Conversation with an EdTech Entrepreneur

I was fortunate enough to be introduced to an EdTech entrepreneur via a mentor at Pear Garage.

• Stanford undergrad student
• Taught as a teacher many years ago
• MBA student from 2015 to 2017
• Did Pear Launch Pad for a summer in 2017
• Currently 35 and working on TeachFX full-time

TeachFX’s story:

• Started when a principal he knew casually mentioned the idea
• Drew sketches of product before writing any code and showed to a dozen teachers from first/second degree connections
  • Feedback led him to decide it’s a worthy idea and start writing specs
• Raised money from Pear VC before incorporating as a solo founder
• Sales mostly from direct/email/phone marketing to schools
  • Can’t use targeted ads because everything has to go through principal in a school

Good impressions on Quizkly:

• Impressive, has clear value proposition (i.e. entirely new way of elimination a very real pain point)
  • Says we’re a painkiller (solves problem directly), easy to sell
  • TeachFX more like a vitamin (harder to engage users)
• Would personally want the service as a recent MBA grad and teacher and imagine many Med/Law/Business students would too

His advice:

• Start getting feedback early on about out user experience / features
• Have landing page and use FB/Google ads to drive traffic and check conversion rate
• Start experimenting different payment models in-person with Med students
  • See how far into process they lose interest
  • Ultimate goal is receive verbal agreement to purchase product
    • Decide on price this way
    • Don’t be shy
    • Can learn about product this way
  • Use above two to iterate to MVP people will either pay for (subscription model) or use a lot (can lead to ads business model)

My thoughts are:

With him and I both being Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup fans, most of the above points are Eric Ries applied to our product, so nothing was extrema-altering. The main value of the conversation was hearing his experience with TeachFx and his journey from teaching into entrepreneurship.

I’m going to get to work.