Founder’s Field Guide
Episode 46 Breaking Language Barriers
Founder’s Field Guide

Episode 46: Breaking Language Barriers

Breaking Language Barriers

Sameer Shariff is the co-founder and CEO of Cambly. We cover the origin story of the business, what Sameer views as the core functions of a two-sided marketplace, and how the team approached scaling a product that was international from day one.

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[00:03:08] - [First question] - What led him to the original concept of Cambly

[00:05:24] - Beginning to learn the scope of the problem and what solving it unlocked 

[00:08:01] - What Cambly is and how they started tackling the problem 

[00:09:18] - Lessons learned about the challenges of building an alive marketplace 

[00:11:44] - Technical challenges and the enabling technologies that allowed it to happen 

[00:13:02] - Deciding on what to focus on first when it comes to students 

[00:15:27] - Figuring out the formula for unit economics and the pricing structure

[00:17:05] - Learning what doesn’t work in their business model

[00:18:10] - Setting up quality control measures and moderation

[00:21:04] - Tools and services that will improve their experience in the future

[00:23:21] - What the 11-star version of Cambly would look like in a decade

[00:26:59] - Ways in which their software and concept could be applied elsewhere

[00:28:33] - Setting themselves up for success and fine-tuning the matchmaking component

[00:30:40] - Driving users to the platform and audience building strategies

[00:33:49] - Making the platform feel native to each country it serves

[00:36:02] - Surprising lessons learned around distribution and market penetration

[00:37:16] - The biggest boss battles faced as a business

[00:40:20] - Advice he would give to founders in a similar situation 

[00:41:35] - How he’s personally changed the most across this journey

[00:43:35] - Ways he’s shifted to a state of letting go and trusting his team more

[00:45:17] - Lessons learned from studying Airbnb

[00:47:25] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

Breaking Language Barriers

Introduction

Patrick
My guest today is Sameer Shariff, co-founder and CEO of Cambly. After starting his career at Google, Sameer founded Cambly in 2013 as an on-demand service to learn English. At the touch of a button, Cambly connects its global user base to a one-on-one conversation with an English speaker. During our conversation, we cover the origin story of the business, what Sameer views as the core functions of the two-sided marketplace, and how the team approached to scaling a product that was international from day one. Once you hear Sameer talk, you'll quickly realize the size of Cambly's market opportunity and why it may have been easy to overlook this problem. I hope you enjoy this great conversation with Sameer Shariff.

A Massive Market Hiding in Plain Sight

Patrick
Sameer, I think the right place to begin what will be a really unique conversation is around this problem space that you're tackling, because almost everyone listening speaks English almost by default. It's not a problem that we think about that we speak English, that we don't speak English and need to. So it's this massive problem hiding in plain sight. Maybe you could begin by just describing how you came across this concept in the first place, and then let's pick it apart as deeply as we can.

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