Picture this: your edtech product is loved by students. They’re interacting with it daily on their phones, willingly rather than teacher enforced. Teachers give you positive feedback about their experience with the backoffice. It’s easy to use, actually saves them real time, and they can see student outcomes improve.
You’re also targeting the African market, so your product is built for featurephones, poor connectivity, and a myriad other technical issues you’ve had to overcome.
And yet … you’re a few weeks away from the end of your runway.
Because despite all that positive feedback there simply was no space in the budget for this. Schools couldn’t take on the cost wholesale, parents couldn’t bear it as a pass through, and your margins can’t sustain a huge discount to meet them where the budget is.
The solution?
Source a very different source of revenue. We turned to ESG players who could effectively sponsor schools and students through a prepay in-app credits system. It allowed us to align their impact goals with business revenue.
This case is just one example of something that holds true across nearly every EdTech company I’ve worked with: students are the reason EdTech exists, and the least consulted when it’s bought, renewed, or killed.
Equilibirum in the 3 body problem Link to heading
EdTech really has 3 constituents: students, teachers and procurement.
It’s worth articulating them briefly
- Students are the obvious group. They engage with the course material and are often the “users”, in standard software terms.
- Teachers are involved. But they usually are administrators in a classic sense. They operate behind the scenes, setting up accounts, groups, reporting, and a myriad other non-learning tasks.
- Procurement is responsible for paying, and finding the budget or business case to afford your solution.
Students regularly get all the attention. Teachers are a distant second. Very few EdTech companies think deeply about the procurement group.
So if you’re running an EdTech business, it’s worth writing down how each of these currently is served by you. You’ve likely, intentionally or not, collapsed the 3 body problem to a 2 body problem.
And there is a reason for this. Just like in science, the 3 body problem is hard to navigate so it becomes easier to reason about a 2 body problem.
The ideal state would look something like this:
- Students who want to engage
- Teachers who are not burdened with poorly designed admin work
- Procurement who can fit this inside the correct budget bracket
Let’s take a quick look what happens if a constituency gets ignored? What’s the common effect of reducing it to a 2 body problem?
Ignoring the teacher experience usually looks like a pain to set up classes and groups. Student admin that isn’t linked to other systems, and reporting so disconnected it’s not useful anywhere.
Every interaction becomes a tiny source of frustration. Oh, and when renewal comes around … good luck getting their support.
Ignoring the procurement group on the other hand is exactly where the founder from the intro landed. Excellent product but simply no viable way to fund it. Schools might try and offload some of the cost on the parents, but there’s only so far that will stretch. And “yet another tool” isn’t high on anyone’s list.
And that’s not limited to the typical school setup. Even in corporate learning&development is a highly discretionary spend. In boom times that’s ok, in crunch times it’s the first to get cut. The reason the big vendors anchor so much on strong relations with procurement teams and HR&IT (often the teacher/admins in corporate context) is because they know who pays their lunch.
And finally we’ve got the students. Ignoring them often looks like forced adoption. We put up with this system because the school/company tells us to. Students don’t use blackboard because they love it. And that onboarding LMS you just adopted isn’t driving the learning outcome you bought, even if it does make you compliant on “onboarding training completed”.
That’s what a forgotten student populace looks like.
And in both corporate and academic tooling the student cohort naturally rolls over. Student cohorts reset yearly, employees come and go, … . The stable parties in this ecosystem are the teachers and procurement roles. That further erodes the voice of students when it comes to commercials.
In conclusion Link to heading
So back to that story in the intro. By spelling out the constituents and methodically addressing them, we realized we didn’t need another feature or another learning outcome report. Instead, we had to rethink our approach to procurement.
Perhaps perversely, student focus gets you in the conversation; it’s teacher experience and a clean procurment story that will close the deal.