Crazy Teacher
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Crazy Teacher was a Chinese home-tutoring app that connected K-12 students with tutors for after-school learning. Backed by Tencent, Kun Ling Capital and bioVENTURE, it raised about $65 million in disclosed funding. The app shut down abruptly one April day, replacing its home page with a single farewell message: the madness has ended, thank you for the past.
02 / Crazy Teacher FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors supported by the current evidence
Edtech outlet Jiemodui (24–25 Apr 2019), contemporaneous with the app's 30 Apr 2019 shutdown notice, reports Crazy Teacher (Shanghai Xiangxue / 享学) burned through O2O tutoring subsidies, then cut them in late 2015 causing teachers to leave; founder Zhang Hao could not find a sustainable, scalable monetization model amid the 2016 capital winter, laid off two-thirds of staff, declared the O2O fight 'already over' to pivot to livestreaming, and on shutdown said the company had 'already pivoted to dual-teacher' so the O2O app closure was 'old news.' Beijing Business Daily/CE.cn (25 Apr 2019) likewise reports the last disclosed raise was the June 2016 C round and later livestream/incubator pivots had little effect.
Jiemodui: peak 20% lesson-fee subsidies drove GMV then were cut; teachers attracted by subsidies left.
Zhang Hao could not find a sustainable, scalable O2O monetization model; he later said the O2O fight was over.
Capital-winter financing pressure after 2015; last reported C round June 2016 (Jiemodui / Beijing Business Daily).
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Crazy Teacher ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Even $65M and Tencent backing cannot buy a shutdown explanation — the app just said goodbye
- 02
In Chinese edtech, regulatory weather can change faster than any product roadmap
- 03
A cryptic farewell suggests the decision came from above, not from the users
- 04
Burning through tens of millions without a public post-mortem leaves only the farewell page as history