Closing the chapter on Educait

It wasn't an easy decision but we felt it was the right one.

I’ve learned A TON since starting, running, and now closing shop on Educait. The skills and learning from the last 18 months have made the whole venture worth it for me and I have 0 regrets.

Before I share the hard-learned lessons, what were the wins?

• We got users before we had a product meaning we weren’t building in vain.
• We built a working product that generated revenue and grew to over 700 users.
• We connected with numerous interesting people in fundraising, tech startups, and education.

So why did it fail and what did I learn from diving in head-first?

1. Category matters. Education is a notoriously tough sector to sell to both in the public and private sectors. Given the series of strikes that took place across 2022 and 2023, we thought the timing couldn’t be more perfect to apply the burgeoning field of AI to the growing problem of teacher workload. The strikes were a strong signal for the problem and anyone we described the idea to got it straight away. Our mistake, however, was confusing signal for the problem (strikes) with demand for our solution (willingness to pay). What I’m not saying is it was the industry’s fault - not at all. What I am saying is you should know the game you’re playing. To bring this to life, there are a few things that make selling to schools hard. 1) The purchasing decisions vary from school to school and usually involve at least 2 or 3 decision-makers: the classroom teacher, the department head, and usually an assistant head. Getting three people to say “yes” is approximately three times harder than getting one person to say yes (ground-breaking stuff, I know). 2) Long sales cycles. Schools set their budgets for the next academic year anywhere between 12 and 18 months in advance which means you have to nurture leads for a very long time. Again, know the game you’re playing. 3) Market positioning. Innovation is synonymous with risk. As a startup, you’re on the back foot in any industry but some industries have a bit more risk appetite and capital to play with whereas most schools don’t.
2. Product feedback loops. Products live and die but how quickly they can iterate, improve, and therefore delight users. There are, of course, numerous factors that impact the success of a product but I would position the feedback loop in the top 3 things. The paradoxical nature of this venture was that the tool was meant to free up time for teachers (which it did). Ironically, teachers were and still are extremely busy so getting time with them to discuss product feedback was difficult. Teaching doesn’t have the flexibility of your typical corporate job. I realised just how much I took for granted in how flexible my day job was. In a given week, there will be some free space on my calendar to call a utility company about a bill, pop out to grab food, or simply take a break - teaching doesn’t have that during term time.
3. Founder-market and founder-problem fit matters… a bit. I’ve churned through a lot of Paul Graham’s holy book of essays as well as the musings of other product leaders and many talk about Product-market fit - the moment where you go from “pushing” the product on users to users “pulling” the product out of you. But founder-market or even founder-problem fit is spoken about less so. I was lucky enough to love my experience at school. Subconsciously, I convinced myself that because I loved school I was “passionate” about education. I believe strongly that education is important but I couldn’t say, hand-on-heart, that it’s my passion. Don’t get me wrong, I also believe passion can grow as you become more successful in the space but that wasn’t the case for me. What does that translate into in practice? Over time, you don’t follow up with that lead, you put off building that feature and overall you lose momentum.
4. Competition, distribution, and sustainable advantages. Educait had more specific, curated user journeys for a niche of the teaching community with more innovative applications of LLMs. Microsoft, however, continued to shout about the same, very basic “Generate me a lesson plan” feature over and over again. What we weren’t worried about was that Microsoft would make a more compelling product. What we were worried about is that Microsoft already had a massive footprint in education and therefore a huge distribution advantage. If they had plans to copy our features then, on balance, distribution wins. This looming existential threat would sometimes light a fire under us to do more outreach and build more features. On other days, however, we would think “Well, what’s the point?”.
5. When fundraising, you can always find the right market size data points but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is revenue. Why? Because revenue is hard to argue with - it’s unambiguous.

TL;DR

1. Spend more time thinking about the category and the problem before you dive in.
2. Prioritise the feedback flywheel. Does this category allow you to do that easily?
3. How do you create distribution advantages over feature advantages?
4. At the start, revenue is the only “KPI” you need to worry about.

Some thank yous for this journey:

1. We used Daniel Priestley 's framework for how to soft launch and validate demand before building. It was extremely useful and we couldn’t have started without it.
2. My colleagues and managers at Capgemini Invent for not only taking an interest in the venture but encouraging me to exercise my curiosity outside of my day job.
3. My wife for letting me spend countless mornings, nights, and weekends strapped to my desk “working on the app”.
4. My brother and co-founder Shane. I heard someone say “Good friends consume together but great friends create together”. Educait was fun, stressful at times but ultimately I got to go on this adventure with my best friend and I couldn’t be more grateful.

So what now? Well for starters I should cancel the subscriptions I’m paying to maintain the web app. After that I think I’ll let myself “wander”, as Shaan Puri puts it, and see what peaks my curiosity, as I’m sure this won’t be my first and final punt. One failure down, many more to go.

SJ