Pattern Matching is the act of evaluating something new by comparing it to familiar standards. It’s an influential technique in the worlds of investing and R&D, and helps to ensure that effort, time, and money is effectively allocated. Pattern matching can be especially useful for analyzing a company’s business model, and corresponding chances of go-to-market success.
But, adult patterns often break when applied to the world of kids.
The ethics, product complexities, and barriers to growth that exist in the world of children don’t quite ‘match’ with startup best practices developed in an adult dominated status quo. Innovators hoping to serve kids need to be realistic about the intimidating differences… and willing to break the rules.
Entrepreneurs face five primary challenges when building innovative products that serve young children:
- “We need adults to buy” — There is always a separate buyer (adult) and user (child) for kid focused products, so multi-agent dynamics apply to every sale. (Better have that reporting functionality ready!)
- “And, we need kids to voluntarily use” — The nuances of multi-party sales are further complicated by consumer-style engagement challenges. Adults only force children to do a limited number of things, and a novel, unproven product is unlikely to be one of them. Plus, unless a child’s engagement is voluntary it’s hard to argue that a new product is truly effective. So, in addition to managing a multi-step purchase process for buyers, companies serving kids also need to have similar care and execution to the best consumer companies when it comes to retention. (And it’s HARD to retain children)
- “We’ll work with schools, they’ll force the kids to use it!” — Surprise! Your core organizational capacity is now *air horn sounds* enterprise sales, and you no longer have the right incentive structure to build a truly great experience for children. Much of your energy, effort, and dollars will go towards selling to schools (which is very hard to do), and your remaining time will mostly be spent on a product-roadmap dictated by school district requirements (LMS integration, anyone?). Because your assumption is now that your product will be non-voluntary for kids (to at least some extent), the adults who force your product’s implementation have become your company’s most critical stakeholders. Given this, your top priorities will rarely be child driven, which means that your impact on kids’ lives is likely to be much much less significant than you might have hoped. (It’s true that it’s sad, but it’s sadder that it’s true)
- “What if we go bottom up with a free viral product to ensure that the user-experience stays excellent, then up-sell parents and/or schools” — Unfortunately, your users/champions are 6 years old, and have a pretty weak voice in the procurement process. Also, most viral growth strategies are incompatible with children’s privacy laws, AND you’ve given away core product value in a market where overwhelmed, under-resourced buyers have been conditioned to expect things for free¹. (RIP Edmodo, et al.)
- “It’s ok, we can sell adds once we get to scale!” — There are no business model bailouts here. Thankfully, you can’t share kids’ personal information with 3rd parties, which makes building a profitable ads business nearly impossible. Even if you “accidentally” let children sign up for your service as adults, you’re still likely to be sub-scale for profitability. (And also probably misguided / evil)
In sum, when building for kids you need to have a tremendous product to ensure that children’s engagement is voluntary and healthy. But, your user-experience efforts, while essential, ultimately have an indirect impact on growth and revenue. Adult buyers won’t interact with your product like kids do, and have a broad set of purchase criteria beyond kids’ enjoyment.
In fact, it’s even worse than that, because parents and educators are naturally suspicious of any product children love and lust for (see Part 2: Safety). And, in addition to being naturally conservative buyers, adults in education are rightfully jaded thanks to all the oversold, just-good-enough products they’ve been buying (Part 3: Values). Combine confusion about what’s good for kids with the difficulty of credibly validating new solutions (Part 1: Science), add in the business model complications described above, and we end up with extraordinary, grueling barriers to innovation for kids that discourage dedicating additional resources to the space — Part 4: Underinvestment)
The challenges are torturous! In response, organizations that succeed and scale in education mostly do so by taking kids out of the equation and selling to adults as end-users². If a company does choose to stay focused on building products for children, the difficulty of balancing both consumer and enterprise market dynamics with no straightforward strategies for growth is immense. To get initial traction, entrepreneurs almost have to choose between enterprise sales (schools), or building a game, or a toy, or something fun for kids (consumer). While games and toys are wonderful, they’re not the same as innovations that change how children learn and develop.
[One valid and proven strategy in the kids market is to build high priced toys/STEM activities that adults and children both love (see Lego, Osmo, KiwiCrate, robots, etc.). However, these physical products arguably exacerbate inequality in education by providing uniquely potent play / learning experiences that are primarily accessible to rich families and schools. Regardless of your perspective on equity, this ‘hardware’ business has its own issues, and will never scale to reach kids worldwide.]
To my knowledge, no company except Minecraft (which took a particularly lucky and noteworthy path³) has succeeded in satisfying children, parents, and educators while semi-equitably impacting kids at scale. Every other company gets stuck in a constrained market on one side of the child/adult stakeholder divide.
And our society is the ultimate loser; as yet another generation of children grows up thinking that learning isn’t fun, spending lots of time doing things in school that aren’t relevant to their future.
Is there a third way? How can organizations build products that thrill both children and adults without being subsumed by the biases of either? How can we, as a society, overcome the mutually reinforcing barriers to innovation that seem to have an iron grip on children’s experience of school/learning?
I don’t know.
But, I do know that exploring why it’s so challenging to build products for kids is critical to inform future successes.
And, I believe that it’s possible for dedicated, privileged teams to stand in the midst of all of these competing priorities and make the hardest tradeoff of all: sacrificing certainty, growth, and revenue in the short term to take the time to build a safe and innovative product that is maximally aligned with children’s, adult’s, and shareholder’s long-term interests.
That is what Edify is attempting to do; has been attempting to do; and will keep attempting to do. It’s intensely difficult. It’s taking some patience. And the effort is worth it, because building pioneering learning products that help children is the coolest work in the world:
Or, go back to Part 1: Science, Part 2: Safety, Part 3: Values, or Part 4: Underinvestment.
Footnotes:
- Still, this model has some appeal considering how hard all the others are.
- Either companies take children/learning out of the equation entirely and just sell software to adults in the education space (Clever, Remind, Kiddom, Teamsnap, Brightwheel etc) OR they choose to serve college or post-college learners; AKA adults who make their own purchase decisions (Lynda, U2, MOOCs, Craftsy, Guild Education, Lambda School, DuoLingo etc.). I’d further argue that successful eduction companies which serve adults are mostly facilitating ‘traditional learning experiences’ but with new business models. While admirable, this still falls short of the ultimate goal to use technology to enable genuinely new, and widely accessible, learning experiences.
- In brief, Minecraft built incredible loyalty amongst children first (without really meaning to), then expanded its educational credibility with schools and parents later (especially after being purchased by Microsoft for $2.5 billion in 2014).
