Scaling to $10 Million from Kentucky: Steve Huey, CEO of Capture Higher Ed (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in your story? Are there any other strategic moves that you want to discuss?

Steve Huey: One of the biggest things that happened was about a year and a half ago, when we were introduced to a McKinsey study that talks about a consumer’s decision journey. The story that they used is the idea of people buying a car. When do you actively start trying to buy a car? The time from when you actively say, “I need to buy a car”, to the time that you buy a car is two weeks. You can imagine car companies. If they were only going to market to you when you’re actively engaged in buying a car, they’d have to pick the two weeks out of five years. This McKinsey study talked about the consumer’s decision journey where they have your brand.

If I were going to ask you what car you’d like to buy, odds are that you probably have a few brands that you’re familiar with and are interested in. Going to college is a huge investment in the United States. In fact, most families don’t believe that college is affordable to them. The adoption of this student decision journey of where they’re going to school is a significant departure of how the industry has been run. Typically, people have a funnel mentality. I’m sure you’ve come across people that think about their pipeline or their funnel. More in the top should yield more on the bottom. For higher education, this was a workable theory for a while. With colleges cutting budgets, the funnel now looks like a martini glass and there’s too much stuff going on outside. The colleges are confused.

We adopted this new thought process. It’s not a funnel. It’s a decision journey that students are on. We’re going to help give them the information that they need, when they need it. We realized that we were using probably 150 data points to talk to students, but what we were really missing was their behaviour and understanding when they were actively engaged. We’ve developed software that we had released in January of this year [2015]. It’s called Capture Behavioral Engagement software. It’s a software that we put on these schools’ EDU websites that build up anonymous profile and known profiles of people that come to their site seeking more information.

The best analogy is it’s similar to schools forming a relationship with people that are interested in their school, similar to the way that Amazon builds profile and suggests content or products that we like. We’ve launched this software. This software is something incredibly new to higher education. Especially in the last three months, we’ve been getting our fair share of press. We’re starting to be recognized as innovators. We have schools that don’t need another student come and talk to us about using our software. Many of these schools that are coming to us now are really thought leaders in the industry. They’re people that you would know.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Scaling to $10 Million from Kentucky: Steve Huey, CEO of Capture Higher Ed
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