

Sell to Teachers - Jarred
http://blog.jarredsumner.com/2011/09/18/sell-to-teachers/

======
patio11
As kind of an omnibus response to this and the comments:

1) A portion of teachers will spend money on software. Reports of teachers
being universally poor and stingy have been greatly exaggerated. You may know
a stingy teacher. I do, too. I also have credit card numbers willingly given
by thousands of her coworkers.

2) Average sales cycle for districts is 9 to 18 months. You can close a
teacher in 9 to 18 minutes a non-trivial portion of the time.

3) There exist many, many businesses which have sold more $$$ to teachers than
BCC. 5,000 paying customers is rather modest, as there are over three million
teachers in the US. I'm always happy to be mentioned but please don't think
I'm the upper bound for success here.

4) Contra article, making money is a perfectly valid reason to go into
education. Teachers get paid on Friday, too. Also, some judicious capitalism
would help redress the severe resource misallocation between education
software, which is probably societally important, and mobiphotosocialgames.
(We could also quibble with the misallocation between education software and
education salaries, but that will not endear you to the main customer group
here.)

~~~
joe_the_user
Teachers may not be universally poor _but wait a few years_ \- at least in the
US.

If we're talking about teachers as a consumer group perhaps we could at least
think for a moment where that group is going...

I will admit that I don't know for certain that total disposable income of all
US teacher finally reach zero in N years. But if a person is thinking of
getting a teacher to buy their product out of the teacher's own pocket as a
sales strategy, that person should keep in mind the number of US politicians
who essentially say all public servants should be fired or live on starvation
wages.

~~~
robertk
What? Can you expand? I'm a graduate math student looking to go into academia.
:/

~~~
_delirium
Academia is a bit different than K-12 education, though not without its own
set of issues. The main problem there is the move towards a semi-freelance
"research manager" model, where technically you have a research position,
which also comes with responsibilities like teaching classes and serving on
committees, but _also_ the university expects you to bring in external money
to pay for at least part of your own salary, plus ideally a lab of students
and post-docs. So the prof-job is really more about the management &
grantwriting than about the research (the research is what the people you pay
do). Math is probably a bit less far along on that transition than other areas
of the sciences & engineering, though. The actual existence of the jobs
(outside humanities, which is under more pressure) is probably stable for the
medium-term future, though.

~~~
impendia
Math professor here. We are definitely expected (or at least encouraged) to
write grants, but this is not such a big deal and most of my time is, as
promised, devoted to teaching and research.

IMHO the most two important drawbacks are (1) you will make less money than in
the private sector and (2) unless you are really outstanding, you will
probably eventually have to move to whatever random city to happen to find a
job in. A large proportion of tech jobs are in places like SF Bay Area,
Austin, Seattle, Boston. The same is not true of academia.

~~~
_delirium
Interesting; I'm a CS prof., where you can _sometimes_ get away with that, but
increasingly the expectation is really that you'll be funding several students
out of your grant money, and at some schools, funding a portion of your
salary. Baseline to get tenure at a research-oriented university seems to be
about $500k-$1m of grants during the 6-year assistant position (i.e. enough to
fund an average of 2 PhD students per year over that period out of non-TA/dept
money).

It could be less in math because there isn't the same "lab" concept, where to
be considered a "successful" professor you're supposed to oversee a lab of 3+
(better if it's 5+) PhD students, a post-doc or two, research scientists,
etc.?

~~~
impendia
Yeah, thankfully this lab concept is absent, although it is always good to be
advising grad students and postdocs. Most universities have tons of students
who need to brush up on mediocre math backgrounds, which makes for a lot of
paying work for math grad students.

------
hospadam
While I can get behind the general sentiment of this (marketing towards the
people who will make the purchase) - I think it overlooks one unique problem
with teachers: traditionally they don't have money for purchases like this. My
wife is a teacher in a fairly good school district - and she was only given
$100 for _all_ of her purchases for the whole year (paper, supplies, etc.) We
have an iPad that she occasionally uses in the classroom... and even with the
relatively cheap apps (<$5 range) - she sometimes second guesses purchases and
is quite hesitant to buy an app.

I just think the primary and secondary school system is a very rough market to
target a paid app/software towards.

~~~
Jarred
I'm suggesting that teachers will pay for it out of his/her own pocket if it's
done right.

Just like any other purchase (i.e an iPad)

~~~
podopie
I taught for a few years in a fairly-sized school district. Even the best
teachers I knew in my department--ones who were very internet savvy and
technological proficient--admitted they wouldn't pay for an application in the
classroom. They just didn't have the money. They constantly look for free
things, such as Google Docs for teaching students how to collaborate and edit
papers together.

Target to teachers, yes, but there are other ways to do business with them
than to take from their tiny bank accounts.

~~~
tinyrock
We have found the opposite - teachers will pay for software if it is made well
and makes their life easier. The price point obviously still needs to be set
appropriately.

Life was very busy when I was teaching, anything that saves time on busy work
is appreciated.

~~~
dhimes
My experience and market research echos yours, just to get another tally mark
here. Differenct schools allocate discretionary budgets differently, and there
is some variance also between elementary, MS, and HS in the same district. A
good time to reach for discretionary $ is near the end of the school year,
after they've spent 7 months being frugal but don't want to "underspend," in
part for fear that they won't get the full budget the next year if they don't
spend it this year.

------
pflats
I teach math at a high school (and have taught CS in the past, before budget
cuts got rid of the program). This article is good advice, but a couple things
from my own experience:

1\. Anything to be used in-class is a _much_ harder sell than out-of-class.
The cost of a wasted lesson is much higher than the cost of your product.

2\. As in #1, the most important thing to a teacher is time. We'll probably
trade some of our own money to save time. We'll definitely try to convince our
bosses that the department needs a subscription to "Bob's Keyboard
Accelerators" if we think it is a good product. On the other hand, though,
that means you have a daunting design challenge. What's fast and easy for a
25-year-old teacher isn't necessarily fast and easy for a 55-year-old teacher,
although we do help each other out.

3\. Do it out of altruism, do it to reduce stress in people's lives, and do it
for the students, but please do it for the money also. If you make a good
product, I'd like to keep using it.

I'll try to answer questions downthread when I have a few moments between
tasks, if it helps people.

------
forgot_password
If the author sees this as a way to get product market fit, his points make
sense. If a teacher with such a limited budget likes the software enough that
he / she is willing to pay for it, then you are probably on to something.
However, banking on teachers spreading the word and having a sales force
focused on teach outreach seems like a terribly unscalable sales strategy.

------
kolektiv
Wow. That sounds a lot more positive than my experience of investigating the
market here (UK) - I presume this article is US focused.

Here school IT is generally centrally managed by an IT team who are not
generally receptive to ad-hoc software installs. SaaS models fail due to
firewalls and network access restrictions. Preferred/accepted bidder lists are
rife. Teachers have NO budget for software.

I looked at selling to teachers here and decided that it was more hassle than
it was worth - the market barriers to entry and borderline
corruption/incompetence just made it a non-starter.

~~~
Jem
My experience of working in 3 different UK schools:

IT teams in schools are normally small, over-worked, and underpaid (as is the
default in education generally). Machines tend to run from a single source
image rolled out once or twice a year. The time and resources it takes to
create, roll out and support departmentally-customised builds is not worth it.
Software is generally dictated by overpaid IT managers who are disconnected
from both the teaching staff and the IT team. It's not uncommon for tech teams
to have a small percentage of the IT teaching budget rather than their own, so
decisions are based on that too.

I'm glad I got out of educational IT.

------
Abundnce10
'Selling to Teachers' is important because they are the ones who will be using
it, so ultimately they should appreciate/approve of the product prior to
purchasing it. However, very few teachers actually shell out their hard-earned
cash - whether they're too poor, too cheap, not tech-savvy enough, etc. can be
a long-winded debate in itself. I feel we should be having technology related
discussions in the education field on a National level. We need to keep the
big picture in mind! We are being outpaced by the rest of the developed world
<[http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-12-07-us-
student...](http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-12-07-us-students-
international-ranking_N.htm>); and we are reticent to address the fundamental
causes of this issue: our under-paid workforce of non-technical teachers are
forced to teach in stressful environments and our solution is to inject
standardized tests
<[http://bigthink.com/ideas/40118>](http://bigthink.com/ideas/40118>); into
our Public Education System, letting the test results determine whether a
teacher is rewarded or fired. We hope this will stop us from falling behind
the rest of the world... (shaking my head)

What we should be doing is getting technology into the hands of our children
as soon as possible. They need to be exposed to it at an early age; not only
will computers be a huge part of the rest of their lives but we are also
beginning to see the overwhelming effects of technology-designed solutions to
education problems
<[http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/>](http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/>).
The sooner we embrace this idea and make efforts to accommodate a rapidly
changing world, the quicker our students (soon-to-be workforce participants)
will be capable of contributing in this ever-increasing, high-tech society.

We need to be thinking outside of the box when discussing technology and
education. It's time to revamp our National Education System, embrace the
benefits of technology, and design software intended to make teachers more
effective. So, you're right when you say 'Sell to Teachers', however, I think
we need to take it a couple steps further and address the fundamental issues
in the Technology & Education domain if we want substantial progress.

------
tonypace
Teachers indeed very often spend their own pocket money to buy things that
they feel are useful for class. Paid Dropbox is quite popular among teachers
these days.

Very few of the sites that I've seen tackle my key pain and time points. These
are test correction, writing correction, and parent communication.

Why isn't there a cheap smartphone OMR program? Of course we all waiting for
the Internet and fairies to take over testing, but until then I'd like to have
a decent way to make, grade, and store data for paper quizzes. There's not
really anything designed for teachers to buy out there.

Writing correction is a hard problem (since handwritten work is privileged in
K-12) but perhaps not impossible with OCR advances. If I could unload some of
the more mechanical aspects of this it'd be wonderful.

There is a cute and secretly useful free utility called Teacher's Report
Assistant. This is the sort of thing that teachers will pay for, and for
anyone who plays with things like chatbots its a natural extension. Huge
masses of teachers all over Asia are churning out this sort of blather weekly.
We could use help.

It's worth mentioning that there are masses of private schools in Asia and in
the western world that have much more open policies about reimbursing for
software and the like. It's not a bad path to bigger things.

Schools almost universally have overloaded and unreliable networks, so you
have to have a reasonable offline path.

------
japhyr
An interesting piece of ed tech to think about is lesson planning software.
Most teachers put a tremendous amount of time planning their lessons, but
still write their lesson plans using word processors. There are all kinds of
problems in effective lesson design that stem from relying on word processors.
Good lesson planning software would lead a teacher through a strong design
process, letting them choose which pieces to include, and in what order.
Lessons would be easy to revise. A teacher could change the format of their
lessons, and instantly have all their previous lessons available in the new
format. The use of word processors for lesson planning is like an architect
using ms paint to design a building.

Yet every example of lesson planning software I've seen has a serious flaw. It
might have a bad ui, it might not be based on sound pedagogical principles, it
might promote vendor lock-in. It's hard to do it right; to do it well and for
profit you would probably have to charge too much to get a significant
percentage of teachers using your product.

You can sell a niche product in the ed tech market. You can build a piece of
software and convince a bunch of districts to buy in, and rake in some cash.
But making a piece of software that truly makes education better, and doing so
in a way that does not contribute to the already huge education gap between
those with resources and those without, is tremendously difficult.

~~~
2arrs2ells
I don't think "Lesson Planning Software" offers anything useful beyond Word,
until it has a useful, curated bank of starters/activities/homeworks/etc
attached to it. There are a few of those kinds of "marketplaces" (some with
money involved - i.e. teacherspayteachers, and some that are free - i.e.
TFANet, BetterLesson) - and I think a better version of one of those needs to
be the backbone to any truly successful lesson planning tool.

~~~
japhyr
I agree that good planning software would offer the ability to tie into a
curated bank of resources. The ones I have seen are spotty, and understandably
so. Wikipedia works, in part, because there can only be one article about any
given topic. But in a bank of lessons, you'd have to allow multiple lessons
about the same topic, if they approach the teaching in a different way.
Curating such a bank is an interesting problem, and I have not seen it done
well yet. I would argue it has to be free to be done well - any such bank that
sits behind a paywall would not build enough lessons to be complete, and it
would not reach enough people to make education better overall.

Tying in to a bank of resources is not a requirement, though. You have to
think in terms of unit planning, rather than just lesson planning. A unit
might consist of three investigations. So on the first page or screen, a
teacher gives a title, unit description, and one-sentence description of the
three investigations. In a word processor, the teacher has to copy those
descriptions onto separate pages to describe each investigation in more
detail. Planning software would do that automatically for you, so changing the
description of the investigation in one place would change it everywhere in
the unit plans.

I am still trying to decide how I feel about the role of non-profit and for-
profit organizations in education. People should definitely be paid for their
work. So a team should be able to propose a solid solution to this issue,
gather funding from public resources, and make the final product available to
everyone while paying themselves a fair market rate.

------
philfreo
Our strategy at Quizlet.com has been similar... make something that teachers
and students both directly want to use, and they naturally spread it to each
other.

------
hhorsley
Education is like enterprise with crapy cycles and the lack of pressure from
public market ownership.

What Jarred is getting at is the education corollary to the consumerization of
enterprise.

This shift is propelled by two recent developments:

1) Internet services often offer a free "single-player" or freemium option. \-
This reduces the value of the procurement person/intermediary in negotiating
price \- This increases the propensity of individuals to try a service
themselves because of decreased financial risk.

2) SaaS: these services are now hosted and can be initiated immediately, no
longer requiring time spent acquiring a physical license or installing \- This
reduces the value of the intermediary in "setting things up" \- This this
reduces the time expense in trying something

I think relevant differences between enterprise and education are budget,
average age, and different incentive structure.

There is definitely opportunity in pursuing this bottom-up approach to
distribution in education and I think at the moment it is a largely unexplored
path.

Would love to discuss more - best way is @hhorsley or hunter@coursekit.com

------
hkarthik
I like this strategy. To me it's reminiscent of someone writing a software dev
tool, book, or screencast and pricing it low enough for an individual to
purchase it themselves rather than try to get their employer to purchase it
for them.

While this strategy may not be as profitable as selling to entire districts at
once, it'll have a more passionate user base and hopefully much shorter sales
cycles and selling overhead.

------
2arrs2ells
If you haven't read it already, the 2007 paper "K-12 Entrepreneurship: Slow
Entry, Distant Exit" by the founders of Wireless Generation is excellent. It
lays out the barriers to selling to districts, as well as some ways around
them.

<http://www.aei.org/docLib/20071024_BergerStevenson.pdf>

------
ansy
I don't know why anyone would doubt this could work. It worked for patio11
[1]. His empire was pretty much built on selling bingo card software to
elementary school teachers. In fact I'm surprised for all the author's
citations he doesn't cite Bingo Card Creator [2].

Granted, patio11's overhead was extremely low. But who isn't trying to
validate businesses quickly before dumping unnecessary money into them these
days?

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11>

[2] <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/>

~~~
wdewind
It really depends on what you're doing. Blackboard is notorious for patent
trolling companies who try to enter the education space. Patio makes a product
that teachers happen to use, but it's not exactly in the education space.

------
neonkiwi
I've been thinking about this exact approach for a while, so it has been
immensely useful to read the discussion taking place in this thread.

There's obviously a lot of value in word-of-mouth sales; but I'd like to know
more about about approaches to advertise directly to teachers in the first
place. There must be schools where no teacher is looking at tech news sites :)
Any advice about advertising to teachers?

------
jeffreymcmanus
This makes as much sense as saying "it's really difficult to sell shoe polish
to corporate CEOs, so you should sell to their receptionists instead."

~~~
lazerwalker
I don't think that's quite an apt metaphor. At the end of the day, the CEOs
are the ones who use the shoe polish. Maybe their secretaries do the
polishing, maybe not, but at the end of the day the CEOs are the ones who have
to cope with a mediocre polish.

The entire point of this article is that it's the teachers, not the
administrators, who have to deal with educational software on a daily basis.

~~~
jeffreymcmanus
This is exactly my point. Teachers don't have purchasing authority for very
much besides construction paper and glue sticks (and then, they're
increasingly paying for that stuff out of their own pockets). You can't sell
stuff to people who can't buy (even if they do happen to be the end users of
your product).

------
tinyrock
We focus on this strategy for Termites (<http://termitesapp.com>) and it works
well.

The purchase process at the school or district level can be glacial slow.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Is this short-termism though (sp?).

If you sell to the district then you've got an order of thousands of units
likely to repeat for several years. If you sell to individual teachers then
you're selling units at a time and probably having to resell those units (or
face more competition) if you've got a good product.

------
ericmsimons
Worth noting: many teachers are given budgets from their school to spend on
technology, so there is a good chance that the money they spend won't be
coming out of their own pocket. Win - win situation.

------
skmurphy
Parents who are home schooling are another great entry point for educational
software. This approach also passes the same set of checks and balances as
selling to teachers.

------
MaxGabriel
"My former Spanish teacher buys chocolate regularly for the class. She gives
them out to people answering questions. A single bag of chocolate doesn’t cost
much, but giving out a few chocolates per period, with five periods in a day,
over the course of 180 days adds up to several bags of chocolate."

hilarious

~~~
prawn
Made me wonder about a website handling student incentives for teachers. A
modern equivalent of the gold star sticker. Little cards with short URLs or QR
codes on them. (That's as far as I've bothered wondering for now...)

