This is great, congrats! How did you get your first few customers? How do you plan on monetizing? I realize Peergrade is free, but, as an educator, do you have any advice with respect to selling into K-12 vs higher-ed?
First customers were through personal network, we then quickly transitioned into cold emails to universities in our region.
We are already making money, primarily through sales to institutions in higher-ed. The longer term plan is continuing down that path, with institution sales making the majority of revenue, but with individual teacher plans available as well. The freemium model is to get teachers hooked, and then have their school, department, or university purchase as they see increased use and a need for integration with their existing school system (LMS). This is a path we have seen for a bunch of our current customers. Especially integrations seems to drive institutions to buy.
K-12 vs Higher-ed is a complex beast, but an analogy can be drawn to Consumer vs B2B. K-12 is high-volume, low price, low touch deals and have some similar characteristics to the consumer market (virality + simple products). Higher-ed is lower-volume, larger deals sizes, but more hands-on sales. Currently our sales and marketing efforts are focused on higher-ed because it does seem to have the best ROI.