Sell to Teachers | Hacker News Reader

Sell to Teachers

blog.jarredsumner.com

58 pointsJarred46 comments

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.)

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.

The number of politicians who essentially say all public servants should be fired or live on starvation wages is rather low as a percentage of all elected officers, particularly on the local level. It's rare that you will see a local politician come right out and say "We should not be paying teachers." This phenomenon is supported by the two related factors, in my experience: Teachers tend to be not too shabby at lobbying on this level, and the large contingent of people with children don't like the idea that their kids are being neglected.

Teachers also have one of the more powerful unions in the United States, at least in non industrial states. A lot of ire is targeted not so much at the teachers as at their union and its policies.

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

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.

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.

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.?

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.

I can probably guess it has to do with the current political climate and the growing concern among its most vocal and recently austere adherents that union labor is bad, ergo teachers are as well.

Gird yourself, you'll hear the argument that School summer vacations equate to laziness pretty often. Just FYI.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

I understand that. All I'm saying is that (in my experience) teachers already purchase a lot out of their own pocket for their classroom. And most don't like it - but find it necessary. Getting them to buy even more is more difficult (than say getting a web developer to purchase a more efficient IDE or project management software).

Hmm. I'm not sure that's a great idea for two reasons:

* It means that kids are going to get an inconsistent experience throughout the school.

* It means that a teacher's personal finances affect their job performance and the benefit to their kids. Since when was the precedent to be full-time employed AND have to fork out for your resources out of personal pocket. That isn't really acceptable.

Both of these are grossly unfair, in my opinion - both to teachers who may not be as well off, and to kids who happen to have those teachers selected and thus don't get the benefit.

There's also the factor of whether the inconsistency across a school of having each teacher with different bits of software is going to negatively impact things.

I do agree with the sentiment of allowing teachers to decide what is purchased based on it being actually useful - I see a lot of "edugeeks" trying to pitch software they claim will revolutionise teaching to school boards and heads of IT, when in reality it's fucking useless for teachers, and irritating to students.

Hey Jarred - since you're actually in a school, could you ask a couple of your teachers if they would actually pay for something out of their own pocket even if all it did would make their work life easier? And how much? And what would it take?

I ask because conventionally companies that have taken this approach (eg. Xobni) of building a great consumer products that solve problems in the workplace have generally struggled to actually monetise it. Typically folks expect their boss to pay for that sort of thing.

Perhaps the classroom is different though - perhaps teachers perceive something that makes their work-life easier (maybe halving the time they need to spend marking after class) as being worth personal investment (because they know the stogy guy in the IT Department will never pay for it).

Ask a couple of teachers (and if you could, let us know what they say!).

I'll do that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All local authority schools where I am in the UK, and local authority sites, are managed from a central IT unit. I suspect even if you got the LEA to buy your software the IT people would refuse to install it unless it says Microsoft on the box (!). Perhaps a tad cynical.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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/

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.

'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...; 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>; 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/>. 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.

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."

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.

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).

Only if every corporate CEO had been a receptionist for several years.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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

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...)

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