to pick the guy whose crappy code they were going to have to clean up put a pretty fine point on it. And we ended up with 15 engineers who were all amazing, because they all selected each other. So there's some really interesting tricks of just how to build up these teams over time.
Scott Case 29:18
It's awesome. And I think that, especially if you're a startup founder, the ability to offload some of those tasks at a relatively low fractional cost and finding people that you can trust. And one of the rules that we had was always do it yourself first and run the process, then to your point, hand it out to three to five people to do it, so that you can know what it takes, right? How hard is it, how difficult is it etc. But it's a great way to be able to both do things manually if you have to, but also to start to get some scale at a relatively variable cost, which is a big deal when you're first starting out.
Scott Case 30:05
I'm going to turn our attention to a few of the questions that have come in through the chat. So first off, I think you said that the most recent round of capital is D, is that right? Do I have that?
Matt Cooper 30:21
Yeah, series D.
Scott Case 30:22
So how has the investment of capital shifted, and if you were to just define it from the two sides of the marketplace, you know, if you look at the series, A, B, C, D, what sort of rough allocation went in series A to the supply side versus the demand side versus where you are now with series D in terms of not obviously the whole amount of money, but on a relative basis? Where are you making the biggest investments on the sides of the marketplace?
Matt Cooper 30:52
Yeah, so series A and B were definitely on the supply side. C and D have been on the demand side. And we started, like, up until early 2014, 2015, 2016, we had almost no paid marketing. So we were going heavy on the supply side, we would drag teachers in, they would teach class, they would bring students with them, we would retain a certain percentage. So it was mostly organic referral traffic through the teacher side of the equation. 2016, that started to stall out. So we realized, all right, we need to figure out the demand side. So we started testing paid marketing channels in 2017, figured out what worked and then we really started stepping on the gas 2017 2018 2019.
Scott Case 31:44
Why did you flip? What was the data point or the insight that you said, hey, it's time for us to dial the demand up?
Matt Cooper 31:53
The growth was stalling. Like teachers brought a certain number of students with them, but not a ton. Because the Skillshare teachers, they don't have huge followings typically, so they were bringing enough in the early days to keep building it up. But you kind of hit that asymptote overtime, it was like, we need a much more scalable acquisition model. So C and D have been very focused on the demand side. One of the things we've been very careful over time is to make sure that demand is growing faster than supply, so the teacher earnings are always rising. Because if teacher earnings are always rising, the supply side takes care of itself, the best teachers want to teach more, it gets easier to attract new teachers, the big names want to teach and then the content gets better, which drives more engagement, which drives more attention and that flywheel starts to spin. So our supply side is really good, now it's how hard can we spin the demand side to keep that flywheel really humming?
Scott Case 32:57
So with that in mind, taking out the demand and the supply, but now you've got a platform, which has two experiences you're managing – the creator experience and how easy it is for them to create content classes, etc. And then the user experience about how they consume or experience those. Are you investing as much energy in both? Is there one that turns out to be much more important than the other? How does your product team sort of make those trade offs? Or do you have product teams that are equally dedicated to both sides? So how does that part of it play out?
Matt Cooper 33:37
Yeah, I mean, kind of along with our demand focus, most of our product's investment over the last couple of years has been on the student side and the demand side of the equation that is shifting and needs to shift back a little bit. Our teachers, I think we can be doing a lot more to make them more effective at developing the right content, getting that content for users, knowing who their users are, we have a ton of data and insights around where their students came from, what they're looking for what they search for and don't find. We have not invested enough there lately. So we're starting to shift back to a little more balanced equation. But I think our product investment sort of mimics our acquisition investments.
Scott Case 34:30
Got it. And I always find that on the supply side, you often have experts that are spending, you know, maybe it's their business is there and so they become expert in the tools and their needs are different than somebody who might be coming for the first time to become a user and they need more sophisticated onboarding, etc. So even if you spent the same amount of time what you're spending energy on could be very different.
Matt Cooper 34:57
Yeah. And that's been an interesting kind of evolution. And we've always had what we call the teach challenge, which is effectively an online workshop to help first time teachers get their first class out the door. It's pretty light touch. But we give them all the tips and tricks, here's what equipment to go look at, we've got documentation out the wazoo of how to be a good Skillshare teacher. But now we've created what we call teach lab, which allows us, so we have teach challenge, Teach Lab, and there's Skillshare Originals. So the originals, when Lilly Singh comes in, we don't hand her a microphone and say, Good luck lLet us know when it's done, right. I mean, we're shooting the class for her on site and is extreme white glove. But then there's a middle ground there of how do we take high potential teachers who are experts, they've got a following, they just need a little more help getting that first class out the door? In the sort of the watch one, do one teach one? How do we help them do their first so that they can then get the hang of it and do it on their own, and that middle ground teach lab model has really evolved.
Matt Cooper 36:01
And we've learned a lot just through COVID. I mean, for a long time, for the last year, we haven't been able to shoot on site. So we figured out, even for originals, how to ship them a big box of gear, detailed instructions on how to set it up in their home studio. And then we call in via zoom, and we can do some remote control of camera angles, and we can help them get the lighting right, and then we just run through the normal process, they box it all up and ship it back to us. So there's been some interesting developments and then if you think about how that works, can that now start to scale down into those kind of mid tier names that need a little support, but not a lot aAnd don't happen to have a $3,000 camera lying around? So yeah, there's been some interesting evolution there of how we give a little higher touch but still in a very scalable way.
Scott Case 36:50
So we're going to do a lightning round for maybe two or three minutes. So quick answers. I'll give you a quick question. So the first one is from me, which is did you use Skillshare to create your Skillshare training tools so that you can teach Skillshare people about teaching on Skillshare?
Matt Cooper 37:06
Yes.
Scott Case 37:09
Excellent. Next question. Where do you see the business model for Skillshare a decade from now? Do you see it changing at all? Are there big shifts happening? What's the story there?
Matt Cooper 37:23
Yeah, I mean, a decade from now, heavier international, we're already very heavy international, but that's gonna be a big area of growth for us in the coming years. Enterprise is another big angle for us. And then giving teachers other ways to engage, right now we have the asynchronous video based classes, but we started doing more live sessions, we started testing some audio content, one on one sessions, like we're looking at other ways for teachers to engage with a student community.
Scott Case 37:53
Did you see a big spike in Skillshare subscribers as the pandemic played out? Was there a lot more demand on a relative basis?
Matt Cooper 38:01
It was about 4X what we normally saw in a day, it was absolutely crazy.
Scott Case 38:06
Got it. And do you see that continuing now that people are used to the platform or are you planning for a little bit of depressed demand as people decide to go outside more?
Matt Cooper 38:16
Yeah, it has definitely slowed down off the peaks kind of in Q4. Q2 and Q3 of last year were just bananas. Q4 started to come back down to normal. I think we are fully expecting things to soften up a little bit in Q2. What has been nice is the retention rates of those early COVID cohorts have been quite good. So I think every subscription business is sort of waiting to see what happens with all the COVID cohorts that they acquired last year. And we'll see how it goes. But so far, so good.
Scott Case 38:53
All right. My last question is admittedly selfish, which is,when do you plan to get out of the basement and back traveling for business again and getting out there and engaging with new partners or clients or whatever it was used to travel for? What's your take for Skillshare's business travel outlook as you look out the next 12 months?
Matt Cooper 39:17
Because we're a consumer business and I don't have clients to go see, I don't travel that much. It was usually for fundraising or conferences. But I just got an email, there's a big edtech conference in August in San Diego, I'll plan on getting out. There's another sort of investor conference in June that I'm going to go to. So it's coming. There's part of me that just wants to pretend like I have a trip and just go sit in the hotel room somewhere, just to get out of the basement. But if I get caught, I won't be able to come home so I'll have to find a real trip.
Scott Case 39:54
Well upside.com has a solution for you. And if you need to have a meeting with me that's very important, with that important person, just know that I'm an excellent excuse for you. Wonderful, Matt. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Scott Case 40:10
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Founders Focus. What do you think? You got any feedback for us? Got a topic that you'd like us to discuss or maybe a future co host? We'd love to hear from you. Just hit me up on LinkedIn at T Scott Case. And join us at foundersfocus.com to stay up to date with the latest episodes. And join us live every week at our Founders Focus sessions. Hope to see you there.