ClassDojo

Serve families directly so the company lives or dies on their benefit. Sam Chaudhary saw B2B edtech chase budgets and then the richest districts, skipping the kids who need help most. ClassDojo chose to be a consumer company serving kids and families, with teachers as the trusted way in.

Sam cites Charlie Munger: show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. School software gets sold and sits for years, so its survival never depends on users. Reid Hoffman told the founders every great consumer company needs a network for growth.

Subversive▶ 9:33

Talk to hundreds of users before deciding what to build. In the first month or two Sam spoke with 400 to 500 teachers by emailing lists, going to meetups and teaching summer school in Palo Alto in exchange for feedback. The top problem, managing 30 kids, became a positive-feedback points tool that reached about 12,000 teachers by demo day with no paid acquisition.

Teachers mostly had detention and punishment, applied after something went wrong. The tool let them reward chosen values like kindness or asking a good question with a digital plus one. "I spoke with maybe four or 500 teachers and I did everything to get in front of them."

Subversive▶ 12:12

Fast word-of-mouth signups hid a leaky bucket. The points tool grew virally, but cohort data a few months in showed teachers using it for a while and then leaving. Sam calls that early growth a false start.

About 12,000 teachers by demo day was around half a percent of US teachers. "I'd say that was a false start."

Subversive▶ 15:42

Segment cohorts by who retains, then study what they do. Instead of reading overall cohorts, the team isolated teachers who were as active on day 90 as on day 7. Phone calls showed all of them were hacking ways to reach parents, screenshotting the site into emails or printing reports to send home.

Sam ranks this cut of the data among the most important analyses the company ever did. "We started to cut the data by okay but who are the people that are actually retaining."

Subversive▶ 16:23

Adding parent and kid accounts produced real product market fit. ClassDojo built accounts for parents and kids so all three groups could share photos, videos and messages. With both sides connected, viral growth and sticky retention arrived together.

Parents wanted it too, since a parent-teacher conference might come once a semester. "As soon as you have a multiplayer product, it becomes harder for either side to drop off."

Subversive▶ 17:30

Early connection with families is the activation metric that predicts retention. Teachers who connect with kids and families early show far better retention and engagement, so ClassDojo treats early connection as its key input metric, like Facebook's seven friends in 10 days.

The company treats network effects as one of the sources of defensibility in Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers, which Sam calls a bit of a bible and had Helmer lecture the leadership team on.

Subversive▶ 20:41

Find the growth behavior already happening and make it easier. Every school had an early-adopter teacher eager to tell colleagues. ClassDojo gave them a ready-made staff presentation ending in a QR code so colleagues could scan and join the school.

Dojo starts with one teacher, lights up a school and jumps to the next. It is now used in about nine of 10 US schools and reaches roughly one in 20 school kids worldwide, though no data is shown for these reach claims.

Subversive▶ 21:58

Build a community for your most passionate early adopters. Jenna, a San Francisco fifth-grade science teacher who interned when the company had six or seven people, analyzed how Dojo grows and set up a mentor community of early-adopter teachers. It became a lasting source of advice, feedback and encouragement.

These teachers are often isolated in their own schools. "You can't hack it. You kind of have to just put in years of care and conversations and relationship building."

Subversive▶ 25:19

Build the network before revenue, then monetize once growth is repeatable. Following Reid Hoffman's advice, ClassDojo had zero revenue about six years in with roughly 25 people. It declared a year of monetization only once it had scale and a repeatable understanding of how Dojo grows.

"If we never build a network then you know we're just going to run out of growth channels."

Subversive▶ 27:48

Charge for convenience, never for learning. ClassDojo Plus started with optional extras like Memories, a yearbook-style album of a child's photos, while core use stays free forever with no hard paywall and no ads. About 5% of the base pays, and Plus stays under $100 a year.

The free base keeps the organic flywheel turning and the paying subset funds access for everyone. The aim is a "Prime type thing for education". "We don't want to block learning."

Subversive▶ 31:06

Tell your distribution channel before you start charging. Before launching Plus, the team told teachers ClassDojo would stay free forever for kids and families and that optional paid extras were coming. Teachers were not surprised and trust held.

Sam says the communication itself built trust, since most companies just do things to their users. The framing was "can we build this with you?"

Subversive▶ 32:30

Tutor matches users already on Dojo, removing acquisition costs. Tutor pairs families on Dojo with teachers on Dojo, so neither side of the marketplace needs paid acquisition. That allows lower prices for families and better earnings for teachers.

The team hired the founders of a small YC company that had built this model in South America. "Because they're already on Dojo, we don't have to go and pay to acquire new users."

Subversive▶ 37:04

Lowering price and friction expanded tutoring beyond the wealthy. Many families want more attention for their child but don't know where to find a trusted, affordable tutor. By guaranteeing quality and cutting price and friction, three in four paying Tutor families had never paid for a tutor before.

"I think there's many more people that are interested if you can remove the friction."

Subversive▶ 37:44

Dojo Islands builds a safe kids space from an existing trust graph. Dojo already knows each child's trusted adults and friends, so Dojo Islands lets groups of kids build an island together, Minecraft-style, and discover games made by other kids, with no strangers. It launched quietly years ago and has grown steadily.

The idea came from parent worries during the pandemic about screens and unsafe online games. The risks of putting young kids on a games platform are barely discussed.

Subversive▶ 40:50

Dojo Sparks caps AI reading sessions at 15 minutes a day. Sparks teaches reading using the science of reading, adapts difficulty with AI and listens to kids speak. Early results show kids gaining two grade levels in four to five months, and it is one of Dojo's fastest growing products.

The cap follows the principle to "always do what is in the long-term best interest of kids". The results are early, with no study, sample size or control group behind them.

Subversive▶ 35:50

Reward errors of initiative, not safe inaction, as the company grows. Sam sees scaling companies drift toward rewarding inaction, where doing nothing means doing nothing wrong. He wants to keep recognizing mistakes that come from boldness and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

Subversive▶ 53:49

Plan international expansion rather than get pulled into it. ClassDojo went international by accident, and Sam says getting yanked into it made for a rough ride. He would have expanded in a more concerted, rigorous way.

Subversive▶ 54:52

ClassDojo is cited among established apps that keep compounding. Sub Club's State of Subscription Apps 2026 names ClassDojo among the established compounding winners that keep older apps earning most of the revenue.

Sub Club