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Ask HN: Has anyone worked with the education industry?

3 points by miketucker ↗ HN
I'm interested in building an app catered to students and professors at universities.

Apps like Blackboard have a seemingly strong hold on certain patents and contracts, but rather than dismissing the market all together, I was wondering if anyone could share their experiences if they've had any.

The app would ideally have a contractual relationship with schools (similar to Blackboard) but would not be a direct competitor.

In my mind these are the potential routes in:

1) Start at the top: Try to get conversations going with people in charge, have a small group test-drive the app, and hopefully arrive at a contract.

2) Start in the middle... through professors: get them interested in the app, then bridge connections to get a contract going.

3) From the bottom... go through students, offer it for free. Generate enough buzz so that the school would take notice and would be interested in a university version of the app.

thanks!

5 comments

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dzuc
I'm wondering, along these lines, whether or not they shun SaaS products and have to host the code on their own servers.
sunkan
I worked at Stanford, UC-Berkeley, UW-Madison (across UW-System) on enterprise student systems. Typically, professors have little say on the technology that gets used in the schools. It is mostly the IT department that makes most of the calls. Easiest would be to get someone at the top interested. You can email me (in profile) and if I like the idea, I can put you in touch with the CIO at one of the universities that I had worked at before.

Be warned that the sales process is pretty long at universities (especially the public ones) and everything has to go through an RFP.

vrikhter
You should probably connect with the team at LearnBoost. They've had great traction building a product that serves K-12.
miketucker
thanks! i'll try to get in touch with them.
impendia
I find your question interesting, and I am a math professor, but I have no idea of what you're building, so I can't really answer.

That said, I second sunkan's answer.