How a Silicon Valley Microschool Actually Buys EdTech

Thanks for having me on to talk about this. My school, Leadways, is in Cupertino, right in the center of the AI hub. Meeting with families, we're always talking about AI and the best tools, sharing tips and what we've been creating. Through that, I started making usable things, I've always been a tinkerer, I've been building stuff for years, but with AI where it is now, I've been able to build functional tools that other people found value in. It usually takes a little nudging to get me going, but someone said, you should share this, and that's how I birthed Learner Mindset. It's really a side project, though, 99% of my time is spent building Leadways, because it's a brand-new school.

Nothing existed. I've been building it from day one, leaning on my previous experience. I'm a Google guy, so that was the easiest platform to jump into to get us started. The only business internet available at our site was Comcast, so we're shoehorned into certain things. But year one is really just picking and choosing.

The one thing I'd always avoid is locking yourself into a long-term commitment as a brand-new school. You're growing, meeting your founding families, learning their needs, and every community, every teaching staff, is different. It's tempting to sign one of those deals that are a lot cheaper when you buy five, six, seven years and really lock you in, but we stayed away from that. We worked with spreadsheets year one to feel our way through the platforms and decide where to go. What's neat is that turned into us developing our own platform for some things, tailored to us and our families' feedback.

They're all very plugged in, because they work at Google, Meta, and Apple right down the road. They're mindful about the tools they use at home, and very vocal about what they want to see in the classroom. We're good at collecting feedback from students and families, and when we ask what they're looking for, they have a lot of great ideas that have pushed us forward in what we choose.

Evidence and user experience. Numbers are great, but I love a good video, if you can show me how people are interacting with it or how it works, it helps me picture how I'd implement it with my staff or students. If I just get 40% here, 10% there, it doesn't click. You see it all the time in ads. I want to see people using it.

This one happens all the time: we're a microschool, an independent school, so when they start talking about your district, they missed their mark on the research somewhere. And the number one thing that gets me is price. When I ask what a site license looks like and someone says $20,000 or $25,000, I look at them like they're absurd. We've got 30 kids. I don't know why you'd even tell me that number. I'm hoping they've done enough research to know who they're reaching out to, so they're not wasting their time and mine on some ridiculously overpriced product.

I don't really open cold emails anymore. If it's something I've been actively looking for and it strikes gold in my inbox, I'll open it, but I get hundreds a day and I'm screening them out. I don't mind a good LinkedIn connection, though, as long as it's not the default AI-agent reach-out and you sound human, I'll probably engage. A lot of it is timing in edtech, is this something I'm struggling with and looking for right now? My eyes start seeing those things pop up in my inbox and my feed at the same time.

Definitely. It's the human part of sales. If I feel like you've invested time getting to know me, my student population, and my community, I'm more willing to give back and connect.

Yeah, I have a few going right now about interesting technology partnerships. I'm very active on LinkedIn, I know some people hate it, but I'm posting, and it's a good connector for people searching for the same thing, whether it's a PBL app, student information systems, or AI. It works.

It depends if it's unique. There's some content I don't interact with but I like seeing online, it's entertainment, really, and if I ever needed to move into those channels, they'd be first on my mind.

Shameless plug, because my wife works for them, but ServiceNow has been killing it on marketing. I've never engaged with her previous companies' content, but theirs is unique, and I'm super interested in AI agents right now, which is their angle.

Interesting, I don't see vendor names passed around too often unless someone specifically asks. It's rarely oh, I had a great experience with this company; it's more, this one fell through and I need something else, it's an emergency, who can help? But most of the companies we work with came through some referral, a friend over dinner saying, I just had a demo from this person and it was crazy, I'd love to connect you, they were blown away by the product and connected us.

John, I'm going to need that.

Not much. For what Learner Mindset is right now, I haven't done much marketing or selling, it's all word of mouth. People find my website or see my posts and reach out. But thinking about the creative things I've seen online, there are so many unexplored avenues for both schools and edtech companies. We just launched a homeschool-connection piece to meet other families' needs, and it blew up, something I never thought of. I was reading online, does anybody have access to this app, or how do I track our learning online, and I thought, oh, we're building that, I wonder if we can reach out. A simple reach-out turned into a whole bunch of potential users.

The number one wrong thing is telling me how I'm going to fit into your system. It needs to come from the other side: how quickly is my team going to get onboarded, and how quickly can we be running at 100% efficiency? I've had pitches, no joke, that go year one, year two, year three, year four, year five, you're going to be great. I'm in year two. I'm not thinking that far ahead. I want to know what will positively impact us now and how quickly you can support that. Come with a game plan: here's the training we do, here's how we support you, here are the resources. I need to see all that up front as a principal.

We don't really pilot. We'll do a short demo to get it in our hands and see how it works with some teachers, and we're pretty much ready to decide. If we were bigger, I've done it, you pick a grade level and have them use it over a semester. But our turnaround is about two weeks.

I don't think they work. In a larger school, the grade level you piloted with is vastly different from the next one, so the data's skewed. And half your staff hates it anyway, or it doesn't work for them. It's a big waste of time. And if you don't go with it and the group you gave it to really liked it, you've burned bridges, because now they want it and can't have it. So I'd lean away too.

Yeah, I've had demos where the person didn't know how to use the product. I don't take it personally, I think it's funny. Similar things, when they hand it to the staff and everyone's fumbling through it, you start weighing whether it's worth it. The biggest question for any edtech platform is, are your teachers going to use it to fidelity? If their first experience is that poor and it's that hard to use, they'll probably just ignore it in their classrooms, and then it doesn't help you.

I got a good piece of advice once: handle the noise and focus on the silence. Every day you'll have an angry parent or an emergency at 10, at 2, at 6, and it's easy to get tied up in that. But if you focus on the silent pieces, the staff member who doesn't acknowledge you in the hallway, the kid who keeps their head down when you say hi, or, in data and edtech, the kids who don't show up in the reports because they're not on either end of the spectrum, that's where your culture is really built, not in the loud ones.

Right, sign up now. I'd say authenticity, same as John. When we're talking about making a deal, don't blow smoke, don't throw giant numbers at me to impress me. I don't care how many others you're working with, that you're in 400 districts or 12,000 schools. I just need to know if it works for me, and whether when I call because everything's broken, someone's going to answer and help us out. That's the relationship piece that matters in edtech.

Thank you, Peter and John.