<aside> ℹ️ TL;DR:
I joined the EXIST-funded founding team early, in March 2008, as iversity’s first CPO to bring learning and education into the 21st century.
iversity started out as a modern substitute for old-school LMS/courseware such as Moodle and Blackboard which dominated the academic market: closed siloed systems (you can’t simply take your data with you to another institution etc.), a pain to use – next to everybody hates them.
Our initial business hypothesis was to enter the market by selling iversity as SaaS solution to the vast number of universities without an eLearning system.
Our growth strategy targeted the teaching staff to whom we offered running their courses in a cutting-edge blended learning model: socially enabled, collaborative, networked, peer-to-peer. A set of core principles that iversity stuck to all along.
To reduce even the least friction with onboarding our pilot users we actively supported every single step from outreach, account creation, setting up courses, inviting students, scanning and sharing seminar and lecture materials, etc.
We preceded Paul Graham’s famous essay by over 5 years. 😎
Close to our launch at semester start lecturer’s binders piled high around the constantly buzzing single scanner in our office, operated by whomever had a hand to spare. A bit later Airbnb would attribute their success to a similar ‘do things that don’t scale’ approach. Thanks to my design and consultancy background I actually didn’t have to give it much thought: when you have human-centricity already baked into your practices it is a no-brainer.
<aside> 💡 Generally, to foster certain behaviours the most powerful thing to do is to create an environment of inevitability for these. Not only in product: Management, parenting, education, personal productivity, etc. are similar in that respect.
</aside>
So far so good: thanks to this high-touch 360° service we quickly grew our pilot audience across universities over the next months: to over 2.000 academics (educators or researchers) and 7.000 students.
At the same time we had to reckon that sales were languishing (and thus also impeding the VC pitches the founder and me did): while educators and students were happily using our fledgling groupware their institutions largely didn’t follow along.
We did anticipate a lengthy B2B bizdev funnel, of course: we knew academic institutions. Yet entrepreneurial optimism drove us to at least attempt it: we had all the rationale on our side, including our pilot users, didn’t we? Enter reality, topping our worst imagination. 😬
Takeaway: it’s a deep systemic issue with too many contributing factors to tackle for a small player. (Digital transformation in German academia – that is: its absence – was still a glaring pain point over a decade later when the pandemic hit.)
In short: As an early-stage tech startup in DE never target academic institutions as buyers. Simply just don’t.
We had to pivot.
The most promising bet emerging in 2010 from our research and experiments: switch to a B2C platform model, provide the platform for free, and – remember the big binders we digitised? – enable publishers to sell both books and micro-content frictionless.
Students and researchers (who were already on the platform) would not have to pay more than formerly for their paper copies at a copyshop and their regular books – they could order everything instantly without investing any time and work right out of their work context. Publishers would gain an additional income stream. Win/win.
These were my respective pitch slides:
Note the right-hand side. The strategy evolved – as it should! – (including a further pivot), yet context and community stayed relevant as key differentiators for years to come.
A typical platform strategy with additional benefits – and a moat! – provided by data mining: knowing what materials academics actually used and in which context they did. As a collaboration platform we had potentially way more behavioural data in that segment at our fingertips than Amazon.