I joined VT at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents and kids were all stuck at home together. During the school year at least, kids were attending school remotely. With summer approaching, parents were panicking. In-person summer camps and academies were super limited because vaccines had only just become available, and by the middle of February, every spot had filled up. Parents were really concerned about increased learning loss without summer reinforcement and they were trying to find ways to keep their kids occupied all summer so that they could continue working from home in peace.
I took these concerns from our customers and the zeitgeist and launched a quick qual/quant survey to understand how I could create an offering to help solve this acute problem for parents with K-12 children. I put together a set of camp categories and topics, as well as a positioning and messaging strategy for our sales and performance marketing team. Within 4 weeks, I shepherded our product, engineering, design, marketing, and sales teams to launch VT Summer Camps.
Between March - May of 2021, we grossed $2M from 90% first-time customers.
In 2022, Varsity Tutors went public under its parent company, Nerdy, Inc. In the spring of 2022, Varsity Tutors transitioned from offering customers tutoring packages to offering customers tutoring subscriptions. From the fall of 2022 through the spring of 2024, I was responsible for deep customer segmentation and product marketing strategies that enabled the company to pivot through $0 ARR and achieve rapid-growth of $180M ARR.
