7 Steps from Idea to Product-Market Fit: An EdTech Founder’s Journey

How UX methods help founding teams hit key milestones

Nicole Gallardo
UX of EdTech
Published in
6 min readApr 25, 2023

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Last week I got to share my Bootstrapping Your Product class with two of my favorite podcast hosts in the space, Alex Sarlin from EdTech Insiders and our community’s founder, Alicia Quan from UX of EdTech.

While the three of us each bring our own unique perspective, background, and experience to what we are doing within EdTech, we are collectively working towards the same general mission, just as many of the people reading this article are:

To improve the lives of those within our learning communities.

We discussed the ways in which UX helps minimize risk for EdTech startups when the right mindset and proven methodologies are implemented from day 1. And we acknowledged that while the UX process itself has basic steps to follow, it looks and feels tremendously different at each step of a founder’s journey as the company grows.

The purpose of this 4-part article series is to explore the topic of an EdTech founder’s journey:

  1. Idea to Product-Market Fit
  2. Early-Stage
  3. Growth
  4. Mature & Exit

I summarize the major stages of an EdTech startup and illustrate how UX and design are used to help founding teams hit typical milestones within each phase. Individual founder journeys will vary depending on the company, product, customers, and users, but this series can serve as a general outline for those in tech who are focused on creating a software, service, or platform for learners and the people who support them.

Stage 1: Idea to Product-Market Fit

The founder’s product focus in this phase is on turning an idea into a scalable and profitable offering that customers are willing to pay for in order to solve their specific problem or need.

There are 7 basic steps involved:

1. Identify the need

The founder has come up with a hypothesis about an identified need or challenge people in a learning community face. The hypothesis is based solely on assumptions the founder has made about the group for which they have assumed the need. Oftentimes, the hypothesis is driven by a founder’s own personal experience of something being particularly frustrating, challenging, or lacking.

2. Gain a deep understanding of the people with this need

In EdTech, the identified problem usually affects an exceptionally wide range of learning communities and needs a solution that is able to serve customers and users with an unusually diverse set of demographics.

Before anything is designed, desk research is conducted and 100’s of potential users and customers are identified, interviewed, and surveyed so the founder can validate the hypothesis and clearly define the main problem they’re solving for.

Founders typically spend several months getting to know the people and communities they are trying to solve the problem for in order to minimize biases and see possible solutions from all angles. Common artifacts developed during this step include:

  1. Customer personas
  2. User personas
  3. Customer journey map
  4. User journey map

It’s common in EdTech for the customer to be very different from the end user (i.e. district buyer vs. student or parent vs. child), so founders typically define those relationships, personas, and journeys separately. Both are important to understand but for different reasons.

3. Come up with the big solution idea

As research and interviews continue, the founder’s initial assumptions are either validated or invalidated one by one to help inform potential solutions for the main problem. After a deep ideation period, one “big solution idea” is then plugged into the overall journey, plans, and vision. This big idea is what will eventually evolve into what is hopefully a profitable business.

After analyzing and synthesizing all insights and data gathered thus far, the following fundamental items for the company and its future products or services are drafted:

  1. Business plan
  2. Financial plan
  3. Value proposition

A cycle of hypothesis, validation, and refinement is done to each of the above items continuously throughout the entire life of the company as features evolve, markets fluctuate, and new technology is introduced. They are living, breathing documents to help founding teams remain focused and aligned.

4. Create a clickable prototype and test proof of concept (with no code)

Features are defined and prioritized based on use cases captured from initial research while business and user goals are defined to measure success down the road.

Paper sketches of the big solution idea are made. The sketches are then turned into wireframes and user flows to convey how several important user tasks would be completed. Only a subset of screens containing the most important parts of the product would be designed.

A trained UX/UI designer is then typically brought on to bring the wireframes to life in Figma as a clickable prototype and proof of concept. In later-stage startups that are launching new products or features, this specialist (or team of specialists) will also own steps 1–3 above, but for startups, it’s highly unlikely to be possible because of budget constraints.

The purpose of the clickable prototype is to minimize risk by gaining customer, user, and subject matter expert feedback via usability tests. By designing and testing the proof of concept without code, the founder is able to validate more critical assumptions before investing more resources into building the future pilot and MVP.

The clickable prototype is also used to raise money from investors if that’s part of the business and financial plan.

5. Pilot the solution

Once the proof of concept has been validated, a partially implemented product is offered to a limited segment of users to see what happens.

Piloting the solution serves three main purposes:

  1. Helps identify any areas of friction that prevent the main problem from being solved for customers and users
  2. Helps identify any issues that prevent the customers and users from being delighted by the experience
  3. Minimizes the risk of scaling the wrong features to a larger group with the future MVP

The pilot is providing specific feedback on the value the customers/users are achieving.

The customer may or may not be paying for the pilot, but the pilot period ultimately helps the founder determine what price people are willing to pay.

6. Design and launch an MVP

An MVP allows the founder to accelerate their learning about what’s working and what’s not within their solution while using minimal resources. It achieves this by designing, developing, and launching only the essential core components of the product to real users.

A product with just enough features to delight early cash paying customers by solving the main problem they’re facing, is low risk. They ideally scale in a controlled fashion, gathering early user and customer feedback to inform design decisions.

The initial MVP will have a small number of customers and users, but that number will grow during customer acquisition attempts made during the early-stage part of the process (the next article in this series).

7. Evolve MVP until product-market fit is obtained

The MVP will be iterated, refined, and optimized until there is a product-market fit.

Founders will know they have product-market fit if:

  • Customers are recommending it to others
  • Customers can clearly articulate the main problem they were previously faced with and how the new product solves it
  • There is a clear demand in the market for the product
  • The value provided by the product is noticeably different from competitors
  • Data and analysis show that there are a large number of potential customers who believe their problems and needs are urgent enough to buy your solution, and they can also afford your solution
  • There are a large number of potential customers who believe their problems are urgent enough to buy the product, and they can also afford it
  • Research shows that customers and users believe the company has a better value proposition than the competitors.

TL;DR

The 7 steps founders take to get from idea to product-market fit with UX:

  1. Identify a need or a challenge in the market
  2. Gain a deep understanding of the people with this need
  3. Synthesis research and come up with the big idea
  4. Create a clickable prototype and test proof of concept (with no code)
  5. Pilot a solution with a small group of users
  6. Design and launch an MVP
  7. Optimize MVP until product-market fit is obtained

Nicole Gallardo has almost 2 decades of experience designing digital products that grow businesses and serve communities. She is the Founder & Chief Design Officer at Founders Who UX, a leader in UX and product design committed to empowering growing companies with free resources, team training, and premium consulting services.

The UX of EdTech Community’s purpose is focused on helping UX practitioners who work on products and services that support learning. We also welcome educators, founders, and those in other disciplines looking to develop a UX mindset applied in the industry of education and future of learning and work.

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UX of EdTech
UX of EdTech

Published in UX of EdTech

Delivering EdTech product design and UX research as a Studio and Community.

Nicole Gallardo
Nicole Gallardo

Written by Nicole Gallardo

Founder & Chief Design Officer at Founders Who UX | CEO at Gallardo Labs | Published in Entrepreneurship Handbook, UX of EdTech, & UX Collective

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