What Most EdTech Entrepreneurs Get Wrong
For edTech entrepreneurs, getting things right requires a very intentional focus on micro-market matching, empathetic journey mapping, and the strategic curation of an alliance network.
1. Market Matching
Persistent lore and traditions, curiously nuanced cultures, deeply rooted identities. Just as these things exist for a particular city or region, they exist, and are often more deeply rooted, at our schools and on our college campuses. At minimum, the traditional budget allocation for market research should be proportional to the resources invested in understanding the institutional culture and targeted “micro-market”. This may translate to the very expensive reality of having to deploy completely unique products to any number of schools, but that’s just the reality of the landscape. Assuming that a product or platform will be valued, or even remotely perceived, equally at Princeton, Purdue and Portland State is an easy way to commit startup suicide before your horse ever leaves the gate.
2. Journey Mapping
Not only do local institutional markets develop unique dynamics that often get overlooked, the people that inhabit them develop unique and distinctive patterns themselves. Having done extensive market research at the institutional level doesn’t necessarily mean you understand how to effectively market a product. It’s time to join your audience on a personal journey of motivations and reasoning, and begin the process of truly discovering what makes their experience unique.
3. Insider Trading
Lastly, if you’re an edTech startup looking to seriously change the institution of education—first off, I applaud you—but it’s time to take a serious look at how you can gain an honest understanding from the inside out. Though it's shifting, the antiquated traditional model of education (higher ed in particular) will still be around 50 years from now, so the insiders, the informants, the resident experts; those who simultaneously see the inevitability of the future, while holding a deep experiential understanding of the existing system, become extremely valuable—perhaps even indispensable. As with any complex system (and few rival higher education in complexity), institutional knowledge and local cultural awareness become prized commodities. Nobody is particularly proud of this reality because it often breeds complacency, but anyone who has worked within a large system knows of its undeniable truth.
Working within education for over 15 years, and having dipped into a few edTech startup ventures along the way, I can confidently say that I’ve made significant errors in both worlds. Though most edTech companies do have a decent understanding of the current system of education, they get mired in the realities of funding rounds, development cycles, and product launches. It requires a very intentional focus on micro-market matching, empathetic journey mapping, and the strategic curation of an alliance network, if you’re to be seen within an edTech market that only shows signs of becoming more and more saturated with each passing moment.