The 10 Most Innovative EdTech Solution Providers 2019

However, that’s not the end of
the story. It turns out that making
a successful business is more than
just making an awesome product that
your end users love. The remainder of
this article will focus on the extreme
challenges facing the ed-tech market
today.
1. Schools are slow. You won’t see hockeystick
style growth with a product in schools,
because the sales cycle can be up to a year.
Furthermore, they’re slow to adopt -- in the curve
of user adoption, schools tend to lump towards the
“late adopters” side. Not good for startup sales.
2. Schools are SLOW. Even after multiple playtests on site
that had kids literally screaming about how awesome the
experience was, and even after clearly learning fractions
from our game, it wasn’t enough. At one playtest an 8-year
old boy was using a sword to chop numbers. Half, Fourth --
easy! Just chop the numbers up until you get the right
amount. Until he got to 7/8ths -- that was a tricky one. He
thinks aloud to himself -- what’s 7/8? It’s.....3 and a half
4ths! Yes, Billy, it is, and congratulations, you’ve achieved
a solid understanding of fraction composition. Jo Boaler
would be proud.
It didn’t matter. Communicating these kinds of results to
schools is like trying to talk to a whale about global
warming. It’s critical information, but whales are huge and
don’t speak your language.
3. Parents are difficult to reach. Every other math app out
there -- and there are *thousands* -- claims to be as fun and
engaging as ours. I’ve seen enough side-by-side playtests to
tell you they’re flat out wrong, and can’t hold a candle to
our game. I don’t mind saying it, because it’s really true.
But it doesn’t matter. To a parent looking at marketing
material, it all seems the same. Standing out is an expensive
proposition, one that requires investor backing (or possibly
some luck and skill that we missed). But even if you get
that part right, there’s even more bad news.
Charlie Van Norman
Co-founder
Mathbreakers
4. The market is tiny. Math apps in the US are valued at
about $1.2 billion for parents and teachers. If you don’t
know anything about market sizes, I’ll give you two
comparisons. Painting residential interiors is upwards of
$50 billion. A single metal-scrapping company can be
worth $1.2 billion alone -- the industry is worth $500
billion globally. In other words, a $1.2 billion market size
simply isn’t big enough for most investors to care.
So what’s the future of games in education?
There will continue to be innovative and powerful solutions
in ed-tech, but they will be small and you’ll have to hunt for
them. The market will continue to be saturated by giants
fueled by government grants and philanthropy, which
makes the gems that startups create harder to find. So the
future of games in education is fuzzy, but if you’re lucky,
you’ll be able to find the pearls that will make a world of
difference to the young learners that find them.
www.insightssuccess.com
August 2019
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