GARY: Next on Start Up, we head to Bellevue, Washington, to meet up with Amin, Marwan, and Dani, the founders of Kadama, a revolutionary app that connects students with tutors.

All of this and more is next on Start Up.

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♪ GARY: My name is Gary Bredow.

I'm a documentary filmmaker and an entrepreneur.

As the country faces significant challenges, small business owners are navigating their way through a changing global marketplace with strength and perseverance while continuing to push the economy forward.

We've set out for our 13th consecutive season talking to a wide range of diverse business owners to better understand how they learned to adapt, innovate, and even completely reinvent themselves.

This is Start Up.

♪ Early forms of tutoring can be traced back to ancient Greece, where philosophers like Socrates mentored students through dialog and critical thinking.

This practice of one-on- one education laid the groundwork for personalized learning that would evolve across cultures and centuries, emphasizing the importance of tailored academic support.

Various societies have recognized the value of tutoring, from private educators in royal courts to community learning initiatives.

Today, I'm heading to Bellevue, Washington, to meet up with Amin, Marwan, and Dani, the founders of Kadama, an innovative tutoring platform that connects students with tutors.

I'm excited to learn more about their journey and the way they're using social media to reshape the tutoring landscape.

♪ ♪ What is Kadama?

AMIN: Kadama is an online tutoring app that connects students and tutors all over the world to get homework help.

GARY: What led you to starting this amazing company?

AMIN: Yeah, growing up, I actually didn't know what career path to take.

I started to dabble into a bunch of different things, like technology, business.

And then my family are immigrant families, and so I witnessed people having nothing.

That gravitated me towards helping out with nonprofits.

And my senior year of high school, I actually went to the local community college, and I was like, "You know what?

I have an idea.

"I want to be able to start a club that can connect "nonprofits with people who want to help through a mobile platform."

GARY: Awesome.

AMIN: And that inspired me to want to be an entrepreneur.

And then from there, I realized my path, and then I ended up studying computer science at the University of Washington.

And through that, that's where my company, Kadama, was born.

GARY: What is that like growing up with your parents being from another country?

Talk about that experience and your culture.

AMIN: The biggest thing that instilled in me is that if I was just one generation earlier, I would have been part of the war that happened in Syria where hundreds of thousands, even millions of people were affected, and I could have lost everything.

From a very young age, it taught me, cherish what you have, even the little things, and always keep in mind the people who don't have anything.

That was the foundation I carried to building my company today.

The whole premise of it is helping people who maybe don't come with a lot.

GARY: What did you do immediately after college, or did you start Kadama in college?

AMIN: Yep.

I started Kadama in the Summer between high school and university.

GARY: Wow.

AMIN: And I kept working on it through university.

We started working on it in 2016.

We launched in 2018 and failed miserably.

When we launched Kadama initially in 2016, it was an idea for many services.

It was housework, errands, yard work, tutoring, a bunch of other subjects.

GARY: Got it.

AMIN: The failure in 2018 was because we were trying to do so much at once.

We looked into it and we were like, "Well, dang, "a lot of these options for tutoring are pretty "old school and ancient.

Kids our age don't want to use them."

GARY: Maybe don't learn that way.

AMIN: Yeah, Exactly.

That's actually the biggest one.

We're like, "They actually prefer to learn "through texting, "through being on their phone, "through videos, not maybe sitting on a desktop."

And so we built this social app where it felt like you're using a social media app, but all based around getting homework help.

GARY: Being- trying to be everything to everyone might sound appealing because it's like, "More options.

We have more options that people can..." No, that's the kiss of death.

AMIN: Especially as a naive founder, you're new to the game.

You I think like, "If I build an app that addresses everything, I'm going to get so many more customers."

GARY: Right.

No.

AMIN: But in reality, when you're building a product that's so broad, it's hard for you to build features that are specific to one of these utilities.

For example, tutoring requires very advanced texting, file sharing aspects that something like yard work would never need.

GARY: Exactly.

AMIN: And so, well you need to build one product that fits all, but now you're compromising on the depth of the experience, which is what's necessary to build something super prestigious.

That realization, when we hit that, obviously, we started to see more success because now we're able to build an education and tutoring product that is super, super specialized in addressing the needs of our customer.

♪ GARY: How do Gen Zs learn?

MARWAN: When we were approaching this, figuring out how Gen Z learn, instead of creating a custom experience directly for them from the get-go, we were like, "Let's take a step back.

Let's provide them all the different tools."

We did audio calls, video calls.

You can message tutors only through chat sometimes.

Sometimes that's all it takes.

They just want to talk to someone on message.

They don't want a video call.

We just provide them all those features.

But from what we've seen, so many of them, the most used one, was just messaging.

They just love to message back and forth with the tutor.

GARY: Yeah.

MARWAN: Specifically, tutors that are their age, they'll have more understanding of the relevant course material that's being taught today in schools.

GARY: Right.

MARWAN: And they build a personal relationship with the tutor in the sense that it's not just talking about the exact learning.

It's talking about, "Hey, did you watch that NBA game last night?"

GARY: Right.

MARWAN: It's built- And that really helps so much.

You might think, "Well, that's not related to learning."

And a lot of other tutoring platforms don't really care for it, even prevent stuff like that, only talk about the learning.

But if you really want students, especially the C students, the D students, the failing students, the students who need tutoring the most to really love learning, it's important for them to see those role models, like a 4.0 student who is maybe a year or two older than them... GARY: Yeah.

MARWAN: Who has the same exact interests as them, but is also super successful in school.

And they could be like, "I want to be like this person."

♪ GARY: What was your initial impression and your experience right off the bat?

HAWA: I think my initial experience was, "Wow, this is really simple and very affordable."

You'll make a post, describe what your rate is, and there'll be a lot of tutors popping up who have experience in whatever topic you need help with, and you can see their background, their qualifications, see even maybe what school they go to, if they're similar age to you.

And then you can pick a tutor from there and then maybe negotiate a price.

GARY: What drew you to the experience?

HAWA: Yeah, I think the most attractive thing was that there were peers my age that I could learn from.

I always think that we learn better from people who are not so far removed from us.

There are tutors who are professors who've worked in the industry for 30 years, and for me, it's, "Oh, my God, am I ever going to get there?"

Versus a student who makes it really fun to learn and also gives you that hope that you can get to where they are if you just keep trying and keep learning.

♪ GARY: In 2016, what did it take for you to launch?

AMIN: In 2016, I was 18.

My other co-founder was 17, and the third one was 14.

GARY: [Laughs] What?

AMIN: We're broke students, right?

GARY: Yeah.

AMIN: And we don't come from family that have money they're going to let us use.

Me and the 17-year-old we're like, "Okay, we're at the age where we can get a job.

"Let's go secure something.

"We want a job that teaches us skills that we can apply to the job."

GARY: Get paid to learn.

AMIN: Exactly.

I somehow secured an internship in computer science with no knowledge of coding.

He secured an accounting job.

He started to learn how to run our business plan and finances and accounting.

I was learning how to code.

At the same time, we saved up $30,000 or $40,000 that we used to pay a few contractor groups to build our MVP.

GARY: When you relaunched in '19, first off, it's- Was your confidence a little bit lower at that point?

AMIN: In that year, we got into a competition at the University of Washington.

We made it from the top, I think, 130 something to the top 32.

GARY: Wow.

AMIN: We didn't end up winning any cash prize, but that was a lot of validation to make it through those rounds.

GARY: Yeah.

AMIN: But because of that, we got invited to the University of Washington, Jones Foster Accelerator, where in six months, you get a panel of advisors.

If you graduate that program, you get $25,000 cash no strings attached.

GARY: Wow.

AMIN: We made it out of that with $25,000 in our pocket.

We get our first customer in 2019 after we finish our program, and we're super ecstatic.

"That's it.

Pedal to the metal."

Then we get a few more customers, all again in-person.

Then the COVID lockdowns hit, nothing can happen in-person, and our app goes from the few customers back to zero.

There was a period where we actually thought we lost it all.

But when the pandemic hit and forced us to rethink everything to a virtual world, we could patch all the off-platform stuff that occur.

We can directly sell to students.

The mindset change that occurred with COVID, I actually think it's 99.9% pro is just being virtual at this point.

I don't think we'll ever go back in person.

♪ GARY: Now it's 2020.

You're done with the accelerator.

You have this $25,000 in your pocket.

What happens next?

AMIN: Now we discover the wave of TikTok.

2020, there's a lot of stigma on TikTok.

GARY: That was it.

It was all kids dancing.

AMIN: Exactly.

And I was working at Apple, and I remember pitching this idea to my colleagues at Apple, like, "You know, "I feel like TikTok is going to be the new way for marketing."

I posted a video on my personal page.

I'm like, "You know what?

"I'm not going to embarrass our brand.

"Let me, Amin Shaykho, go on social media.

"Let me just play around with videos there.

Just see how this works."

GARY: Yeah.

AMIN: Two videos in, I posted a video of my friend eating an In-N-Out burger.

He was giving his review, and he was like, "Mmmm.

This is aight."

And social media went crazy because it turns out In-N-Out was a controversial topic.

Some people love it, some people hate it.

And that took me to like, I don't know, 200,000 views.

I'm like, "Oh, my God."

And that's where I bring in my co-founder, Dani, who happens to be my brother.

We lived together and we start spinning off videos after video.

And then we realized that in education, it's boring to promote tutoring or basic education.

But what if we think of topics that fall within education that resonate with students, which is our target customer?

And so we thought, "Okay, what do customers want?"

Well, they like to learn about food deals, how to get free Dairy Queen ice cream.

That'll be our brand.

And then because of those bite-size hacks, those bite-size hacks were so easy for us to scale from so many different topics, we realized, what if we offer them a quick way to get a 4.0?

And that's where we start to tie in our own product.

GARY: Transitioning.

Yeah.

AMIN: Exactly.

"Here's how to get a quick 4.0.

"Go download Kadama on the App Store, "put in your request, "and within 20 seconds, you have a tutor."

GARY: Wow.

AMIN: And that video, I remember our third one in, pulled in 3 million views and took us to number seven on the App Store charts.

GARY: What?

AMIN: I was outside of the house, I run back into the house, I show it to my brother.

I'm like, "We need to make 11 more of these videos."

DANI: And Amin, my brother, he slams my door down and he's like, "The server is gone.

The server is shut down."

It was because that video, the first video we ever posted, got a million views.

GARY: Oh my gosh.

DANI: It shut down the server, and we got tens of thousands of view downloads.

And ever since then, everything changed.

AMIN: Video after video, viral, viral, viral.

We're climbing off the charts like number two.

And at that point, we're like, "We cracked the code."

I'm pretty sure within a month or two, we had 20,000 followers.

A year, a million.

And because we were getting so much attention, investors are coming our way, so many more customers.

GARY: Oh, my gosh.

AMIN: And we're like, "This is it."

I was still working at Apple, by the way.

My brother was still in school.

My other co-founder was working at his job, and we're like, "What's going on?

We need to take this full-time."

GARY: Yeah.

AMIN: It was hectic.

But that's when we cracked the code on how to use TikTok.

GARY: What an incredible story, man.

I mean, you literally- TikTok helped to build this business into what it is.

AMIN: 100%.

What's funny is now we're the second most followed education brand in the world.

GARY: What?

AMIN: There's only one above us.

This approach, by the way, to marketing was recognized by Forbes, and we made it on Forbes 30 under 30 because of our unique approach to customers through TikTok that was never done before.

♪ GARY: As we sit today, how many students and then tutors, roughly, do you have on the platform?

DANI: Yeah, we've got millions of students and tens of thousands of tutors on the app today.

I want to come back to the fact that when I first started TikTok, I knew nothing about social media.

I had my own account with 10 followers, and that's about it.

GARY: Okay.

DANI: With everything, you don't have instinct when you start with anything.

But what you got to do is just learn.

Look around, see what everyone's doing, the people who are succeeding, why are they succeeding?

See what they're doing, try out what they're doing.

Learn from your mistakes, and you can form this intuition that you can use in the future.

♪ ♪ GARY: Let's talk about you building the infrastructure behind Kadama to sustain your own growth at that point.

What did you do?

AMIN: When we started getting that virality, we were the Wild West on our app.

People were getting scammed left and right.

There was not a lot of regulation because it was a basic app.

GARY: It's early.

AMIN: It's an MVP.

It's like literally two people meet on the app and then they can just interact.

GARY: Sure.

AMIN: But the thing is there's no guidelines.

So we had to add proper payment system.

We had to add rules.

We even gave them instructions on how to use the platform.

We had to up our vetting for tutors.

At first, it was so simple.

But the idea was as we were getting data, we learned as founders that- be data first.

We would send out surveys and we'd be like, "Okay, give us your two biggest pain points on the product."

We'd get that aggregate information, figure out the top two biggest things to fix, and tackle them.

We went in that order, and slowly, we started building a product that was optimized to what the customers want.

GARY: How does the app make money?

AMIN: Right now, we make money because we take a cut of every transaction.

GARY: Okay, got it.

Very simple.

How do you fill the tutor side now?

Because you need qualified tutors, right?

AMIN: Our app has one of the most advanced tutor vetting process.

They take quizzes on the app, they have to submit IDs, transcripts, and there's levels within the quizzes.

You keep taking them until you fail to determine your level.

When they come to the app, what we learned is, yes, they come in for the homework help, but then they end up building friendships.

You see their relationship is a friend that helps with homework.

♪ GARY: What initially drew you to Kadama?

YOUSUF: Essentially, when I was younger, I wish I had a resource like Kadama.

When I found it on the app store and it was trending, it was top of the education, I was like, "I kinda want to be that person that I wish I had."

GARY: Walk me through the full experience.

YOUSUF: Essentially, when you're a tutor, you have a toggle button that activates whether or not you're active on the app.

A student can either reach out to you specifically, or they can just post their assignment and wait for a tutor to accept it.

GARY: What would you say to other folks out there, other students that may be interested in being a tutor?

YOUSUF: I think anyone can be a tutor.

I think if you have an area of expertise or you have a subject that you know a lot about, there are other people out there in the world who need help with their assignments, and they may not know as much as you do.

At the end of the day, it's really just a casual conversation that you're having with that person.

You're just walking through step by step and explaining what you're doing.

♪ GARY: Are you guys still working side jobs or is this full-time?

AMIN: No, we've been full-time since 2021, when we actually secured our almost $2 million round.

The reason we raised that was because we needed staff at that point.

That money took us around almost a year and a half to two years.

We were about to go raise another round.

But what happened in the start up world was this recession where all the investors stopped investing in around 2022.

They changed their mentality from growth first to being a profitable company.

And so, we had been building our company with growth first mentality.

When they changed that mindset, we were in this position where we have three months of runway.

We're not profitable.

Nobody wants to invest in us.

What do we do?

That was probably, I would say, the three worst months of my life.

At that point, our app was taking 15% of every transaction.

I was like, "Listen, "our long-term goal was always to move it to 30% "because that's enough for us to be profitable.

But how are we going to do that overnight?"

And so what I did, I sat with Marwan and we computed everybody's metrics.

We saw inefficiencies in the app.

We saw ways that if we can take that extra 15% and move it to 30%, we can improve the experience where tutors have to spend less time wasted finding customers.

We can find them higher paying customers, and we can build an experience that would allow them to actually make even more money with a higher percent take rate from them.

GARY: Okay.

AMIN: I created a custom pitch deck to our top 100 tutors, and I sat there one to one on Zoom with 100 people for three days straight.

"If you guys trust me to up your fees, "here's what I promise in return.

"We need this because if we don't do this, our company is going to vanish."

And so I convinced them that it started to work.

But then we realized that that caused another problem because all the new tutors coming in, that 30% seemed too big on them.

Then we developed this algorithm where when you're brand new... GARY: Oh.

AMIN: We start you at 15%.

GARY: Yeah.

AMIN: And as you get better we slowly up the fee with you as long as you're making more money at the end of it.

By the end of it, I think four days left on the clock or something like that, we were looking at our projections, and for the first time, it was green.

GARY: You were profitable.

AMIN: Since that day, today, we've been profitable and haven't had to raise any more funding.

♪ GARY: What's the future hold for this company?

AMIN: Yes, now we're working on a few different things.

We're partnering with schools, colleges, specifically.

GARY: Yes.

AMIN: All over the nation.

We're also building AI products on top of what we have right now.

GARY: Is AI a threat or a benefit to you?

AMIN: Initially, it was a threat.

GARY: Why?

AMIN: We were very concerned because, of course, are you going to go pay somebody maybe $20 - 30, $40 for help on something, or are you going to go use an AI tool that's free?

However, if we can leverage AI, which we are, with tutors, we can allow the tutor to spend less time helping, so the overall price will be much more affordable... GARY: Yeah.

AMIN: To the student.

That's where it went initially from a threat to actually a tool that can help us scale.

GARY: What keeps you up at night regarding the company right now?

MARWAN: Really, what keeps me up at night is that we're continuing to serve Gen Z properly, as in when we started the company, we were still in college.

We were right in it with the students.

But as we're growing older, it's been many years now.

Trend and again, we're saying Gen Z now.

GARY: Gen Alpha is coming up.

MARWAN: Gen Alpha is coming up.

Exactly.

That we're keeping up with that exact trend.

GARY: Yeah.

MARWAN: That we're not falling behind and we need to always constantly evolve and adapt.

Because as I mentioned, maybe these solutions that existed prior for the tutoring industry were great when they started, but then because they didn't keep up, they became not the best.

Really, that's for us, continuing to deliver that amazing user experience for our students, adapting to the times, ensuring that we're always up to date and providing them the best experience possible.

GARY: What is the best advice that you have for somebody watching this that feels inspired, that may also want to utilize social media to grow a business?

What advice do you have for them?

DANI: My advice would be, do not fear failure, embrace it.

The marketing is really what made our app today.

But guess what?

I used to do door to door.

I used to stand outside after school ended and knock on the cars of parents just to see if they would use our app.

GARY: Yeah.

DANI: So many ways failed.

It only just took one way, which was TikTok, to really change everything.

GARY: So much of a small business story, it's almost like seeing a chess game unfold.

So many close calls, but man, how does it feel looking back, knowing you made some of the right decisions at the right time?

AMIN: The lowest moments throughout this journey are my favorite moments now when I look back because they taught me the most.

It made us think in creative ways outside of the box thinking that we wouldn't have done if we were comfortable sitting on a million dollars.

And those three big failures that we talked about were instrumental to where we are today.

GARY: I have to confess that throughout grade school and high school, I was a pretty mediocre student, and I was always terrified of math.

So when I got into college and chose marketing as my major, I had no clue that the curricula was nearly all math.

But I hired a tutor and quickly realized that it wasn't the actual math that I struggled with.

It was the way that I was being taught.

And that changed everything for me.

I was no longer terrified of math, and the experience helped me realize the importance of how information is delivered because we all learn differently, which is why I absolutely love Kadama.

Amin, Dani, and Marwan have figured out a way to meet students where they are, pairing them with similar-age tutors who, better speak their generational language and are much more likely to learn in a similar way.

They text, chat, and talk through mediums that they're all comfortable with.

And they've cracked the code on reaching their target audience with fun creative videos on TikTok and other social media platforms.

To me, this is a story about so much more than just another new tech solution.

It's a story about empowerment, accessibility, and the belief that every student deserves the chance to succeed.

It's about blending technology with compassion, creating a platform that adapts to individual learning needs, and breaking down financial barriers by keeping things affordable and negotiable between tutor and student.

I can't wait to see what the future holds for Kadama and its founders.

And based on the energy and passion that I felt meeting them today, I believe that this is just the beginning.

For more information, visit our website and search episodes for Kadama.

♪ GARY: Next time on Start Up, we head to Detroit, Michigan to meet up with Ping Ho, the founder of Marrow, a unique butcher shop and restaurant on a mission to create transparency in the food industry.

Be sure to join us next time on Start Up.

Do you want to learn more about the show?

Or maybe nominate a business?

Visit us at StartUp-usa.com and connect with us on social media.

♪ ♪ We've got a long road ahead of us ♪ ♪ A long road ahead of us ♪ Got a long road ahead of us ♪ ♪ Before we pay our dues ♪ We've got a long GARY: You're not my father.

CAMERAMAN: He's not your father.

♪ (Gary screams) ♪ (clapping) ♪ (cheering) MAN: Hold on, if they ever doubted it was me.

There it is.

GARY: Oh, yeah, there's nothing fake about this.

(laughing) Oh my God.

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