Technology-enabled teaching & learning in higher education, pt. 3: A guide on how to build a unicorn — advice for founders
This is the final article in our series on technology-enabled teaching and learning where we share Product and Sales advice with ambitious founders that are innovating in this space.
Introduction
If this is the first time you are encountering this edtech article series from Emerge Education, we highly recommend you later check out our first piece highlighting ‘Why we are investing in this space’ and our ‘Guide on how to build a unicorn’ in technology-enabled teaching and learning.
In our first piece in this series we argued how and why now is the best time for founders to innovate in this market. We covered the four key principles we believe education technology startups in this space will need to follow to adjust to the new post-Covid norms. These include innovations around format, content, design and structure.
Through our second piece mini-series we covered deep-dives into the technology-enabled teaching and learning categories of Resources, Delivery and Support. We provided definitions and clarity on the subcategories in these spaces, an overview of trends and innovations, challenges as well as opportunities to build the next generation of edtech unicorns.
This piece synthesises all of our learnings from 30+ top edtech operators and 50+ university leaders to offer founders specific Product and Sales advice. We believe there is a core set of rules that founders need to follow to have a chance to create solutions that will genuinely move the needle in digital teaching and learning at a great scale.
Product advice:
Keep it simple and stay focused: If you are growing a consumer business and cannot explain your product in one sentence you are most likely going to fail. All consumer business successes in education to date have come through targeted value creation around very specific student pain points and learning resources. Chegg became a unicorn thanks to early focus on textbooks rentals, Quizlet through flashcards, Coursehero through study notes and Varsity Tutors through connections with tutors. Focus on achieving large scale against a specific gap before significantly expanding product functionality.
Sell solutions not features: The higher education market counts around 25,000 separate institutions, of which more than 5,000 are in the West. If you are selling to universities, given the finite market size, you need to prove that your value proposition or product expansion path can build a defensible moat and command a high enough price point per customer to warrant a successful venture business generating $100m+ in revenue. We have previously talked about this through the lens of model market fit theory. There is a long tail of businesses in education that do not achieve model market fit and end up as mid-market players. As growth slows, they struggle to raise further capital and often sell for smaller prices to market leaders.
Understand the data fundamentals: AI in and of itself is neither a solution nor a problem, yet somehow many see it as its own category and the saviour of teaching and learning — more on this topic in our article here. Education does not have a data quantity problem, it has a data quality problem and without quality data there can be no meaningful insight. Instead of personalising learning in the early days of your startup and overwhelming educators with yet another unusable isolated data dashboard, focus on understand how your solution connects to the broader data infrastructure and embeds pedagogy in learning design. If the computer doesn’t know what outcomes we are solving then all of the data in the world will not help.
Embed pedagogy in the core: We have spent decades on understanding how the brain works and how we learn, yet digital teaching and learning technologies of today barely take any of our learnings into account. The market leaders of today include simple video courses, notes sharing platforms and flashcard creation tools. If your business is genuinely embedding pedagogy in its product, then you need to have a fundamental understanding of this discipline (read up on research covering ‘active learning’, ‘collaborative learning’ and ‘teacher student engagement’) and the right leadership team (eg Chief Academic Officer or Head of Learning). Pedagogy cannot be an afterthought as we have seen through consistent failures of MOOCs in improving retention and LMSs in increasing engagement. We need to move away from a market dominated by solutions that generate institutional and teaching efficiencies towards a market that genuinely cares about the learner. Jamie Brooker, co-founder of Kahoot, elaborates on this in amazing detail here and we cover this further through our concept of Pedagogy Market Fit.
Prioritise security and inclusivity: While universities often make decisions based on business economics, security and inclusivity are criteria that make the top of any decision making list. If you are helping 99% of students but neglecting 1%, it is not good enough. If your data security and sharing protocols are reliable 99% of the time, it is not good enough. Inclusivity entails building products that any student can use regardless of disability (eg including video captions for those with hearing difficulties), income (eg being able to enjoy the lecture if you do not have the fastest laptop) and more recently location (eg having the same experience if you are joining in person or online). Budget time and efforts accordingly, expect a lot of paperwork and do not neglect the importance of this category.
Sales advice:
Prioritise network effects: While the B2B market for digital teaching and learning has been asleep, the B2C market steadily rose with a long list of student centric competitors. This has led to an oversaturation of subscale products and difficulties in achieving promising business economics. As tutoring as a category took off, the money poured in to attract leads. It became increasingly difficult for businesses to acquire students at low enough costs against attractive consumer lifetime values given the ease of switching between platforms. The next generation of B2C businesses will have to prioritise organic growth, network effects and user generated content.
Pursue foot-in-the-door strategies: Unless you are taking all of your university customers downside risks and only promising upside risk, be careful how much you are expecting from universities. They are risk-averse entities with procurements departments that protect against mistakes but also slow down and prevent rapid adoption of expensive, complex products. Offering product trials and prototypes or small early rollouts that are priced under procurement thresholds could be smart ways to gain early customers before expanding to more expensive offerings with greater features as well as other departments and universities.
Unlock inbound sales: Selling to universities is probably one of the most difficult sales processes after selling to government. New teams in education with no previous higher education experience can take years to understand the buyers and reach product-market fit. Given the risks involved and scars from the past from AI-revolution solve-all-of-your-problem promising startups, universities today find it difficult to trust and pick startup partners. The best edtech startups focus on finding the first couple of pioneering large universities with a proven appetite for innovation. They prove effectiveness of their products and then rely on reputable and happy customer testimonials and case studies to attract inbound interest, acknowledging that most universities are followers of trends.
Understand educator circumstances: In a world where hundreds of products are launched every year and everyone is trying to disrupt and change education, it is easy to understand why educators are often scared and closed off to technology. They are protective of their IP, fear for their jobs, the amount of time they have to dedicate to new solutions and the upskilling to use them. Due to the nature of their work and incentives, schools and teachers are more often open to advice and collaboration than universities and professors. It is not rare to hear that professors are more likely to share a toothbrush with each another, than use each other’s content. Entrepreneurs need to acknowledge these circumstances and build solutions that support and enhance the work and individuality of university educators while providing intuitive and flexible products alongside training and support.
Understand university motivations: Naïve founders have historically thought that the promise of better outcomes and student experience alone are enough to build large B2B edtech businesses. While we have argued that driven by Covid more and more universities are finally now starting to prioritise the quality of education, the more founders can address other university pain points, the easier it will be to sell. This means showing whether your solutions can either help increase revenue, improve student retention and / or reduce time and costs. The stronger your business case and the more robust the evidence, the easier the sell.
The future of digital teaching and learning and our work
Over the last six months, we have had the pleasure of speaking with more than 50 UK universities and 30 leading edtech startups. We hope this guide will help existing and future founders better understand this promising and complex landscape and better inform the direction of their businesses.
In the coming weeks, we look forward to publishing our final installment in this series — our green paper which will focus on higher education institutions and educators as the audience. It will provide more detailed insights into the interests and concerns of the higher education sector, advice on how to foster innovation and greater uptake of digital teaching and learning technologies, with rich case studies on successful university and edtech company partnerships.
If you are a learning leader or educator interested in following our work, we would love to speak with you. If you are an ambitious startup founder building exciting solutions in this space, we would love to hear from you. Just send us a note here.
If you have come this far, thank you very much for reading this series. We look forward to sharing with you soon further insights on the future of learning and work across many other categories.
Acknowledgements
Andy McGregor, Deputy Chief Innovation Officer and Jisc
Ben Nelson, founder and CEO at Minerva Project
Corey Snow, Director, Education Industry Solutions at Salesforce.org
Curtiss Barnes, Senior Adviser at e-Literate
Damir Sabol, founder and CEO at Photomath
Dan Avida, co-founder and CEO at engageli
Dave Sherwood, co-founder and CEO at BibliU
Daphne Koller, co-founder and Board member at engageli, former co-founder and co-CEO at Coursera
David Minahan, Chief Information Officer at TEDI-London
Dror Ben-Naim, founder and CEO at Smart Sparrow
Gideon Shimshon, Associate Principal Digital Learning and Director of QM Online at Queen Mary University of London
Grant Lindsay, Director of Product Management at Chegg
Ian Dunn, Provost at Coventry University
James Kenigsberg, founding CTO at 2u
Jamie Brooker, founder of Kahoot & founding Partners at We Are Human
Joab Rosenberg, founder and CEO at Ment.io
Jonathan Baldwin, Managing Director Higher Education at Jisc
John Filmore, President, Chegg Skills at Chegg
Khaleeq Aziz & Abdullah Orkun Kaya, CEO & COO at Symanto Research
Matt Greenfield, Managing Partner at Rethink Education
Mauro Calise, founder and Director at Federica Weblearning
Michael Feldstein, Chief Accountability Officer at e-Literate
Michael Soselia, Director of Growth at BibliU
Mike Silagadze, founder & CEO at Top Hat
Morten Andersen, Strategy and Business Development at Labster
Nachiket Paratkar, Senior Vice President, Higher Education at Learning Mate
Nathan Thompson, Vice President, Corporate Strategy &Development at EAB
Dr Philippa Hardman, Vice President, Learning at Aula
Peter Reed, Managing Director at Interactive
Prasad Mohare, Senior Vice President at Learning Mate
Rob Cohen, former COO/CFO & current Senior Advisor at 2U
Robert Purdy, Regional Director of Scientific Partnerships at Labster
Tom Davy, Managing Director at Panopto
Valentina Reda, Research and Academic Development at Federica Weblearning
