Have Edtechs improved education?
SFDC and ZOOM, to name just two blockbuster products, spend 3-5$ in Marketing for every 1$ in Product. So, I’m sorry if I find this “PUSH v. PULL” and “if product is so good, then why…” concepts terribly dissonant with ground reality in today’s world.
SFDC and Byju’s are the most valuable companies in the world in CRM and EdTech, their respective product categories. To me, that’s proof enough that whatever they’re doing is working. Period. Hard selling, soft selling; good product, bad product; good service, bad service – all that is a matter of detail that doesn’t matter to me as an outsider. As an insider in some (other) companies, I also know that virtually every product goes thru’ a long period of evolution, and that selling / marketing cannot wait until product has achieved full maturity – which it never does because no software ever does. At one company, the product was so immature that it would crash everytime an invoice generation would try to update stock status. If that company had said, let’s “have a product first, then do sales and marketing”, that company would’ve shuttered long ago. As things happened, luckily, the company took up product and sales / marketing on two parallel tracks, the company went on to become one of the first unicorns in its country.
Well, there WAS a breed of founders who DID attempt to swim against the tide 10-15-20 years ago. As I keep saying, there’s a HUGE difference between Core Education and Supplementary Education in India (and elsewhere). Thinking that core education in India is f*all and ripe for disruption, many companies developed tech platforms to mediate Core Education. It was only after they got in deeply that they realized that Core Education is regulated, is subject to price control, is not as f*all under the circumstances as dreamy-eyed founders thought, and whatever problems it did suffer from were driven by industry insiders’ vested interest, so no amount of tech is going to solve those problems. I don’t recall a single one of those Core Education EdTechs surviving today. I’m not privy to the internal product management philosophy of Byju’s, Toppr, et al but I can bet that their founders were astute enough to realize that the real market lay in Supplementary Education. Onward they went and created successful EdTech companies. Kudos to them. While they may employ some sharp business practices, the same charge can be made of the Amazons, Facebooks, Googles and Ubers of the world. To make omelet, you have to break eggs.
It’s a free market. Just don’t buy if you don’t think there’s enough value. There’s no concept of penalty. If somebody else can sell an equal perceived value product for less than 1000, then they should. That’s how capitalism works.
Sad story? Exactly the opposite. Becoming the world’s most valuable EdTech company is reason to celebrate, not feel sad. Product was Differentiator only in old LQR era when companies had to get license to produce anything. In free market capitalism, Product is Tablestakes, Distribution is the Differentiator. Byju’s and other successful EdTech companies are putting the focus on Distribution, which is what really matters, and it shows in their position in the league table. Under capitalism, no company can become even #10, let alone #1, in any product category without generating outcomes that customers pay for.