How ClassDojo Built Network Effects to Reach 95% of US K-8 Schools

creating a world where every kid gets education they love, one that makes the most of their talents and capacities. That's that's really like real for me. And so the two parts of that are how do you reach every kid and then how do you give each kid these kind of learning experiences they love? Smartphones were part of the answer to the first part was like oh that tailwind gave us a distribution and growth. AI is a amazing answer to the second part. If we can build the leading network for our demographic which had never been built before, if we could build it, we'll have a lot of time to and lots of ways that we could monetize and build a great business. If we never build a network, then you know, we're just going to run out of growth channels and it's not going to be like an enduring business.

There's going to be like a prime type thing for education. And that's I think what cluster plus this is our our subscription for families. And so we're like, look, can we build a product or build something that's so valuable that that it'll just be a no-brainer for families to buy it? >> Welcome to Subversive, a podcast dedicated to sharing stories from the best consumer subscription apps in the world. We'll bring you lessons for how to grow your consumer subscription business, including insights and inflection points that led to exponential growth from leaders at category defining companies and innovative startups.

Let's get into the show. This episode is brought to you by RevenueCancat. The world's best apps use RevenueCat to power purchases, manage customer data, and grow revenue on iOS, Android, and the web. Join more than 100,000 apps that are already using RevenueCat to grow their businesses and track more than 10 billion and spend, including category leaders like OpenAI, Notion, and Ladder. Learn more at revenuecat.com/subversive.

My guest today is Sam Chowdery, co-founder and CEO of Class Dojo, an education platform used in roughly 95% of US K through8 schools and by tens of millions of students across 180 countries worldwide. In this episode, I talked to Sam about how Class Dojo grew teacher byteer in a market that most investors had written off as unfundable, about how the company ultimately turned a free classroom tool into a paid consumer subscription product for parents without breaking teacher trust, and about why Sam is now betting on AI and gamification to build a broader platform for childhood. All right, welcome Sam to the Subversive Podcast.

Excited to talk about your company, Class Dojo, today. Uh you're the founder and CEO of Class Dojo and as somebody who spent a good part of my career in edtech. Uh this is a company I've been following for a long time. I'm sure my kids will be using it soon and so excited to talk more about your experience, but let's just start with

your professional background and and then maybe a little bit about what Class Dojo is for those who don't already know. >> Well, um cheers Phil. Thanks for having me on the on the podcast. Uh it's great to see you. Um so um my quickly my by background um I went to quite an odd school. Uh so I grew up in the UK and then the Middle East. In the Middle East um my school insisted on kids teaching as well as learning. Uh and so I ended up teaching for maybe about a third of my time through school which is in retrospect kind of a crazy experience. I hadn't hadn't realized how unusual that was. Um I was an economist at college. I I was on heading towards a PhD. I thought I'd just do some more academia and that would be it. Um, one of my professors in my last year asked me to go and help a friend of his with his school. He he'd heard about my crazy teaching experience. And so I went to the school and ended up just helping

them teach economics and some maths a lot better than the way they were doing before. Uh, we can we can double click into what what changes my school made. But this became like a very formative experience for me. Shortly after that, McKenzie, the consulting firm had been in touch and they had an education division that was just watching, you know, and this is advising. it's not doing the thing. But um uh it was it was a great opportunity to go and speak to all the kind of education ministers at the top performing education systems to to get a look at how they were doing. So I was kind of kind of I guess I kind of like slipped in a way into this education stuff after after the stuff at school. Uh and then shortly after that I met my co-founder Liam and I I can tell you a bit more about how we got started.

He's he's an incredible guy. But um just to answer the other part of your question for those that don't know uh Class Dojo uh is an education technology company. We started as a communication app for teachers and kids and parents. It's since grown into a lot more. The mission of the company is to give every kid on Earth an education they love. Uh we serve about one in fourish families in in the US every week now and um many more than that internationally. Uh so we can dive into all the things that we're doing, but but that's the bare bones.

>> Yeah, that's incredible. I mean, one in four that that is massive market penetration and and it sounds like you guys are just getting started. I know you've launched a couple of new products recently that we're going to talk more about later in the episode. Before we do that, I mean, first of all, I love your point around I I have heard the adage like learn one, do one, teach one. I think teaching can be one of the best ways of really cementing your knowledge and and learning more deeply. And so, it's great that you as a child got the experience to to teach as much as you were learning. Uh, I want to go back to you

mentioned your co-founder Liam. Um, you all originally were working on an idea that looked a little different than Class Dojo. And so what did that look like and how did you ultimately make your way to the original version of what became Class Dojo? >> Yeah. Well, so Liam and I met at a hack weekend actually in the UK and so we worked on something totally different there. I think it was some Mac app or whatever. I don't even remember. It was so long ago, but but it was a kind of a weekend hack project.

>> And you know, maybe I'll leave him on the show one day, but he's brilliant, right? He was a video game developer. Um he was at a company called Jagex which built one of the world's biggest uh kids games called Runescape. He was doing a PhD in computer science. It was focused on technology that helps kids learn. So he and I got talking about you know we met in our 20s and really talking about um like the big problems that you could work on.

>> Um and I remember we we kind of got it down to like two. One was energy and one was education. The thinking was you need enough energy just to fund all of human activity. you know, everyone realized how important energy is now, but I think it's always been uh important. Um the second thing then was well, if you have survival because we have enough energy, then then how do things get better? How does the future get better than the past? And my view is that well, you need people to discover their talents and capacities. Um and I think even in a very AI kind of pled future, you want people to be central to to that future.

You want humanity to be central to it. And so you really do want people to discover their talents, their capacities, and be able to make the most of them. And that's broadly speaking what education does. So you know we were very inspired by by kind of both problems but the second one is something that we both spent time working on and that's kind of where where the impetus for a dojo emerged from. Now we didn't know what the right starting point was.

Um but at the same time um there was a education incubator that had launched which then folded back into Y Combinator. It was kind of affiliated with YC and then folded back in and they were they were opening applications for their first cohort. Uh and so we applied we were like oh this is like what a fortuitous moment. Uh so we applied we got into this first cohort and you know I we didn't have like a fully formed idea but we had like this big picture view that it seemed like there were a lot of companies that had been built that were selling things to schools and districts and there weren't that many companies that were building great products for teachers and kids and parents. Yeah, there's like pre-dualing though and pre- like a lot of the consumer products. Um and so we didn't have much of an inkling of okay what's the exact right entry point but that was like the general orientation. I think we

built like a like a small app just to show the application crew that we could build apps, you know, we built like like a like a seating app where you can make seating charts in the classroom. Very trivial stuff, but it changed pretty quickly. >> Well, that was back in the days where creating an app was a lot harder than it is now coded in a weekend. So, I imagine that was an important part of the application process. Let's you mentioned

I think this is an important point because often the conventional wisdom is start B2B like B2B is easier than consumer but you went a bit of a contrarian route which was you decided to go teacher by teacher build it bottoms up rather than selling top down into schools and districts and that turned out to be a really critical part of your growth strategy was this sort of bottoms up teacherbyteer movement and that started with you talked to hundreds of teachers in your first few weeks as you were getting traction with this idea. So what did you learn in those conversations and and what were the insights that became so important to the next step of the company's growth?

>> Yeah. Well, just to put it in context, you know, we were two 20some things who just turned up in California. We never you never worked in edtech before, didn't know much about this this whole kind of industry, had never gone to school in the US. And so we we were on like a learning mission, you know, and we be very quick about it. Um, so we got here and we started to meet edtech founders. >> And basically we kind of got like very quickly discouraged like it seemed like like a not that u uh like a very difficult space you know we're like well >> you know if you go back to first principles we're like well hold on every family on the planet wants a better education for their kid. So theoretically, you should be able to build a company that serves every family on the planet. And you know, given how deep a need it is and and deep a desire it is for from parents to want better for their kids, you should be able to

build a quite a big company. But there weren't great examples of big companies. There weren't companies that, you know, reached a billion people that had really transformed how things were working. You know, classrooms have kind of worked the same way for a long time. Um, there weren't any public re really big public companies that had come uh come about. And so, you know, you kind of ask why. We kind of arrived at like a thesis diagnosis, which I think is still true today. We saw that there's like a lot of companies that build their businesses selling the B2B route. You know, there's nothing per se wrong with that. But I think like everyone knows it's a very very difficult sales process and so it tends to be like quite slow and and and it could take quite a long time. Um, but I think the second thing that we realized was that there's actually like an incentive problem. Now, you know that

this Charlie Monger quote, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Like Our view is we're like, well, you really want to tie your incentives to the customer, >> right? And the customer in this case are families, like kids and their families, you know, like you, that's the person we're all trying to serve, whether you're a teacher or an edtech company or whatever. We're like, well, hold on. We don't want to build a product that can just get sold and you know, you probably use some edtech stuff in schools, not not the greatest software, you know, just going to get sold and stays there for years. And we're like, we don't want to build one of those. We want to build something that people actually want and that actually like our survival in a way lives and dies on people benefiting from from our product. And so we kind of made this very principal decision early on that look we're going to build a company

for kids and families in the best interest of kids and families. We want our incentives to be tied to kids and families. We should live or die based on our ability to serve kids and families. And so we kind of took this almost like very principled stance early on. And at the time I think people looked at us like we were crazy. They were like what? No one does that. you know, I think Dolingo was just starting out as well and like really the only two that were thinking this way and so we kind of decided to be a consumer company and then we had I think basically the most formative conversation in the early days of the company. Um Reed Hoffman came to the incubator and he did a talk at the incubator and you know you probably know Reed he's Mr. Network effect and and so so he got excited. He was like, "Look, nobody really builds consumer companies, even at the time, there were very few that were being started, you know." Um,

but he's like, "The number one thing you have to figure out if you're building a consumer company is how are you going to grow?" Like, how are you going to reach your consumers? Um, because all of your growth channels will eventually get too expensive and you know, all the you won't have any unfair advantage. And he he told us he was like, "Look, the best way to grow and the core of every great consumer company is some kind of network." So, what is the network you can build that reaches families? And so, we got thinking about this and we realized, we're like, well, hold on. I'd been a teacher. And so, we're like, well, hold on. Teachers are like an incredibly important and and the the number one most important person here because teachers are the are the people that actually deliver the education.

It's not like a tech company delivering it. It's it's a person making an education with with kids and families. So, they're they're kind of the trusted person here. If we could find a way to be helpful and useful to teachers, maybe then we could get to kids and families. And so that's that's kind of really the instinct that then led us to speak with hundreds of teachers. So in our first month or month or two, I spoke with maybe four or 500 teachers and I did everything to get in front of them.

Again, it was from spamming apologies in retrospect, but ap you know, spamming email lists to um I went to teacher

meetups. I actually taught summer school at a school in Palo Alto, you know, in exchange for the teachers giving us feedback. And and so we basically like used this time to like understand deeply what their deepest problems were. And so we dived in. We really got to the root and I can tell you more of what we did here, but we got to the roots of a couple of problems that were very real for teachers. The top one that we came up with was very surprising and and very non-obvious, which was this this thing around classroom management, >> which is dramatically unsexy. Like no one can even really tell you what that is, you know, but it's like you're a teacher in a classroom of 30 kids. How do you make this a productive learning environment?

>> Yep. And what we saw is that for the most part teachers had these kind of outdated tools around detention and discipline. You wait for something to go wrong and then you punish and that's that's the only tool you have. Well, for some teachers the only tool you have. We thought this is like a very painful problem and it's it's one of the biggest reasons for teacher burnout. It's one of the biggest impediments to learning. And we thought what if we what if we flipped that? What if we actually turn it into a positive thing?

>> And so first thing Dodger built actually wasn't the communication app that it is today. It was actually like a point tool that gave teachers a simple way to give kids positive feedback. So as a teacher, you could pick you could pick a few values. You could say, you know, being kind, helping each other, you know, asking a good question, whatever you want to encourage in the classroom. And then you could give kids kind of recognition, just digital kind of plus one for asking question or whatever it was. Um, and that first product became incredibly popular to a degree we couldn't have predicted. you know, it kind of we went from >> zero teachers, you know, zero product and zero teachers um using a product midway through the incubator to something like around 12,000 teachers or so using it by demo day. Um, which for us was like it was on the order of about half a percent of all teachers in the

country. >> I was going to ask you next, what was the moment when you knew you had product market fit? I think this is a good segue into that. But briefly to recap what I

heard there, it sounds like you did a few things, right? One is you spent a lot of time deeply understanding your target customer, which in your case was teachers and even living the life of a teacher. I mean, you said you'd been a teacher, but it had been a number of years. You had done it outside of the US, so it wasn't necessarily within the US school system. And so there were lessons you needed to learn to really deeply understand and empathize with your target customer. And then two, you built a very simple tool that had the potential to grow into a network, but that initially was just a very simple oneplayer tool for teachers to be able to give positive feedback to their children. It reminds me a little bit of Instagram in the early days. It's like come for the tool, stay for the network.

Well, originally people were using Instagram just because they had easy access to these cool photo filters and then it became this whole network. So, let's talk more about when was the moment you knew you had product market fit. It sounds like you had the early signals of it with those 12,000 teachers who signed up during the incubator. And then related to that, once you had initial traction, how did you tap into the network effects that started to exist between teachers, but also between teachers and their students to then start to get that growth flywheel that Reed Hoffman was talking about going? So on the first one on the product market fit you know I think um initially when we just saw the growth curve of how many people were signing up you know teach and and you know we still to this day hadn't spent on paid acquisition right so it's just one teacher telling another telling another so we we kind of t

clearly tapped into something and so we were feeling pretty good about that but I'd say that was a false start >> right so in in retrospect you know we had a we had a great uh kind of viral word of mouth um thing happening Um but a few months in uh we dug into we we had enough data to look at some cohorts and so we dug a bit deeper and basically what we started to see was that retention overall was like fairly mediocre >> you know it wasn't like you know like 90% of our cohorts are active like 3 months later or anything you know if we if we just take the data side of it we were like oh man this is this isn't great like seems like we're we've got a leaky bucket here people are picking this up using it and then sticking with it for some period of time um and and then leaving um but that's easy to misread because we were looking at kind of overall cohorts. What we did next I think was maybe one of the most

important analyses we've ever done. We started to cut the data by okay but who are the who are the people that are actually retaining >> and then we looked at those codes and we basically found a subgroup of people that were consistent users you know they'd be just as active on day 90 as they were on day seven. >> Um and we were like what is going on here? Like what what what have these guys figured out? And so we basically did a lot of qualitative, you know, got on the phone, called people, called teachers and figured out what they were doing. And basically they all had a version of the same story, which is that this was the group that was um not just using the product in the classroom, but then communicating it at home with parents and and we didn't have any way to communicate with parents. they were, you know, they'd get to the end of the school uh school week and they would like screenshot the website, you know,

and then they'd like pay like attach that to an email or they'd print something out, print out a report and like send that home with kids. And so in some way or another, we found this group that was like hacking communicating home with with families. And we were like, >> "Oh man, that makes so much sense, right?" Because as you know, like as soon as you have a multiplayer product, it becomes harder for either side to drop off, right? And so we'd built a great very useful single player tool. Um the the jump that needed to happen we realized was that it had to become a multiplayer kind of product. And in particular communicating with families was was one of the as mentioned there's two big needs uh teachers had. That was the second kind of big need that family teachers had was engaging families in their kids' education. And turns out families really want this too because you know it's so weird that you this

person you love the most in the world is like at home for half the day but is out of home for half the day and maybe you get one parent teacher conference once a semester if you can make it, you know, like you wouldn't accept that in any other part of your life for the thing that you care most about. You're like, you know, you kind of want to be engaged and involved and help and support. So what happened next was Dojo um built we built parent accounts and and then kid accounts as well. But basically went from just the teacher having an account of Dojo to all each each of these groups uh having an account then being able to share pictures, videos, messages through the single day. And so it very quickly went from single player to multiplayer and that I think was real product market fit. That's when we started to see not just the the viral kind of growth but also the stickiness and kind of the

retention. That's still been um to me I still look back on that I'm like wow. Thank thank god we we we took the time to go deeper on that on that retention analysis.

>> Yeah. Well, a couple things that stand out for me there. I mean, one is a two-sided network effect is really powerful, but a three-sided network effect is even more powerful. And in your case, you know, we're talking about young kids here, so they only play so much of a role. But you do have this three-sided network between teachers, parents, and students. And so that's really powerful. I guess I'm curious, how did you measure the health of those network effects? like what metrics were you looking for or what sort of qualitative feedback uh did you find across those three constituencies that told you okay this is really working and then to use your point it like it wasn't just driving viral growth through word of mouth but it was also directly contributing to retention which was the foundation for ultimately monetizing the business >> yeah there's a couple of different ways I could answer this but just to zoom out

a little bit um I think it was a year maybe around this time that that that we made this switch that I found this incredible book um by Helmer Hamilton. >> Mhm. >> Got the wrong way around. Hamilton Helmer. Um uh and it's a book called The Seven Powers and it basically talks about sources of defensibility. >> Yeah. >> And this basically became like kind of a bible in the company. I actually had Hamilton come and like lecture the the leadership team on it and and so on. Um but it became a bit of a bible for like how we think about defensibility, you know. So network effects are one very important source of defensibility. um scale economies, brands, switching costs, etc. So, so I think generally we start to think about um how how can we deepen defensibility and how can we become an enduring uh business so that we can serve our customers over the long term rather than just being a flash in the pan. Um but on on network effects

cuz you asked about them, I think there's a couple of different ways we thought about this. One was um just at the classroom level, right? So you want so we discovered that you know we want teachers to to connect with kids and families quite early in the journey and if they do that then retention is fantastic you know and engagement is fantastic. So retention engagement are downstream of this kind of early activation action of connecting and if you connect and it's like the Facebook you know seven friends in 10 days or whatever like if you connect you're going to retain forever or for a very long time. Um and so that that that was kind of one of the early kind of inputs that we started to measure quite a lot into longerterm retention. Um the second thing we started to see was um Dojo would land in a school with one teacher using it and then it would start to spread through the school and we'd have

you know you'd see it kind of pop up. Um some I'll show you a map of how this happened but like you know you'd see you'd see each school kind of light up a bit more and get a bit bit dense and then jump the next school and light up a bit more and a bit more. Um and so we started to think a bit about this like landing and expanding through schools. >> Um you know now dojo is used in about nine out of 10 schools in the country to some degree or another uh and you know many more than that internationally. I think we reach something like one in 20 kids on the planet now you know. Um >> Wow.

>> In school. Yeah. But but we thought a lot about this idea of getting to a school and then expanding through the school. Now one principle I've got the company is you you look for emergent behavior. You kind of heard it in how we found the high retention cohorts, but we looked for like what's already working. Uh and so we looked at well how in the schools we are growing, how are we growing? And we basically found that we had um usually a very vocal champion.

You know, in in in every school you have this the kind of same technology curve. You have the early adopters, you have like kind of the middle, you know, the group that wants to jump on next and you have like the lagards who are kind of, you know, scared and probably never going to adopt. And so we found these early adopters exist in every school and they really want they're so excited. They're like, "Oh my god, I found a thing that solves a problem for me. I want to tell my friends about it." This is one of the wonderful things about teachers is they really want to help.

They want to, you know, they don't they're not in it for the money and the fame. They're in it to like help kids. They also want to help other teachers who are helping kids. And so it's just like a wonderful community to be part of. Uh and so we found we thought like, wow, like these teachers are already spreading the word. Like can we make it easier for them? And so we did like a I know honestly things that are so um low tech you might laugh at them you know but teachers were like look I really want to do a presentation about dojo in my school uh you know I haven't had time to make a presentation we're like you know what we'll make a presentation for you we'll make it easy for you you know we'll put a QR code at the end so like your friends can scatter it and just join the school and so you get you get more more more teachers on on board in your school. Um but I think one really lovely thing was uh it came from our

existing teacher community. So I was in uh a classroom observation. You know we'd go into the field, we'd go sit in the classroom, see how teachers were using the product. So we're in a classroom in San Francisco. It's a science I think it's fifth grade science classroom. And there's a teacher uh named Jenna. Uh and we we're observing class. She was a great teacher. Two or three months later, we get an email from Jenna and she was like, "Hey, um, you know, I've got the summer off. Uh, and I might not go back to the classroom. I'd love to come and do an internship with you guys."

>> And I think we were maybe like six or seven people. Like we're tiny, you know, mostly engineer, a designer here or there. Um, so we didn't know what to do with with a with a teacher at the company, but, you know, we're very receptive and like welcoming of teachers. We're like, "Yeah, sure. Come and hang out for the summer and, you know, we'll figure something out." Um, so she turns up and we got so lucky. Like she was an incredibly um it kind of selfarting person. And so she look like I'm just going to do a little bit of poking around and and figure out how this dojo thing grows. And she came back uh and she at the end of the summer she'd done this whole analysis. On the surface she was doing like customer support but actually she was doing this whole like secret analysis and how dojo grows. And what she showed us was that you know the dojo is a communitydriven company. So teachers uh and now kids and

families but at the time teachers really made it their own and they would like tell other teachers about it. She was like so can we support our community more and more and so she stood up uh what we call our mentor community which are basically our our early adopter teachers most passionate teachers um they kind of often quite techsavvy um and we kind of brought these but they're they're quite isolated because you know they're maybe the one crazy person in their school or something. We're like, so we brought this this community of mentor teachers together and basically like this community is now an incredible source of advice, feedback, encouragement, enthusiasm. You know, being a teacher is hard. Um, and this community is really supported each other. They've also kind of boy dojo and you know, I don't think there's any real substitute for for that kind of work either. You can't hack it. You kind of

have to just put in years of care and conversations and relationship building. Um, and so so that was kind of a second thing we did, I think. um that that has really kind of helped build kind of some of the network of of of the company. >> This episode is brought to you by Paddle. Today's fastest growing apps are multi- channelannel. They use web monetization to reach new audiences, improve attribution, and boost margins.

But selling on the web gets complicated fast. Managing currencies, taxes, fraud, and disputes gets increasingly difficult as companies scale. Paddle solves this. As the merchant of record for thousands of apps, including Runna, GoodNotes, Codeway, and HubX, they take on the complexity of web monetization so you can focus on growing your business. Learn more at paddle.com/subversive. Yeah, I mean, I've had a couple of guests on the podcast talk about just how critical community was for their businesses, uh, Rachel Hworth, who led marketing at Notion for a number of years, talked about how important it was for them because they have such a horizontal product that people don't know where to begin. And so having an evangelist community helps you plug into a product like Notion. In your case, it sounds like it was more being a teacher is a really hard job, particularly in the US. And so having a community of

teachers to evangelize Class Dojo, help new teachers figure out how to use the platform and get value out of it was was really productive. Um, and then it also obviously contributes to organic word of mouth and retention, which we already talked about. Let's start to transition

a little bit into monetization. So we already talked about how from the very beginning you decided to assue the more classic path of B2B sales selling into schools and districts which turned out to work really well for getting this flywheel going because you really had to do the hard work to figure out the network effects between teachers, parents and students. Um, eventually you did start to monetize and you did that primarily, at least in the beginning, through premium features for families through your Class Dojo Plus subscription, but your distribution was still coming largely from teachers and I imagine that might have created a little bit of tension. So, how did you navigate getting that monetization flywheel going, but still preserving trust with your your teachers who were driving the growth of the product?

>> I'll say it was a very nervous time in the company. So we'd got I think we were six maybe seven years into the company and we we we hadn't monetized you know um the reason was we'd basically had we'd taken Reed's advice really to heart like look we're going to prioritize building a community building a network and if we can build the leading network for our demographic which had never been built before it >> it's long shot but if we could build it then you know it's we thought well we we'll have a lot of time to and lots of ways that we could monetize and build a great business if we never build a network then you know we're just going to run out of growth channels and it's not going to be like an enduring business. Um so we really focus on the network to start with but you know it led to this odd shaped company where it's 6 years in 0 of revenue. I think we're like 25 people, you know, so very

small. I remember the year that we decided, okay, this is a year of monetization. We're like, oh, we think we've got to enough scale that we we are now we think the leading uh kind of network or community and we've we've identified how we grow and we think that's somewhat repeatable. So now let's make this sustainable. We make money so that we can make more impact. Um uh and so then then the question became okay, well, what do we do? How do we monetize and how do we maintain trust? And like you said, we'd we I think one thing was very clear. You know, we'd seen company after company go after this very traditional business model. As I said earlier, like there's nothing per se wrong with that. However, I I do think incentives dictate a lot, right? And so what we we see with some of these companies was that they end up chasing budget. Like where is where is the budget available? Let's just do that

thing. And and this is fine. You know, districts have real needs and we're we're sympathetic and empathic to those. Um but again the impact is for kids and families and teachers right so we kind of like we wanted to retain a focus on solving real problems at the at the grassroots kind of level. I think the second thing we saw is the the incentive corruption became let's just chase the richest school districts you know because they can pay us contract and and so on and so and skip the kids that need it the most you know but our mission is to give every kid on earth an education they love so it's kind of like incompatible with the mission to just serve like a small fraction of the population. Um, it's also, I think, frankly, not good for the customer. You know, I think school districts for for a long time are just been burned by education technology where, uh, you know, the products aren't that great and

but they they get sold and then no one knows how to get them out. And, you know, so anyhow, so from the start, we're like, look, we're going to we're going to do something for families. We think we're going to do something um compelling um for families and and we think that's a better alignment of incentives. So, you know, the first monetization we had really came from this thought experiment. We're like, look, if you have $50,000 to spend, you you may send your kid to private school, you know, but the majority of the world doesn't have $50,000 to spend on education. If you have like a hundred bucks a year and so this this kind of started to feel a bit like I think we were inspired by like Amazon and Netflix and Spotify, you know, we're like, well, you know, I think Jeff Bezos famous talked about Prime is like we want it to be so valuable that it would be irresponsible not to buy it. that that's

kind of what Amazon Prime is, the best $100 you can spend as a consumer. I think of that for Netflix and Spotify, too, where I'm like, can this be the best $100 you spend on entertainment or the best $100 you spend on music? And so, you know, I I'm kind of interested and convinced that there's going to be like a prime type thing for education. And that's I think what Cluster Plus uh was both from this is our our subscription for families. And so we were like, look, can we build a product or build something that's so valuable that that it'll just be a no-brainer for families to buy it? And that's kind of where we want to go with plus. Um, so that's still the vision. What we practically started with was just a few optional extras. So we had this principle. We're like, we don't want to block learning.

>> So you're like, well, what do what do you charge for if you're not charging for learning? Well, maybe we can charge for convenience. Maybe we can charge for some some some optional extras that some people have told us they want, but which don't get in the way of your kid learning. It also meant we weren't never going to do a hard pay wall. So you never have to pay if you don't want to. You know, today it's about 5% of our base pays for something on Dojo. Um so you know there's there's many more that could but like that builds a great business and it also funds everybody else getting access to dojo for free forever you know which is which I think is quite important. Um so you know the first kind of set of features that we built were were very um I'd say small you know one of them was this feature called memories where instead of scrolling down you know pages and pages to see your kids photos through the year

we give you like a nicely formatted album. It's kind of like a yearbook you know and some parents really want that you know this digital kind of yearbook idea. Um and if you want that you you can get that here you know and and that was like one of these nice optional extras that that um that felt quite good. Um, and there's like two or three other features that we bundled into there as well. But so, so we we we kind of um we'd arrived at a couple of these principles. Um, and then I think what was very important to us was that we communicated uh to teachers uh ahead of time so it wasn't a surprise to them.

And so we were able to tell teachers, hey look, like Classio is going to be free for you forever. It's going to be free for kids and families to use forever. We're going to introduce some optional extras that some families can buy if they want to. they never have to. They don't want to. But some families we think will find them very useful who want to buy them and you know we just want to give you a heads up that this is kind of how this becomes a great business so we can build even more useful stuff for you down the road. Um and I think that communication itself was like very trust building because you know when do companies tell you that they just do things to you for the most part we like can we build this with you?

Um I think that was that was an important move. >> Yeah I mean I I'm hearing some really important lessons there. One is sort of obvious, but it's remarkable how many companies get it wrong. And that is start with what's best for your customer, not what's best for your business. And for you, that began with we're not just going to go sell to schools because that will lead us down the path of only selling to the elite schools with the biggest budgets, which will deviate us pretty quickly from our core mission, and that is serving students and their parents and and the teachers teaching those children. So, that's number one. Um, but then number two, in order to keep your organic flywheel going, which had been so critical for costefficient growth, you made a conscious decision not to have a hard payw wall and to ensure that the core experience of Class Dojo continued to be free for everyone.

Um, but then you had these delightful features that parents could purchase to make their children's education just a little bit better at an affordable price point that was, you know, under $100 a year. And so that allowed you to get to some extent the best of both worlds. You preserve that organic flywheel, but you're able to capture, you said roughly 5% of your user base is now paying for um the premium version of the product Class Dojo Plus, which then subsidizes it for everyone else to be able to access it. And then I guess another point is it sounds like you very deliberately decided not to run ads, which is a choice you could have gone with in order to monetize the users base that way, but then you're sort of extracting value from your user base by trying to sell them things as opposed to getting the subset who are getting enough value out of it to pay for a subscription. And so all of that led to

a very healthy core business, even if it started small, built on a thriving network that you didn't disrupt with your payw wall. And so now I want to get

to how you've continued to use the the strength and the health of that core network as a launchpad for more and more new products. So you've launched some products recently. You've got Class Dojo Tutor, you've got Sparks, you've got Islands, which is your new game product. Let's talk a little bit about each one of those and how you're thinking about how those products fit into the broader puzzle that is your vision for Class Dojo. In the long run, >> as you as you know, you know, subscription apps so well. I think a lot of a lot of revamps I've seen basically grow by either like bolting on more features or creating more tiers scripture or so on right um what we realized was that we've built this this distribution this network um and I think we've we've earned and and continue to earn I mean it's a daily work but continue to earn trust with our user base and so our thought was like can we

use that to build whole new businesses for our customers rather than just tweaking the subscription Couple of guiding principles here. One was that the o when everyone joins dojo. I have a document called the mission strategy and modes for the company. Everybody reads it and it's got this single guiding principle for everything we do at Class Dojo. It's like our number one overall thing which is that always do what is in the long-term best interest of kids.

>> So like that's when we start to think about launching new businesses like that's kind of the the overarching principle. You know you kind of start with the customer and work from there. Um and so the business models, the products, all these things have to align with that that overall principle. Um and and so we do we don't do things that just like you know steal kids attention whatever. We try to optimize for what is in the long-term best interest of kids.

Um so then what we started to do is we looked at all the needs that kids and families have and we're like which of these needs can we serve and so I'll tell you about the second business we launched after plus. Um this was some years ago. Um we were talk you know we talk with our families a lot like it's a very customer centric company like hundreds of interviews happening every week. Um one of the things that we started to hear over and over was that families want more attention for their kids than just what they get in school.

Yeah. And so you might call this tutoring, you might call it something else, but like you know like h I feel my kid is either ahead of class and bored or behind class and and stressed and worried. I would love for them to get more attention than just, you know, being lost in like a 30 person classroom, but like I don't know what to do, you know? Now, um there's a small fraction of the population that goes and gets a tutor, right? And and and they can afford it and it's very obvious where to go and probably their friends have one and all the rest of it. Um but we're like, well, hold on. There's a large chunk of families that wants more attention for their kid, but they don't know where to go. They don't know how to find someone that they trust. They don't know if they can find someone affordable. Um they don't know how to take all the friction out of that experience. Um, and so, you know, I

think some people had assumed that tutoring was just reserved for like, you know, the top 1% or something that that they were interested in it. I think there's many more people that are interested if you can remove the friction. You know, I think it's like a market expansion thing. And so, we realized, well, hold on, we've got many teachers on Dojo. We've also got many families. What if we start to match families with a great teacher >> and win-win? And because they're already on Dojo, we don't have to go and, you know, pay to acquire new users. So we might be able to pass on lower prices to families and also better earnings for teachers um and and because we don't have all the marketing costs in the middle. So could that work? Uh and so we actually found uh a company that was doing this in South America. It was a small uh uh business. It was other YC company. Uh we they they didn't quite

raise the next round of funding, but we asked the founders to join us. Um and they're fantastic. They rebuilt that business uh on Dojo. Um and so it started as a tutoring marketplace connecting kids with with and families with great teachers and that just started to explode. You know, initially it was math and reading K through five um just in the US. You know, that that business has grown like very substantially. It's a great second business. Um uh but what's what's amazing is three out of four families who are um paying for for for the tutor visits have never paid for a tutor before in their lives. So, we're actually expanding the market here of people that that want want this but couldn't have it before because the price is lower. It's easy to get to.

It's safe. They know the quality is guaranteed. You know, we underwrite the quality. Um, and so that that kind of second business just started to flourish. Uh, it's expanding into different verticals, different subjects into, you know, I think we we launched group classes uh last quarter. So, now you can get small groups of up to six or seven of your friends on there instead of just one-on-one. Um, and so so I think that's that that's that's been pretty exciting as a second business.

Um, I can tell you about the next two if

you want. >> Yeah, let's get into it. I They're both very interesting bets and so feel free to spend as much or as little time on on on each as you want, but I'm curious to hear how you you see them fitting into, as you put it, the mission and the strategy for Class Dojo over the next 5 to 10 years in the same way that Tutor has fit into it. >> Yeah, totally. So, the next one was honestly a little bit of a an oddball one. Um, but this came from a lot of anxiety that we heard from families in the pandemic. you know, everyone was online a lot of the time and we talk to families and say, "Where are your kids spending time?" And you know, what what what are you excited about about that?

What are you worried about? And basically the universal message was families were like, "My kids spend way too much time on screens. When they are on screens, I don't know what they're doing. Uh I've heard that they're on some of these online games. I'm really worried about that because they don't feel safe and I think they're around a whole bunch of creepy strangers, you know, and a bunch of press articles that came out that didn't help." And we're like, you know, families are kind of right to be worried because most products on the internet were never built to be great for young kids.

>> You know, like they just weren't built for kids. They were built for adults and, you know, kids find their way onto them and they're not necessarily built any of the right assumptions for for young kids. And, you know, we start to think about this and my co-founder Liam uh had had been at Jagex, which built one of the big kids worlds. Uh we met the founder of Club Penguin around this time. We met a few early Roblox team.

Um, and we're like, well, hold on. Dojo's got this very unique position because we know who a kid, we've got basically like a kids relationship graph on dojo. We know who the trusted people in your life are, who the adults are, who your friends are. Um, so we want to make a place where you can be with just your friends. >> So, no random strangers, no one else. It's just you and people that you trust. And so we ended up building this this place called Dojo Islands, which so the the idea is it's uh every group of kids gets an island. They get to build the island together. It's very Minecraft like and then to discover games and experiences on this island built by all the other kids in the world. And so you kind of get like both the creator aspect, you get the building aspect. And so we introduced this um and we're like look like this might be like the idea was can we make the best place on the

internet for kids? you know, I don't think kids their whole lives on screens, but if they are going to be in a screen, can we make it a great place? You know, that is with friends, that is constructive, that, you know, isn't like sending surprise bills to parents, you know, all the usual problems, you know, we're like, well, um, so we gave ourselves this challenge. Can we build the best place on the internet for kids, like a digital playground that's so great that parents will feel great about, that kids will enjoy. And, you know, I think we I think we we built the the first version of it. you know, we launched it some years ago uh quietly uh and it's just it's it's been really amazing to watch it grow. Um and so we can we can talk a bit more about that, but that's the high level. Most recent

product um which we launched last year is kind of our most AI native one. Um you heard me talk about tutoring earlier. There's this whole category of services or many categories of services actually that many more people would benefit from um if they could get access to them. But they've been so human capital constrained uh and therefore so expensive that it's very difficult for most people to have a you know personal or a private doctor and a personal chef and a you know personal nutritionist and a private tutor for your kids. These things are you know luxury goods for for the most part but um AI obviously reduces the cost of providing at least part of those services. We think there's going to be a great AI tutor for kids.

Um what does it look like? Are we can can we build one? are we even, you know, do we even have a right to build on? We realized, well, we're in this unique position between having distribution, having trust, um, and then also having a lot of context on how kids are learning and what they're learning that we really could try to build um, one of the best AI tutors for kids. And so we ended up building uh, we ended up focusing on a specific problem which is learning to read. This is a universal problem. Every family knows that some point they have to solve this. It's also just uh, not very well done. Uh so in the in the US it's something like seven out of 10 10 year olds uh don't read at at proficiency. This is in the 2024 NAPE scores like the the reading kind of scores and four out of 10 are below the most basic level. So these are like the worst scores we've had in like 20 years you know should be very concerning

reading is like the gateway skill for for all other learning. Um it's even pretty bad internationally. It's like seven out of I think seven or eight out of uh 10 kids around the world uh struggle to read and understand a simple story by age 10. >> Wow. >> And so like this this is like UNESCO's they call the learning poverty measure. Um now the the the cool thing is the science of how to teach reading is really well understood. Uh so science of reading phonics it's like pretty well established. So um our our CTO actually built a product initially for his own kids which took the science of reading and turned it into this delightful kind of Dolingo like game. Um it's perfectly adaptive uh to the child. So it listens and speaks but the child um uh it uses AI in the background to moderate the difficulty level. So we're really kind of guiding you along that that kind of optimal learning path. But it's really

fun. My kids love doing it. In fact, one one of the tweaks we had to make was we kept engagement at 50 minutes a day. So it wouldn't be like unlimited screen time, you know, as it was just highly effective 15 minutes, but we launched this last year and it's been it's called Dojo Sparks. Uh it's been pretty incredible. Uh so it's one of our fastest growing products uh ever. Um we got some early results back. We're seeing kids uh go two grade levels um higher in reading proficiency. So it's about two years of progress in about four or five months in about 15 minutes a day. So it's really quite amazing and that's that's that's available for for families and you know I I kind of think it's like a a very exciting vision where we could take some of the basics like literacy maybe numeracy one day um and and do them in a in a much more uh accelerated way so that the classroom the teacher can start to do many more

interesting things that you can only do in a classroom. You know trying to teach every individual kid in a classroom is quite difficult. AI can support there. Uh, and then we can we can free up the classroom for, you know, do creative projects, build things together, do real world stuff together. Um, I think that's that's pretty exciting. >> Yeah. I mean to me the through line across all three of those products Tutor Islands and most recently Sparks is that you were able to harness the power of your network which from the very beginning you treated as the sacred core of the business in order to have unfair advantages in many cases around distribution to be able to offer a service that would probably not be economical for anybody else to offer.

You talked about how for tutor it was matching students with teachers who are already on dojo in a tutor relationship which normally would not be very costefficient because you have to acquire both sides of the marketplace and that's very expensive but in your case you already have both sides of the marketplace and you're passing that efficiency on to your users in the form of lower costs then with islands it was the relationship graph it was the fact that you already knew who these children's trusted teachers parents and friends were and so you can create this ecosystem them in a game-like environment like Minecraft where they can interact safely with other people they know and trust. And then with Sparks, it was all of your data and understanding around how children and teachers are using the existing platform in order to then leverage AI to create a much lower cost version of a tutor that

was AI powered. But all three of those were rooted, if I'm understanding correctly, in the unfair advantage you've built around your network, which just shows how powerful that asset can be over time if if you nurture it correctly. Since you ended with Sparks,

I'd love to close before we get to our lightning round in talking about what your vision looks like for Dojo in 2030. And then specifically, obviously, smartphones was a big tailwind that got you to this point, but now AI is this brand new tailwind that has all sorts of potential for where you take Class Dojo going forward. And so, how does AI factor into your vision for the next 5 years? Well, look, I I feel very fortunate to have lived through and be living through these kind of these technological waves. You know, without smartphones, we never would have been able to connect people. And without AI, I don't think we'd be able to deliver kind of personal learning, uh, personalized learning in the way that I think we will. But just to zoom out a little bit, you know, overall my hope, my aspiration for Dojo is that it's a company that stands for flourishing, for human flourishing, and and we're

starting with kids. And so this mission is very real for us, you know, like creating a world where every kid gets education they love, one that makes the most of their talents and capacities. That's that's really like real for me. And so the two parts of that are how do you reach every kid and then how do you give each kid these kind of learning experiences they love? And so I think smartphones were part of the answer to the first part. It was like, oh that that that tailwind gave us distribution and growth. Um AI is a amazing answer to the second part. So you you probably know this, but like you know there's um uh there's this one these old findings education from like 40 years ago. It's called Bloom's two sigma observation which was that one-on-one tutoring can move a kid two standard deviations um uh up if you just versus a traditional kind of classroom. And so that that to put that in context that's taking someone

from like the 50th percentile to the 98th percentile just by changing the method of instruction if you just got individual attention. The challenge is that's never been able to scale. it's like far too expensive to, you know, it has been to give every kid personal attention. Um, and I think AI just makes it feasible and scalable for every kid. Uh, and so, you know, like in Spark's case, I think we're we're able to give children an perfectly adaptive, endlessly patient, infinitely compassionate, um, very engaging um, way to to learn to read, to get basic literacy handled. And I think that's like that's very exciting to me, you know. So, so I think I think to the extent that AI can help deliver some of these foundations um in literacy and numeracy and really bring up the floor, I think that's that that would be a pretty amazing contribution. Um I think what we have to be careful with is that

you know friction is inherently part of learning you know you have to like struggle and grapple with things in order to learn. Um and AI produces all the friction you know so like what do you do? Um there there's this great essay um by uh historian Nile Ferguson and I think I think it was called the starship and the closter or the closter and the starship something like that. But he basically talks about uh he was applying it to higher education but I think it's pretty broadly applicable. Uh it talks about the environments that you should you want to spend time in and what those environments develop in you.

So the starship is this environment where you have unfettered access to all of the latest technology and you know this environment I think develops a new facility with these tools like an ability to to work with the tools of the future and I think it's good to spend time in that environment. However, it's not the only environment you want to spend time in. You know like >> the other environments what I think of as the cloister where it's just you with maybe a difficult problem or a hard text. maybe have a few friends around and you kind of have to figure it out and you have to like build that kind of self-reliance and ability to figure things out. And I think that's also an excellent environment to spend time in.

So, you know, um all this is to say, I think like the the when I think 2030 vision for dojo, what I'm hoping we can do is we can reach every kid and family on the planet. And I really do mean that. You know, we're talking with a lot of a lot more national governments now about ways we can help. But I hope we can reach every kid on the planet. And then I hope we can deploy for each of those kids the right sets of products and services that help them learn and grow and you know basically make the most of their talents and capacities. Um that's what I'd like to be doing in 2030.

>> Yeah. Well, what an inspirational vision and as a father myself it's certainly one I hope you succeed at because my my children will personally benefit as will any other parents. Um so best of luck with that and and certainly rooting for you. I'll also say one other thing which is you know one of the the fun things about being a podcast host is I can draw connections across the many different guests and episodes I've had and and actually our very last episode was Essenderani who's the co-founder and CEO of a rapidly growing AI ed tech company called study fetch um and he talked specifically about how their AI intentionally does not give away easy answers to the student like it does it presents a certain amount of intentional friction to force the student to truly learn because it used to be the game of college was you go get good enough grades, you get enough B's, like you graduate with a high enough GPA, you get

go get your job, and then you you figure out your career on the job. That's no longer going to work. Like at this point, you really need harsh skills to succeed. And that's only going to get more and more true over time with AI. Um, and so it's become all the more important to like truly generate real learning as opposed to just helping helping students get the grades they need to get get their job and move on with their lives. So in both cases, I feel like you all are thinking about it the right way and using AI uh in helpful versus harmful ways to help children of different age groups um learn productively. Let's wrap up with our

lightning round. Uh this is always a fun way to end every episode. >> Shake it off. Yeah. >> Yeah. We'll we'll we'll keep it fairly short and and light here. Um the first one is the question I ask every guest and that is um what's the best part about working at Class Dojo? And then as the founder and CEO, you obviously have a lot of control over the culture. So what's one thing you're actively working to change and make better?

>> Oh man. Uh well one thing I mean look like I think that the thing that I love is just this idea of like talent density. Like you can just it's a very small team. It's like on the order of about 200 people serving you know 50 million kids. So like it's a tiny group. It's all hand selected. you can walk into any room and just like the brain power kind of lights up the room and like that it's like a great to be around that you know um uh things that I'm working to change uh you know I really wish a long time ago we'd been able to afford just dojo.com uh have the cost but yeah that's just a superficial one um I think one thing for me look as companies grow uh I think a natural instinct I don't think we have this at dojo but a natural instinct is that they start to um like reward the wrong things and one of the things you reward is people doing nothing, you know, you start to avoid uh errors of

initiative and you start to like reward errors of inaction. You're like, you didn't do anything so you kind of done anything wrong. Um whereas actually what you want to uh recognize and reward is like errors that come from taking initiative and from boldness. I think that's something that like I I just want to be very vigilant over as we grow. I want to continue to have this entrepreneurial initiative driven kind of bold risk-taking.

>> Yeah, dude. >> I mean, it's always nicer to have a shorter domain. So, I love the dojo.com point. But, but the second point, the second point I truly love because I think that's so spot on. It's like the people taking the biggest risks are often the ones solving the hardest and most important problems, but they're also the ones who are going to make the most mistakes because they're working on the hardest stuff. and you need a culture that rewards that versus punishes it. Um, next question. If you could go back and do one thing differently in your journey building class dojo, what what would it be?

>> Oh my gosh. Um, there I mean there's a lot, but I think I think one of the ones that comes to mind is um we didn't go international in any kind of intentional way. It just kind of happened to us. Um, and I think in retrospect I I would have gone international in a more concerted and more um more rigorous way. we kind of got yanked into it and now you know we do a great job now but it was it was a rough ride. >> Yeah, fair. And I've yet to find a company that has done it perfectly. I think it's just inherently pretty messy.

I happen to have worked on international expansion at both Quizlet and Fair, the company I worked at after Quizlet, and it's just hard. Uh, you know, and both of those companies ultimately figured it out, but it's it's not there's no there's no clean and easy path. >> What's the most creative thing you've seen kids build or do inside Dojo Islands? >> Oh my gosh. uh that this this is a constant stores of joy. Uh the stuff that we get posted in like customer support, whatever. But I mean just cuz World Cup is on, you know, we've seen a lot of kids build like soccer stadiums with like >> Oh, cool.

>> games happening in there. Um I one of the fun ones I saw was uh this is on YouTube actually. Some kids had like made videos to tell the story and and using what they're doing in Dojo Islands as like the visuals for those videos. So it's kind like just creating stories based in Dojo Islands, which is super cute. >> Huh, that's fun. I'm I'm a huge soccer fan. I grew up playing soccer and uh of course Lionel Messi given my age I've grown up with him. He's my favorite player. So watching him be so successful in what will probably be his last World Cup has just been such a joy to watch.

>> Um last couple here. What's the most profound way you think AI will change education in the coming years? I'm sure there are many things you could point to, but if you just had to pick one, what would it be? >> Maybe I'll point to counterintuitive one. I hope we get less mind-numbing time on screens. I think AI gives us the chance to build really incredible products that help kids learn. And so I think I hope time on screen becomes far more nourishing and then I think we have time offscreen to develop all these more human traits, you know, like how do you collaborate and do things with other people and yada yada yada. So I hope I hope both of those effects happen.

>> Yeah, I love that. Well, it's funny because we talked about the two tailwinds earlier being smartphones and now AI and smartphones created all of the mind-numbing screen time. So I guess you already had TV, but smartphones made it worse. Hopefully AI can reverse some of that. And then the last one, and feel free to share as much or as little as you want here, but I'm curious how Class Dojo's mission of giving every child an education they love feels personal for you now and and where you expect to go in the future.

>> Oh man. Well, look, I mean, I think everyone that's considering becoming a parent probably feels that quite personally. Um although when you know, I'll say when we started, we Liam and I were not parents. Um and I think for me a lot of it came from my parents actually like I grew up my dad's from Pakistan he grew up in a little village in you know kind of in in Pakistan not much economic opportunity um but he he just kind of worked really hard at school was fortunate to have a few great teachers um you know got to the UK became a doctor I was born in the UK grew up there if he hadn't done that journey I wouldn't be sitting here talking with you and so he kind of was able through a combination of great educational experiences from a very humble background to give us a much better life and so so I think like wouldn't it be cool if you could give every kid on the planet a chance to to make the most of what they've got?

>> Yeah, I love that and that's come up on a few of our episodes. You talked at the very beginning about how energy and education were the two things you considered devoting your early career to. And energy is foundational to everything. So like if you look at it from the standpoint of Maslo's hierarchy of needs, you need energy before anything else matters. But what's amazing about education is it just unlocks so much uncapped upside not just for the individual but for society because that person then goes on and does great things which benefits everyone around them and so it's such it's such an important field and it's great to see class dojo um doing so much good in in that field. Um thank you so much for coming on. This has been such a joy of an episode. Anything you want to leave the audience with before we wrap up?

>> Oh well um Phil thank mostly thanks for having me on. It's such a joy to be here. Um, I mean for audience look I I I I I really think you've got a group of people here that's trying to build a company that champions the best interests of kids. And so if you're interested in being part of it, supporting um you joining the cause, we'd love to hear I'd love to hear from you. It's just Sam at classjo.com. >> Excellent. It's a great opportunity. Uh and best of luck, Sam.

>> Cheers, Bill. Thanks. >> Thanks again to RevenueCat for sponsoring this episode. If you're building a subscription app, you can use RevenueCat to power purchases, optimize pay walls, offer discounts, handle refunds, manage customer data, run AP tests, generate insights, and unlock more revenue. I work with dozens of subscription apps, and most of them are already using RevenueCat to power their businesses. Learn more at revenuecat.com/subversive.