Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We’re hearing a lot about going into accounts through the teacher network. It seems to be working really well. You’re reinforcing the point by getting products in the hands of teachers through some sort of a freemium model and getting people to start looking at the product. There’s a virality to this. It seems like you’re seeing a lot of that. Could you speak more to that trend?

Stuart Udell: That is a trend. Teachers do like to talk to each other. It’s not just because they’re chatty. When they try a product, they’ll usually talk to other teachers first in the same grade. Then the other teachers will try it too. Then they go to their principal saying, “We’re all trying this individually. We’d like to unlock more tools.”

In premium, we provide more data, more reporting, additional content, and things that are harder to access. It’s that migration that we’re hoping for. We only want to be used in schools if they’ve success. What we don’t want is to just sell something. When your customer is teachers and kids, getting it right is very important.

That’s why we like trials a lot. As you go larger, the implementation will go more favorably because folks have already tasted it. We have that positive word-of-mouth going. Buy-in is extremely important in any implementation. We do like when teachers talk to each other.

Sramana Mitra: Whether it’s social media platforms, where do these teachers hang out? Are there places where they’re congregating on a regular basis?

Stuart Udell: There are certainly several teacher social media platforms and tools platforms. Via API’s, we have done deep integrations with other leading products out there. There are a handful of types. The first type is student information systems. We integrate with Google classroom and other leading products. We want to make sure that it’s really easy for teachers to connect to our products and to share data across our products.

Similarly, we connect with some of the leading assessment platforms. We work with NWEA and Illuminate. Those aren’t necessarily social platforms, but when you look at a product suite like Google Classroom, it offers a broad array of tools, activities, and resources for teachers. Teachers use it in a social way.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. It used to be so difficult to crack into school systems. It was such a long sales cycle. With this whole teacher angle of being able to get into accounts through teachers, it has really smoothened and added velocity into technology adoption in the school systems big time. 

Stuart Udell: That’s true. It’s been an interesting moment in time. There has been a slow 15 to 20 year migration from print to digital in schools. However, with COVID, it helped accelerate digital adoption by necessity. At the end of the day, we take the best of the old strategies, the best of what we learned and end up with a one plus one equals three situation. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell
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