From Start to Scale: Product-Market Fit Academy Returns

We’ve spoken with thousands of founders and backed 70+ startups, giving us unique insights into what separates the winners from the rest. But here’s the hard truth: 90% of startups fail, with a staggering 20% falling flat within their first year. The odds may seem stacked against you, but we firmly believe that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Introducing our new Product-Market Fit Academy (PMF Academy) Season! We’re thrilled to launch this exclusive content series designed specifically to help edtech founders like you overcome the challenges of finding product-market fit. Because in the realm of company building, achieving product-market fit is like discovering the Holy Grail — a crucial but enigmatic concept that can make or break your startup.

You might be wondering, what exactly is product-market fit? Is there a foolproof formula or a clear-cut milestone to aim for? According to tech veterans industry voices like Paul Graham, product-market fit means making something people want. Sam Altman defines it as the point when users spontaneously tell others to use your product. And for Marc Andreessen, it’s when customers clamour for your product just as fast as you can make it. In fact, he warns that many startups never reach product-market fit and fail precisely for that reason.

Here’s the kicker: The traditional frameworks and tech benchmarks may not always apply to edtech. Education is unique, with its own metrics and motivations. That’s precisely why we launched the PMF Academy last year. We recognised the need to support early-stage edtech founders on their journey to product-market fit, providing tailored guidance from those who have been there and done it successfully in the edtech world.

Over the past year, we’ve had the privilege of hosting over a dozen inspiring seminars and office hours with top edtech founders and executives. We’ve documented key learnings from each of these sessions, making them easily accessible on our Medium page.

One of our favourite sessions from the early days of PMF Academy was with Kahoot! co-founder, Jamie Brooker, on How Kahoot! grew to 7 billion players by designing for behaviour — a product-market fit case study. A true model of Product-led growth, the Norwegian startup has raised $517.3M, and has hosted over 9 billion participants in hundreds of millions of learning sessions since it launched in 2013.

Another brilliant session we hosted in a previous season covered How Springboard continuously disrupted itself to find product-market fit. Parul Gupta, the co-founder of online bootcamp pioneers, Springboard, shared their journey to teaching over 30,000 students and raising $65M in investment.

In March of this year, we wrapped up season three of PMF Academy with a case study led by Holger Seim, co-founder of Blinkist, the Berlin-based startup with over 20 million users, recently acquired by Australian edtech giant Go1. Now, we’re back with a new season and, based on your feedback, we’ve tweaked a few things. Here’s what you can anticipate:

• Full in-depth episodes: say goodbye to space-limited, live sessions with the experts. We’ll be recording and releasing comprehensive episodes that you can access anytime.
• Practical applications: get ready for engaging conversations where industry leaders share practical frameworks, processes, and checklists that propelled them towards product-market fit.
• Multi-media: we’re not stopping at full-length videos. We’ll be sharing short clips packed with key insights, podcast versions for on-the-go learning, and detailed write-ups for each episode.
• Comprehensive curriculum: we’ll be covering essential topics for early-stage founders, ranging from team building and market research to solution development and traction-gaining strategies.
• Your input matters: do you have a burning topic you’d like us to explore? We’re all ears! Share your suggestions with us.

We’re building a comprehensive library for early-stage founders building the future of learning and work. Available anytime, anywhere. Straight from the experts, directly to you. Here’s a sneak peek at the remarkable edtech founders and executives you can look forward to hearing from in our upcoming season:

• Craig Pines — CEO of Amerigo, ex CEO and President of Deltak

Craig sold Deltak to Wiley for over $220<, at which time they had 45 university partners and 300 online programmes

• Sievert Weiss — Co-founder, CEO of AMBOSS

Amboss’ learning platform has raised €60M in venture funding and is relied on by more than 2 million healthcare professionals in over 180 countries

• Shailu Tipparaju — Founder and ex CIO of Examity

Shailu has founded, scaled, and exited 4 successful edtech companies, including EdAssist (acq by Bain Capital Bright Horizons) and and Examity (acq by Great Hill Partners)

• Cory Eyler — Ex GM of Ed2go, Cengage Group

With 17+ years of experience in edtech, Cory has worked across the spectrum of global billion-dollar private equity-owned companies, privately held companies, and early-stage start-ups

• Kirsten Campbell-Howes — ex CLO of Busuu

Busuu is one of language learning’s behemoths with over 120M learners, acquired by edtech giant, Chegg, for $436 million in 2021

• Jonathan Lau — Co-founder and COO of InStride

InStride has provided 57,000+ employees with access to life-changing, employee-sponsored education programs from top institutions while helping prevent learners from accruing $628.7+M in student loan debt.

Excited? So are we. We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on with you. Watch this space.

Emerge is a global pre-seed fund backed by 100+ of the world’s best edtech operators. Our vision is to democratise access to opportunity — by being a catalytic partner for early-stage edtech founders. If that’s you, get in touch and submit your deck on our website.

This article is part of our Product-Market Fit Academy, where we bring you practical insights and advice from our world-leading community of Venture Partners. To keep up to date with our episodes, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, YouTube and Spotify.

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