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I was at Chegg during its peak. I think there is a cautionary tale here about the danger when a company's culture deludes itself about its product's value state
by nfw2 2y ago
I was at Chegg during its peak. I think there is a cautionary tale here about the danger when a company's culture deludes itself about its product's value statement.
No one internally at Chegg admits that it's cheating software. I remember a slack channel where external criticism from an educator affected by cheating would sometimes be posted, and the consistent reaction was along the lines of "this person clearly doesn't understand what we do lol".
And yet, every single person I have ever talked to about Chegg Study has admitted they used it to cheat. Not a single person has ever said "Chegg helped me learn that material really well."
If Chegg has been more honest with itself about its service -- little more than a shortcut that students were willing to pay -- perhaps it would have used its available resources to establish a position of deeper value before a more efficient shortcut became available.
- tdeck 2y agoWhat about Chegg's textbook rental business? Is it a significant chunk of their profits? That was what I remembered them for but it seems to be barely a footnote these days.
- nfw2 2y agoThat is how they got started but I don't think it accounts for much of the revenue now. That was my impression at least.
- spike021 2y agoI think a good comparison would be something like Khan Academy (in its first five or so years or during the 2010's decade). Khan Academy is clearly geared at supplemental or even primary learning in some cases. And of course now even more so. When I was going to college if I wanted to learn a math concept better I went to Khan Academy or its contemporaries. Anyone who suggested Chegg to me did it to say "if you're looking for answers to your problem sets, go to Chegg". And usually people split memberships to do so.
- ycpwindg 2y ago[dead]
- Tainnor 2y agoI used to work at an edtech startup that was bought by Chegg. They let us write some code for 2 years, never knew exactly what to do with us (the managers they assigned us clearly had no knowledge of the problem domain) and then basically killed it off. Shortly afterwards, they bought a competitor. It was apparent that the strategy was just "corner the market and buy up all the competition". Making students learn things was never the focus.