Edtech tool vendors’ biggest challenge is locating a buyer who has a budget and is ready to buy. Gaining the first round of buyers is critical to proving product market fit. Using Customer Success tools, these early adopters could yield important behavioral data that can be used to refine lead…

Earlier this year, I wrote about instrumenting a SaaS product for making the product itself a major part of the marketing effort (link). I have seen some progress, but it has been spotty. The areas where I've seen the most progress are in-app notifications, feedback, and feature suggestions and referrals. Interestingly, none of the products I’ve stumbled across have implemented all three of these PLG examples. Below are a few examples.

Product-led Growth (PLG) is about using the product as the primary sales mechanism. This means reducing friction in order to help customers have an ah-ha moment. PLG in EdTech can be challenging because there are usually onboarding steps, such as student rostering, creating class sections, lesson plan creation, content curation…

It is difficult to be successful selling EdTech products because of the budgetary cycle, vendor approval lists, ebb and flow of the school year, and every school district is a little bit different. The answer is data science. Build your own sales pipeline by tracking every buyer-oriented activity and relentlessly…

#EdTech products can potentially be used by a wide and varied group of user personas. As a result, it is critical to collect information to understand how and who uses your product. One way is to instrument your product for Product-led Growth (PLG) to gain individual user insights for marketing…

The K12 process for buying EdTech products is broken. Educators get inundated with solicitations and EdTech companies find it frustrating that they can’t cost-effectively find educators with budgets. In an effort to remove some of the friction from this process, below are resources for EdTech companies to learn more about…

I had a chance to catch up with a range of #AI EdTech vendors targeting K12 (see image below) and I’m starting to see where we are and where we could go. Generative AI (GAI) adds a conversational interface to information and will impact learning significantly. …

The procurement process for K12 EdTech products is broken. EdTech buyers (i.e., teachers, principals, and superintendents) are inundated by unsolicited marketing campaigns. EdTech vendors find it difficult to cost-effectively market to buyers of educational technology products. Who has a budget to spend and what products are they seeking? …

I review dozens of EdTech products every week and almost none move the needle like Sizzle. It is simple to use. You take a picture of a STEM problem and it solves it for you. The most impressive aspect is that it does so in a step-by-step process (see picture…