May 15, 2024
by Märt Aro
Thousands of educational challenges can be solved with the help of technology – with an EdTech startup. You might have an excellent idea of how to solve one or more of those challenges. To support you, here is some of the most common advice experienced founders give new founders.
- Don’t start building before you have feedback from your target audience that they would be willing to use/pay for such a tool you have in mind building. Yes, make a nice presentation/mockup, and get honest feedback. Try to make pre-agreements already.
- Keep focus. If you are building your first EdTech startup, try to build as narrow-scope MVP (minimum viable product) as possible and scale this. Building-wide products are much harder, and going this way, there is a bigger risk that you / your team will run out of steam before getting to enough customers to sustain your team providing a high-quality service.
- Don’t stay in the vicious cycle of “need to build this one more feature for success”. Often it isn’t true. Nordic startups continue building but forget to set up appropriate marketing/sales. But guess what, it doesn’t matter how much you build if nobody knows about your amazing product.
- More than 50% of the world runs on 2G internet speeds and more than 50% of internet users globally are accessing it via Mobile. Let that sink in.
- Choose a major language that is likely understood by your target audience as the base language of your system, so if you are doing updates in the system and lose a translation file, users will still be able to figure out how they can use your system.
- Build international from the beginning. It’s OK to take a first test in one (small) country, but each country has its own specifics. Better consider them in your architecture. Otherwise, you might have a significant headache when crossing country borders as you have “built yourself stuck” in the country.
- Business model wise. Ideally, the end user can:a) identify that your product is suitable for them,b) make the decision on their own that they benefit from your product and take it into use andc) be the budget holder (read: pay for the product for themselves without major headache).The easiest way to achieve that is by developing “microservices” instead of wide vertical services.
There are many alternatives: your end user can identify that the product is good but needs to involve other people to decide on implementing your product; needs to involve others to implement your product; somebody else pays for the product. Those alternatives may also work but can be a headache for scaling. - Your product is not strategically critical.If you are a startup, it can be very difficult to prove that you are worthy of the trust of your customers. It’s easier for the customer to make a decision if it adds value but their career/life does not depend on the product.
- Be aggressive.Building EdTech startup is hard, and there is a lot of noise. If you want to survive in this world, you need to try all doors, windows, and chimneys to get the things moving that you want to get moving. Nobody will lay red carpets for you even if you have the best product for solving a specific problem.
- Evidence.As soon as possible, collect as concrete evidence as possible on how much value your solution creates for your customer (e.g. my product makes this: 10x cheaper; 50% faster; 80% students feel happier, etc.). This will make proving that your product is valuable and a successful EdTech startup is much easier.
- Mind the science.Make sure there is scientific research to back up your education-related claims and aspirations. Be thorough and unbiased; your product could potentially affect a lot of people all over the world.
Resouce: e-estonia
estoniadigital.wordpress.com 