Expanding B2B to B2C in EdTech, and the Community of Practice

Major educational product providers get most of their revenue selling to schools and school districts. Those are the organizations that are in the business of engaging students and teachers and administrators in learning, and so educational products support those organizations. And it's the affiliation of the teachers and students with those organizations that grants them use of those products, making EdTech principally a B2B proposition.

But there's more to it. Families move, and so students will migrate from school district to school district. So do they take their learning experience or -- more importantly -- their learning data with them? Not typically. The data is "owned" by the school district and does not migrate with the student.

And what about products that teachers purchase on their own or with personally won grants? They would like to use those products alongside district-purchased products, but not have to share precious seat licenses with everyone else in the district. The same goes, of course, for products that parents purchase to help their kids get some extra help. How can a child use both the district-sponsored EdTech products and the privately purchased products together in some seamless way?

There are also professional development tools that teachers would like to use in their classroom and take those certifications and tools with them when they change jobs. If the certification gets left behind with the affiliation, this does no good.

These models are more B2C. Many EdTech companies are struggling to find a smooth path to expand their offerings from B2B to B2C. But the potential is clear, and the market need is not new.

It's tempting to dismiss the B2C opportunity. Why work to sell to an individual user when you could sell to an organization with ten thousand users? But what this myopia misses is the famed Network Effect. The point is not just to sell a product that the individual user would like. Instead, the B2C product becomes a platform that enables the interests and activities of a group of like-minded people. These are the kinds of products that become more valuable, the more that people use them.

So as an example, a good math product might be of interest to a 6th grade math teacher in Alabama, but will be of even greater value if there is a "community of practice" of 6th grade math teachers in Alabama that are all sharing recommendations among themselves. The classic product delivery to a single school district actually defeats that network effect by ring-fencing the community that's using it.

Tesla is obviously the same way. Sure, there are individual consumers that love those really powerful and sleek electric cars. But the critical mass that provides the charging stations wherever a Tesla-owner wants to go -- that comes from the network effect. And so the game plan is to build the community of practice of environmentally passionate electric car owners. Likewise, even the iPhone that celebrates its 10th anniversary this week didn't really take off until the App Store, which built a huge network of app developers targeting special groups of iPhone users that had a common interest -- sports enthusiasts, for example, or foodies. When that happened, the iPhone suddenly became a platform, not a sexy device.

So the question to ask in the B2C space, especially for EdTech companies that are traditionally B2B companies, isn't whether your products are valuable to individual consumers, but rather this: Can you help build a community of practice that is enabled by the platform that your B2C product represents? Does that product help build the community's strength? Does it enable community growth by allowing things that individual customers would struggle to do otherwise? If not, then you're kinda missing the boat. The call to action for product management, then, is to imagine not just the compelling product, but the community of practice that the product enables.