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I worked for an Education startup a couple of years ago. They had a really good math learning product which blew away the competition in terms of software quali

I worked for an Education startup a couple of years ago. They had a really good math learning product which blew away the competition in terms of software quality but they didn't achieve exponential growth. It was linear growth but at a very good rate. The trick was to sell directly to schools and educational institutions. There are new challenges there but it's also very high-reward. You can sell 1000 licenses from a single deal with a school. If you get a government public school contract you could be looking at 100k licenses from a single deal. I think that companies which do big b2b deals have become greatly undervalued. VCs are so obsessed chasing exponential growth curves that they seem to have forgotten that the earth only has limited population and that buying power has become much more centralized and is becoming increasingly centralized.

meepso 9y ago
There is truth to the centralization issue in education, we see more and more deals being done at 100k levels. Makes the current way of doing business on smaller language markets obsolete, I'm not sure it's for the better.
- jondubois 9y ago
  I think a problem is that most parents (in the west) don't have any ideas or opinions about what learning tools are best for their children - Most parents are happy to let the education system decide what's best. I think most busy parents these days tend to see the school system as an end-to-end automatic education machine; you insert a young uneducated child, put some money in it and several years later an educated adult comes out. With that mindset it's easy to see why it's better to do deals directly with schools than trying to get the attention of the parents.
pdg11 9y ago
I work with an education start up now. Company does really well in the b2c space but we are looking into the b2b (educational institutions). Were you guys dealing with individual schools or going straight to districts/counties?

meepso 9y ago

There is truth to the centralization issue in education, we see more and more deals being done at 100k levels. Makes the current way of doing business on smaller language markets obsolete, I'm not sure it's for the better.

jondubois 9y ago
I think a problem is that most parents (in the west) don't have any ideas or opinions about what learning tools are best for their children - Most parents are happy to let the education system decide what's best. I think most busy parents these days tend to see the school system as an end-to-end automatic education machine; you insert a young uneducated child, put some money in it and several years later an educated adult comes out. With that mindset it's easy to see why it's better to do deals directly with schools than trying to get the attention of the parents.

pdg11 9y ago

I work with an education start up now. Company does really well in the b2c space but we are looking into the b2b (educational institutions). Were you guys dealing with individual schools or going straight to districts/counties?