Lessons learned from 11 case studies on product-market fit

There are five things that will help you build a successful learning product.

Over 2021 and 2022 working with the EdTech “first-cheque” investor, Emerge Education, I gathered case studies from leaders in successful in EdTech startups about what had worked on their journey to find product-market fit.

I’m about to embark on collecting and sharing more stories from learning changemakers. My intention is to offer valuable insights to others creating new transformational learning experiences.

Before I do, I thought it worth reflecting on the original set, which I’m also making available again here.

Looking at them together - a kind of macro study - there are some clear themes.

New ventures find success when they:

1. Pay attention to trends

2. Invest in continuous discovery

3. Focus on a North Star

4. Make growth everyone’s job

5. Develop a growth mindset

These are the things that those who have found success think it is important to focus on.

Everyone’s experience is different. But there are approaches that appear to common in the journey to successfully find - and keep - product-market fit in EdTech.

Let’s take a closer look.

1. Pay attention to trends

Being alive to new trends came up regularly. There are several different kinds of trends that created new opportunities.

Regulation

For Multiverse, it was new regulation and the apprenticeship levy.

This made it mandatory for companies beyond a certain size to invest in apprenticeships or lose the money in tax. Multiverse spotted that the market was underserved in the growing area of tech skills.

They kept this disruptive mindset and as they grew and kept looking for new programmes that would beat their current winners.

Head of Learning Products, Gordon MacRae described their discovery process of working with employers to understand growing skills gaps.

Their Data & Insights for Business Decisions programme based on the Data Technician apprenticeship standard was an example of this.

“The demand was clear after talking to 5-6 clients,” say Gordon. “But in the process our PM identified there were two separate personas clients needed. So we designed two programs off one standard,” says Gordon.

Between them, they sold 200 seats before the team started to build the actual programme and by the second quarter one of them had become Multiverse’s second biggest apprenticeship.

Technology

Opportunities created by technology is another common trend.

Sana Labs was in early on exploring the use accessible AI in education nearly a decade before everyone was talking about it. They hired engineers who had been working on recommendation engines in organisations like Spotify and applied machine learning to the idea of adaptive learning.

“We wanted to organise and personalize the world’s learning,” say Joel Hellermark their founder. “We decided that we wanted to spend our time doing something groundbreaking, rather than incremental.”

Social

For others, they rode the wave of social trends.

RaspberryPi were forced to respond to the dramatic trends created by the pandemic that had closed their real-world CodeClubs. Laura Kirsop, their Head of Product started by doing foundational research that helped them understand some of the broader trends at work beneath the surface.

“There were some definite market leaders - particularly Minecraft and Roblox,” says Laura. They learnt that children were taking to these types of games to replace their face-to-face social lives so communication and collaboration was super important. And that parents wanted them to be independent. “It was surprising to me how comfortable parents were with online peer-to-peer interaction,” says Laura. This became one of the key insights on which to build their online CodeClub alternative.

BridgeU also bet on a social trend identified by their founder Lucy. She describes herself as a ‘Third culture kid’ who had grown up in several countries and attending international schools.

She spotted the growing international demand for UK and US universities but the lack of support to enable kids from Africa and Asia to make good choices.

“These days people have a budget line item against ‘guidance’. But at the time, this was new,” she says. “When you’re creating a product or service in a new category, what you're competing against is the cost of doing nothing.”

Combining trends

Sometimes it can be about seeing how two trends, where there are already competitors intersect to spot an opportunity to do something different. And different nearly always beats better.

Trilogy Education, acquired by 2U in 2017 was a workforce accelerator that partners with universities to help companies bridge the digital skills gaps. The company was birthed from observing two macro trends that were playing out in edtech back in 2015, both of them spawning successful companies:

1. A rising cottage industry of coding bootcamps (e.g. General Assembly, Dev Bootcamp, Hack Reactor)

2. A growing acceptance of Online Program Management (OPM) and university partnerships (e.g. 2U, Keypath, Embanet)

They bet on these two trends to create the first university badged coding bootcamps in the US.

Trends in marketing channels

Trends in acquisition channels also was cited on several occasions. StudySmarter spotted the rise of TikTok early and it’s potential to be big for their audience.

“This was a game changer,” says their cofounder Maurice Khudhir. They were given access to Alpha and Beta tests and bi-weekly calls to help them optimise. “Be really helpful to large advertisers and you can get exclusive access ahead of the curve.”

A similar story was told by Holger Siem Blinkist’s co-founder and CEO who realised in 2014 that Facebook’s new lookalike audiences feature was a great way to reach new audiences that were looking for interesting ways to kill time. This changed the trajectory of their business after a nearly disastrous viral growth strategy.

2. Invest in continuous discovery

The biggest overall theme was the need to keep exploring. Almost all the case studies reflected on importance of ongoing foundational research, continuous discovery and, occasionally, taking a big risky bet to disrupt your own business based on the insights.

Pivot and pivot again

Online bootcamp pioneers Springboard are a classic example. They began as a search engine for the rapidly growing market of online courses back in 2013.

Soon they pivoted to offering learning paths and in 2014 they launched their first mentor-guided UX course.

By 2016 they realised that career switchers needed more support and launched their career track product with the then innovative idea of a job guarantee.

“It really changed the trajectory of the company,” says Parul Gupta, their founder. “It improved our margins significantly. It got us to a much tighter product market fit. And it really accelerated our growth in a market which, at the time, wasn't very crowded.”

In 2018, based on the insights produced by more customer discovery that suggest what learners wanted was a combined UX & UI course, they disrupted their flagship UX course.

“There was no precedent for it in the market,” says Parul. “And worst of all, according to our analysis, it would cannibalise up to 55% of our fastest growing bootcamp. There was a lot of resistance within the team. But it seemed pretty obvious to me that we had to do it.”

The programme quickly became their biggest, making up 45% of their revenue.

A similar story was told by BridgeU’s founder Lucy Stonehill. Having built a market leading position selling university guidance to schools through building close relationships with early clients, they took the bold step to pivot to charging universities for insights and making their core product free to schools.

“We could tell a university where in the world students interested in their courses were and what high schools they went to,” says Lucy. “These turned out to be rich insights that universities previously didn't have access to.”

Bridge U now work with over 100 higher education institutions and have made their product free to the increasingly cash strapped schools. This bold step was based on a significant amount of research and experimentation.

Exploration over exploitation

Joel Hellermark, Sana Labs’ founder describes this as the need to prioritise exploration over exploitation. “It’s very easy to get stuck in incrementalism,” he says. “When we set out and built the first iteration of our product, all our team then thought about was improving that product. It was just incremental improvements,” says Joel.

He worried that they would get stuck in what he describes as a ‘local maxim’. “There’s a big risk in iterating something that doesn’t have product-market fit,” he says. “So I started to ask myself, how big were the deltas between iterations?”

Sana Labs cycled through various versions of personalised learning before finding significant traction as an AI driven learning and knowledge environment for corporate learning and development. Last year they recently raised $62m in series B funding having grown 3x and have recently released a new AI learning assistant.

Investigate lots of options

Head of Learning Product, Gordon MacRae described the process that Multiverse investigated new programmes as they hit their growth trajectory.

Product Managers would explore lots of opportunities and grade the opportunities on a A to D scale. ‘A’ grade meant that they could be bigger than one of their existing top three programmes.

“I stole this from the way that Liverpool FC keep tabs on their potential transfer targets,” he smiles. These concepts would then be quickly tested for feasibility before a curriculum and pitched deck was put together to test with clients.

”Don’t be afraid to take a programme to clients while you’re still figuring out who it’s for. A lot of founders and product teams are worried they’ll lack credibility in front of clients. We actually found the opposite. Companies were eager to be involved early and have an influence on the final product.”

Get close to your users

Getting close to your customers and building communities to inform product development was also a theme.

Kahoot! grew in stealth mode before launch to create buzz, with the product team visiting early users of the product in the classroom to get feedback on the product.

“I remember going into schools to test our initial product,” says cofounder Jamie Brooker. “In one of the first sessions there was a kid at the back, loving the game so much he was standing on his desk. I asked his teacher ‘Is that OK?!’ And she said ‘Yes! He’s the most disruptive kid in his year, I’ve never seen him this engaged in his learning!’ This was the type of behaviour we wanted to see and was a sign of product market fit. We asked ourselves, how can we scale this…?”

RaspberryPi also built a community of learners. “We aimed to have weekly user interviews with two different sets of children and parents,” says Laura Kirsop their Head of Product. “It was so amazing to be able to put anything we needed feedback on in front of them so quickly. The weekly feedback loop was invaluable and enabled us to make really quick decisions on things.”

3. Focus on your North Star

Another big theme that emerged was having an inspiring vision and being super focused about delivering it. The idea of a North Star metric - one number that tracks the core value you are delivering - also came up a number of times.

So did the need to understand the dynamics that drive this number and being clear about how everyone contributes.

Cathedral and bricks

Joel at Sana Labs introduced this idea by telling the parable of the the three bricklayers. When asked what they are doing one answers, “I’m a bricklayer, I’m building a wall.” The second answers, “I’m a builder, I’m working hard to feed my family.” And the third answers, “I’m a cathedral builder, I’m building a cathedral.”

“When we started Sana, for us this story encapsulated this vision-led approach and became a core value of the company,” says Joel. “We were very inspired by this, how can we ensure that everyone says they are building a cathedral. And more specifically, how can we make sure they know the breakdown from the cathedral to the bricks.”

After experimentation with different cadences they landed on a six weeks sprint cycle that drove towards six month strategic goals, guided by vision prototypes or trailers tested with users.

Defining the magic

Ahmed from Trilogy talked about the need to ‘define the magic’ as they started to grow. “The starting point in any metrics conversation has to be in defining what matters,” says Ahmed.

“Great products deliver ‘magical’ experiences that far transcend the normal expected assumptions. The key question you need to consider is, at your very best, what makes your product truly magical?”

For Trilogy, he says, it boiled down to establishing three things:

1. A deep and sincere empathy for their students goals and struggles, company-wide

2. A high base-line for the teaching experience: understanding the makeup of an excellent teacher

3. A high base-line for the curriculum: one that was built to engage and paced to encourage students and reduce the cognitive load on the instructional teams

Then they tracked their performance on these things through relentless surveying and reviewing the data. These became their focus for creating a high quality learning experience that scaled. “You haven’t achieved product-market fit if you have a service,” he says. “It’s not a ‘product’ until it has the potential to scale.”

Later, they identified a strong correlation between their student’s satisfaction and the likely to recommend at the end of the programme with how well supported they felt during it. They then targeted the reported level of support as their ‘golden metric’.

“It was this system that allowed us to scale rapidly within the very visible university context with very little blowback,” says Ahmed.

Metrics you can move

Kirsten Campbell-Howes, Chief Learning Officer at Busuu also reflected on the importance of a clear common goal. And also the need for it to be something that the team can practically impact.

“A North Star metric has to be something that you can move. It should have a rich effect on your product roadmap,” she says. “It should give you and your team lots of food for thought. What can we be experimenting on in our sprints? What should we be iterating on?”

After various iterations they arrived at looking at Weekly Active Learners. This helped them to challenge important assumptions, such as the more people use the product, the more they’d retain them.

“We discovered that’s not true,” says Kirsten, “At least for us. In fact, we’ve found subsequently that people who overuse the product and binge, are not setting themselves up for success. They exhaust themselves and set themselves a study schedule that they can’t maintain.”

These kind of insights into behaviour enabled the team to find various tactical metrics to guide them to have a meaningful impact on their overall North Star.

Understanding this kind of nuance and why behaviours can be very different in education also was a recurring motif.

Hamdi Tabba, CEO and cofounder of Abwaab talked about his penny-drop moment in understanding the role seasonality played in their learners’ usage. It was all about prepping for exams. He started asking himself the question: “do they use us when they need us?”

4. Growth is everyone’s job

The approach to growth is the penultimate theme to highlight. Most success was had when product, marketing and sales worked collaboratively towards a shared goal rather than in silos.

Where the product was designed with marketing or sales channels in mind and where the marketing was authentic and leveraged the strengths of the product was when the magic happened.

“You need to make growth everyone’s responsibility,” says Kahoot!’s Jamie Brooker. “We made sure that everyone took a turn doing customer support. Engineers, finance people, everyone. This helped everyone think in a user-centric way, understand the problems our users were facing, empathising and spending their time improving the experience.”

Holger at Blinkist suggested the need for a cross-functional approach.

“Back in 2013 the product team wanted to work on product features and we had a marketing team which was basically me and an intern,” remembers their cofounder and CEO Holger. “And we had zero visibility into attribution. And even though I was the founder and CEO it took me quite a while to convince my co-founders and our product team and engineers to get their hands dirty with marketing.”

As soon as they built a cross-functional team around it, they were able to quickly optimise and start to see results.

Mould your product to your channels

The concept of ‘channel-product fit’ surfaced a number of times. This is the idea that you can’t change the nature of marketing channels, but you can recognise which are the best fit for your product, and then mould your product to them.

The most appropriate channel sometimes isn’t obvious.

Paid

Blinkist initially decided on a viral growth strategy. “We had a content product,” explains Holger. “We thought viral was a good product-channel fit because when people read content and they like it, they may share it with others.”

The problem they found was that for their product, there were no real network effects. “It doesn’t matter how many people use Blinkist, you still get the same value out of it,” says Holger. “It doesn’t matter if 10 or 1000 others are using it, it’s the same experience.”

They pivoted to using Facebook advertising and immediately saw positive results. “Most people use Facebook whilst on the move, on their mobile phone when they have time to kill,” says Holger. “So when you’re on the go and have time to kill, that’s when you could also do something more meaningful… like Blinkist.”

Search

For StudySmarter, SEO and content always had the best return on investment over time compared to paid. And it matched the nature of their product and user motivation - searching for help prepping for exams.

“I truly wish that we had started with SEO and content marketing earlier,” says their cofounder Maurice. He explains: “You have a one time investment but you continuously reap the benefits of the article or the content piece. In comparison, with paid you have a one time benefit from a registration.”

Viral

And for Kahoot! it was viral. Their product got better the more people played and created quizzes. The social behaviour was well suited to sharing and word of mouth.

“We knew we were on the right track when the memes created by learners started to appear,” says Jamie recalling the huge range of mashups and the remixes that appeared featuring Kahoot!’s distinctive logo and catchy theme music. “This was because we were designing for emotion and something connected between them and the brand.”

“We also started to see the same from teachers,” he says. “This kind of evangelism and sharing by teachers really drove our growth. The behaviour they saw in their classroom was so transformative that they showed great trust in us.”

The lesson here is that the right channel is different for every product and you need to recognise the dynamics that will help you find product-market fit by identifying the right engine of growth.

5. Develop a growth mindset

Bringing together each of these themes is an observation that many have highlighted about the nature of product-market fit: it’s not a one time exercise. You need to keep paying attention to it as you grow and as the market evolves around you. It’s a never ending road.

It’s also not clear cut. It’s a spectrum and you may have nailed it on some dimensions but not others. This means you need to develop a growth mindset of constant exploration towards an ambitious goal.

Be ambitious

Joel at Sana Labs reckons that “doing something difficult is easier than doing something easy.” He acknowledges that this sentence doesn’t make sense but explains: “it’s allowed us to raise funds and recruit talent. And with great talent who are inspired to deliver something ambitious, any problem we’ve then taken on has been easier. Be silly-ambitious! This is easier than trying to build a niche product that no one wants to dedicate their lives to.”

Embrace the never ending road

Let’s finish with Parul from Springboard: “There’s no point where you say, ‘Okay, I’m done’. It is very, very important for founders and leaders to cultivate a growth mindset. Even when you’re a nine year old company, you need to continue thinking about what’s relevant today for today’s consumers and build for that.”

To recap, to find product-market fit you need to:

1. Pay attention to trends

2. Invest in continuous discovery

3. Focus on your North Star

4. Make growth everyone’s job

5. Develop a growth mindset

To go deeper, you can explore the case studies from Sana Labs, Springboard, Multiverse, Raspberry Pi Foundation, Trilogy, Busuu, Abwaab, Kahoot!, StudySmarter, Blinkist and BridgeU. Thank you to all of the amazing learning changemakers that contributed. And watch this space for new case studies.