So You Want to Scale Your Ed-Tech Company?

Don’t trust Google & other tips to help you scale

Every company looking to scale in the ed-tech space, given its particular challenges and misconceptions, should develop a go-to-market strategy which includes at a minimum:

1. Comprehensive Market Research
2. Thoughtful Pricing and Monetization Strategy
3. Marketing Strategy that is both “Top Down” and “Bottom Up”
4. Sales Strategy that Addresses Multiple Stakeholders

You may think you’ve heard all of this advice before, but please allow me to expand by offering some new food for thought based on my 10+ years leading go-to-market for pre-seed through Series D ed-tech companies.

I promise, none of this advice is easy to Google or produced by ChatGPT ;)

1. Comprehensive Market Research

Don’t Trust Google

Companies in this space are notoriously bad at SEO. Even after 10+ years of being a leader in financial education in K-12 classrooms, post-secondary institutions, and within companies, EVERFI was only showing up on the 11th page of Google results when you searched with keywords like “financial literacy lessons.”

It’s no wonder an Australian competitor moved into the market calling themselves the “world’s most used financial education platform” — they hadn’t even heard of EVERFI! Had they dug a little deeper, they would have realized that EVERFI’s courses were deeply embedded in classrooms across North America. We were even embedded into the curriculum in a number of states. We had over a million active students that school year. I’ve seen this issue happen over and over again.

This means you actually have to talk to potential stakeholders — whether that’s teachers, administrators, parents, or students. It’s time to get creative — go to conferences, strike up conversations at cafes, pose questions on relevant Facebook groups, ask your network for introductions, reach out to people on LinkedIn or Twitter. For every person you talk to, you should be able to get 1–2 more recommendations of people to talk to.

It’s Probably Safe to Assume Your Idea Has Been Tried Before

In another case, a friend of mine had started building a platform to aggregate professional development opportunities for teachers, and was completely unaware of Ed-Web until I told her the penetration it had among U.S.-based teachers. I always think back to the time a professor who worked in Venture Capital told my class “there is no idea we haven’t heard before. Any time a founder pitches what they think is a unique idea, we immediately lose respect for them.”

Conduct Extensive Stakeholder (Not Just “User”) Research

I constantly meet founders who think they are first to market, or serving an unmet need. For example, a career exploration platform I advise was banking on their platform being more engaging and relevant, with high quality interviews and a great UX/UI, than the competition’s. Unfortunately they were unaware of how engrained the first mover was in schools across the U.S. and didn’t have a good sense of why they weren’t getting viral adoption in schools, until I started working with them.

It’s hard to understand what the problems and existing solutions are without talking to users. But in ed-tech especially, it’s important to remember that users aren’t always the same as implementers who aren’t always the same as the decision makers/buyers. All of these ‘personas,’ ideally based in a variety of contexts (private school vs public school, urban school vs rural school, high school vs middle school, math class vs CTE class etc), need to be consulted to get a deep understanding of unmet needs, current painpoints, and potential opportunities.

In Education, Users, Implementers, and Decision Makers Could Have Very Different Motivations and Needs

In the case of the career exploration platform, while it may have been true that the ‘users’, ie students, preferred their platform, the implementers (teachers), and decision makers (district administrators) did not. The start-up realized that they would have to improve their reporting features, adjust their pricing strategy, and do a better job highlighting the student feedback, to be more competitive and gain buy-in from implementers and decision makers.

Validate Whether You’re Addressing a Problem that is Current

I’ve also worked with several founders who built a product to address a need that existed when they were in school (math not being interactive and interesting, lack of project based learning etc) before they had a good sense of whether that need was still unmet.

The education landscape is rapidly changing. Even if the curriculum isn’t able to respond as quickly as many would like, students have access to endless resources online. Even TikTok and YouTube are helping to fill gaps by exposing students to educational content from creators they can relate to, on literally any topic they have an interest in. For free.

Be careful not to get caught up building something that you wish you had when you were in school.

For example, through my MBA and shortly thereafter, I still had never heard the terms Sales Development Rep, UX/UI designer, Customer Success Manager, or Account Executive — now extremely common job titles in the tech industry. Now those roles are well understood and students are much better prepared for them when they hit the job market than I was when I graduated, just 10 years ago.

Validate Whether There’s Actual Willingness to Pay

I’ve also seen many start-ups make the mistake of assuming that because they are helping to solve a problem, people will be willing to pay for their product.

Just because a problem exists, that doesn’t mean it’s painful enough for someone to be willing to spend money to solve it. In education, there are endless ways a school could allocate their budget. Financial education might be extremely important to the administration, but if their students are coming to school hungry and there aren’t enough chairs for their students, the ed-tech product that seems like a no-brainer investment gets deprioritized.

That being said, just because a customer or local decision maker isn’t willing to pay (or simply can’t), in education, that doesn’t mean it’s not a valuable tool that someone else wouldn’t pay for (for example, many ed-tech companies have been successful in making their products free for schools but charging school districts, or obtaining funding from foundations, corporate partners, government agencies, or even parents to cover their costs).

This is one of the trickiest aspects of getting your business off the ground, and every company is different depending on their market and their product, so if you want to discuss how to approach these conversations, please reach out to me!

Understand Use Cases

One of the biggest struggles teachers face is fitting in everything they want and need to do into the hours they have in the school day and year. It could be that you have a great solution to help students with their essay writing skills, but that it’s a better fit for an advisory period, or a creative writing elective. As much as you can, validate your assumptions, ideally with a prototype. Try to figure out where your product will be used, by whom, when, and why?

“Education” is not a behemoth, singular, market. There is so much variety from subject to subject, school to school, district to district, and state to state, both in terms of cultural factors but also curriculum. Needs and problems vary by department and grade level, by demographics, and by region.

The bottom line: talk to as many stakeholders as you can!

Map Your Relative Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats

Once you have a good sense of the competitive landscape, you should do a SWOT analysis. The existence of competitors doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t find a market that loves your product, but you need to be aware of their strengths/weaknesses and honest about your own. For example, what does your platform that delivers short educational videos offer that Ted Ed or Sesame Street or even TikTok and YouTube don’t?

Do you have an opportunity to tackle a widespread underlying issue (great examples of companies that do this include Nearpod, Clever, Reverb, Teachers Pay Teachers), or a really niche market (for example Edmit, Newsela, Essay Jack), or could existing players who already have great penetration be a threat to your positioning?

Keep In Touch With Everyone You’ve Spoken With!

As you conduct your market research, you’ll come across people who wouldn’t ever use the product you’re interested in building. That’s ok! You should however be meeting many people who would. They should have a clear pain point that you provide a clear solution to, making them likely to be eager early adopters. Not only might they be your first paying customers, they’ll be valuable sources of feedback as you test your pricing models and build your product. Because you’re addressing a real problem that they have, they will feel invested in your success.

Add them to a CRM database and send occasional updates to keep them “warm.”

2. Thoughtful Pricing & Monetization Strategy

Make Sure Someone on Your Team is Focused on Revenue and Pricing

While every founder needs to simultaneously stand-up a brand, a product, and a revenue strategy to get their company off the ground, in my experience, there are three major approaches that founders take in the early stages of a start-up:

1. Brand Forward — some founders, likely with Media, Entertainment, Retail, and/or Marketing backgrounds, are focused on building a recognizable and valuable brand, and creative marketing strategy, trusting that the customers and therefore revenue will follow. For example, you’ll see this type of founder investing significant resources working with designers for their website and marketing collateral, and hiring early team members to manage social media and communications.(FYG)
2. Product Forward — other founders, likely with Engineering or Education backgrounds, are focused on building the best product UX/UI possible to meet their target customer’s needs, preferring to leave leave marketing and sales related efforts up to others to get their product to market. For example, you’ll see this type of founder investing a year or more on product development before shifting their focus to selling.
3. Sales Forward — the final type of founder, likely with a Business, Finance, or Consulting background, tends to be most focused on monetization strategy above anything else. For example, you’ll see this type of founder forging partnerships or securing Letters of Intent before committing any resources to building a product or brand.

Which approach do you lean towards? Do you have team members who complement your approach or amplify it, leaving your company with big gaps?

If you lean towards prioritizing and focusing on building a brand or product over generating revenue, it’s really important that you don’t assume that your monetization strategy will work itself out. I recommend that you pay extra attention to this part of your Go To Market Strategy, even hire an advisor or consultant if you can.

Identify Best Monetization Opportunity

Before you get too specific around pricing models and tiers, put some time into analytically evaluating which monetization opportunities are, or aren’t a good fit for your company.

From your market research, you should hopefully have a sense of how competitors are generating revenue, your ideal customer and their willingness to pay, and any revenue strategies that are still on the table. For example, maybe you’ve learned that no company in the digital wellness space is currently approaching foundations for funding, or that teachers aren’t able to allocate any time or money to digital wellness but parents and districts are, or that popular consumer apps like Calm and Headspace are building a new product targeted at schools.

Broadly speaking, revenue in the education technology space comes from four sources:

1. Consumers: students, teachers, and/or parents (e.g. Prodigy)

• ideal for Product & Brand Forward companies
• short sales cycle but more difficult to scale efficiently
• need team members with digital marketing experience
• leverage freemium models, free trials, discounts, referral rewards

2. Enterprises: schools and/or districts (e.g. Newsela)

• ideal for Product & Sales Forward companies
• longer sales cycle but more efficient to scale and retain customers
• need team members with experience in education
• limited budgets so leverage professional development opportunities, add-on training & support services, and discounts for scale

3. Foundations & Government Agencies (e.g. Read to Lead)

• ideal for Product & Sales Forward companies
• complex and often undefined ‘sales’ process
• need team members skilled at navigating government agencies and/or grant writing
• need to devote resources to measure and showcase impact of investment

4. Corporate Partners: sponsors, advertising, data (e.g. We Are Teachers, Clever)

• ideal for Brand & Sales Forward companies
• longest sales cycles
• need team members with enterprise sales experience
• need to devote resources to promote partnership

As you can see, each source of revenue has different considerations and demands on your team, not to mention a very different buyer’s journey and sales cycle, therefore requiring a different pricing strategy. Which source(s) makes sense for you to pursue, given your market research, product, team, and current resources?

Create Different Pricing Packages & Tiers

This is the fun (but complicated) part! Now that you have determined your best path to monetize, it’s time to test different price points and packages, so you can start to better predict how long your sales cycle will be, and what resources you’ll need to invest for your target buyers to feel confident enough to give you their hard earned dollars.

For example, let’s say you’ve decided that as a former-teacher who is a Product Forward founder of a digital wellness product, you want to be first to market in targeting teachers to implement with their students. You’re assuming Calm & Headspace will focus on an enterprise sales model, at a higher price point, with a more generic offering. You would want to first list all the various features that could be of value to your buyer (reports, unlimited storage, unlimited users, access to free workshops and webinars etc.). Then, you can put together a handful of packages that combine different features, at different price points, and create a survey to send to any stakeholders you’ve encountered since starting your market research who fit your buyer persona, to get a sense of what your buyer values most, and what their willingness to pay would be.

Note, willingness to pay is not the same as actually paying, so you need to be careful about who you send your surveys to and how you phrase your questions (for example, a teacher might thing a package is “worth” to pay $30/month, but not actually have the budget to buy that package). As much as you can, you want the respondents to feel like it’s most helpful for them to be honest about whether they would actually buy the package described, at the price in question.

Look to comparable companies, ideally with the same buyer but selling a product that meets a different need, that already have good traction as a guidepost if you don’t know where to start with your packages or price points.

There are already some great articles about pricing strategy for digital products to help you get started with this, but if you would like some 1:1 support, please reach out!

Test!

It’s assumed that you won’t have a perfect pricing strategy to start, but you have to start somewhere, and it’s best to start with a price point and package that was informed by market research and a customer survey, than one at random or just based on a competitor’s pricing strategy.

If you feel insecure about putting your product out until the world before it is “fully baked,” remember that this is where free trials, discounting, pilots, and “beta” testers etc can come into play.

3. Marketing Strategy That is Both “Top Down” & “Bottom Up”

When it comes to ed-tech, it’s important to consider the perspectives of the buyer, implementer, and user.

Ideally, these three roles would be filled by the same person, as it simplifies the process for everyone involved, but unfortunately that’s rarely the case in this space!

No matter which marketing asset is being created, be clear about the problem you are solving, how you solve it, who the product is for and what their call to action or next steps are to get started.

“Top Down” Strategies

• Offer enterprise level professional development
• Cold calling target customer (or cold outreach on LinkedIn, by email etc)
• Looking for channel partners who already have distribution
• Content Marketing — write guest posts to include in newsletters from friendly partners that target the same audience (EdSurge, Chalk Beat etc).
• Speaking Opportunities — present at conferences, on panels, have calendar of webinars to establish thought leadership

“Bottom Up” Strategies

• Partnering with teacher or student influencers
• Regularly posting unique and thought provoking content on social media (TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
• Incentivizing User Generated Content
• Designing your product to encourage word of mouth/referrals
• Offering 1:1 trainings, webinars

Recommended Assets

• Website — provide clear messaging and calls to action, and good SEO. Link to Data Privacy Policy & Terms of Use
• Product Demo — use a tool like Loom to record an online demo, and Pendo to automate in-platform tours.
• Recorded Webinar — teacher onboarding/training that can be easily shared in email campaigns or included on website
• Email Templates to Run Campaigns — understand target persona, source high quality leads (MDR, other), A/B test subjects and calls to action, campaigns, have proper CRM to track results
• Curriculum Alignment Map — if relevant
• One-Pager — highlight key features and how to get started. Can be emailed as an attachment, handed out at conferences, left behind after meetings etc
• Testimonials — once you have some happy customers, request feedback and reviews from as many stakeholders (parent, district administrator, student, teacher), and contexts (large district, rural school, home school etc) as possible
• Infographics — to include on website, in email campaigns, in content marketing, paid ads etc
• Case Study — one for each way to implement product
• Social Media Accounts — follow influencers, use same hashtags, share resources in relevant educator groups etc.
• Promotional Video — film product being used by students/teachers, highlight founder backgrounds etc to share on website, link to in email campaigns, or leverage in social media strategy
• Branded Swag — purchase custom water bottles, pens, posters, bags etc to be given out at conferences or left behind after workshops/trainings/meetings
• Company Newsletter — to nurture and retain active customers, include sample lesson plans, relevant articles, product updates etc

4. Sales Strategy That Addresses Multiple Stakeholders

I already addressed my thoughts on how to do this in this post.

As you likely already know, scaling a business in the ed-tech space is no easy feat, and there are several misconceptions and unique challenges that must be considered. However, with a thoughtful go-to-market strategy, companies can successfully navigate these obstacles and thrive in this competitive industry.

By conducting comprehensive market research, developing a pricing and monetization strategy, implementing a marketing strategy that covers both “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches, and addressing multiple stakeholders with a tailored sales strategy, companies can position themselves for success.

If I can be helpful or you have questions about any of the above, please don’t hesitate to reach out.