EdTech is a vertical market where the #SaaS vendors should know their prospects and customers extremely well. Unfortunately, in practice this is not usually the case.
I purchased 30+ EdTech tools for my school. Some products were requested, and some I bought in the hopes that teachers would embrace them. I grade all of them an F. Teachers and I don’t receive incremental pings on how to use the product more effectively. We are not connected with other teachers or product ambassadors.
Companies will contact me a few weeks ahead of a renewal. Some will overload me with new features without understanding the curricular redesign implications. They are not focused on making my teachers more successful. They rarely ask for feedback in the app or otherwise.
They never ask how we are using the product. This is a critical failure of EdTech companies because the usage often doesn’t align with how the developer envisioned the problem it would solve. See my previous blog posts on “slogans” and “10x” value creation.
