When I joined Swing Education, we were generating thousands of substitute teacher leads. The top of the funnel looked healthy. But fill rates were inconsistent, which meant revenue was capped by supply, not demand. We couldn't figure out why more spend wasn't translating into more supply.
Leads weren't converting into substitutes who were accepted into the product and actually available to work. We had a demand gen system optimized for volume, not usable supply. In a marketplace, without supply, you can't generate revenue.
The Situation
Swing connects schools with substitute teachers. The growth constraint wasn't demand from schools. It was supply reliability. We needed to figure out why substitute teachers weren't activating.
We surveyed and talked directly to substitute teachers about how they decide whether to sign up and where to work. Two things came through clearly: they wanted jobs close to home, and they wanted to know what the job paid before committing.
Proximity mattered more than anything else. But we were recruiting at the county level, a geographic scope that didn't reflect how substitutes actually behaved. The GTM motion wasn't broken. It just wasn't designed around what drove activation.
What We Did
This wasn't a campaign. It was a four-year system redesign, done in phases so we didn't break supply while we fixed how we generated it.
First, I reframed what success meant. Lead volume became a vanity metric. We started tracking lead-to-activation conversion, activation rates, and active substitutes per market. With six-figure monthly ad budgets at stake, I identified an opportunity to align the leadership team around supply as the core growth lever and drove the team toward that shared understanding.
We tightened geography from counties to neighborhoods. A substitute in East San Jose doesn't want to drive to Palo Alto. We stopped pretending they would.
We tested sixteen channels, then cut to six. Surge testing showed us where each channel hit diminishing returns by market. Instead of spreading spend thin, we became intentional about where, when, and how we invested. We built deeper partnerships with the platforms that actually worked.
We built a weekly operating rhythm. Every week, I sat with ops, finance, and sales to review forecasted school demand by market and adjust substitute teacher marketing spend to match. Over-invest in a saturated market and you waste money. Under-invest in a growing one and schools churn. This meeting became how the company allocated growth capital.
As efficiency improved, we shifted spend from headcount to programmatic channels.
What Happened
We hit our operational and active substitute goals throughout the process. Over four years, LTV/CAC improved by 3x.
That number compounds. Tighter targeting reduced wasted spend. Channel discipline lowered CAC. Surge testing let us invest up to efficiency thresholds instead of scaling blindly. All of it layered.
The metric that mattered most was downstream: 125% increase in school partner LTV. When substitutes actually showed up, schools used the platform more. Fill reliability drove retention. Marketing wasn't just filling a funnel. It was improving the product experience for the other side of the marketplace.
We created surplus supply at a lower total cost, without adding headcount. That's leverage.
What I'd Do Differently
Customer advocacy should have come earlier.
Substitute teachers trusted other substitutes more than they trusted ads. Referrals, user-generated content, community-driven proof. All of it could have accelerated trust, reduced CAC faster, and improved activation earlier in the lifecycle.
The Takeaway
This initiative wasn't about optimizing ads. It was about designing a demand gen system that created surplus supply, improved unit economics, and unlocked durable growth.
By aligning marketing strategy to the needs of the customer, we changed the trajectory of the company.
