Little baby is now coming up on 6 months.
So how’s distribution going after 5 and a half months?
Well unregrettably for first two and half months Inktrail just sat there while my wife and I guided the little one through surviving outside of the womb. Magic time.
During this time my aunt who is a professor and the catalyst behind Inktrail tried to get her colleagues on board. Several logged in. Only one actually tried a test as a student. None have used it. It seems that the effort involved in getting students to write their assignments in a different tool is “harder” than having a class of cheats.
This took her by jaw-to-the-floor surprise, but for me was more disappointment. Changing habit and workflow is difficult. You need the bright sparks, the agents of change to drag all the others along. That or a 10x better product. Our product is on the way to being 10x better but isn’t yet. So I knew we had to instead hunt bright sparks that really cared.
At this point, I decided that we’re still a little bit too early for universities. We might get the odd lecturer that really cares about their students, but universities in general are high on their supply of international students and credibility isn’t even on their minds. A recent SBS insight episode really demonstrates how bad this is (I used Australian VPN to view from NZ).
So, after a week of shower thoughts I decided to pivot. We’re not doing top down sales (yet), and we’re starting with private schools. They’ve the most to lose in terms of credibility and the least red tape when buying. One of the intentional features of Inktrail is that any teacher can just start using it without integrations, so minimal product changes were needed. I built it this way in case we needed to pivot to land-and-expand sales model. Self high-five.
Over the next 4 weeks we improved the sign up, built a new website that speaks to high school teachers, set up Meta Ad integrations. In one week alone, I created over 100 ads to test different messages.
This wasn’t all done at once, each component was iterated and tested. For example, we started with a simple Meta ad and a landing page. Once we proved we could get sign ups, we improved the flow. We looked at where people were getting stuck, the ad copy, the landing page, the sign up flow. And each iteration we tested and improved it some more. Rinse, repeat.
At this point we were could get a sign up for about $200 of ad spend. But I felt like we were close to cracking meta. I set a goal of $33 per sign up.
We spent a whole week on a big bet, a video ad creative that hit the A-ha moment within 10 secs and hooked in 3 secs. After we put it live, each sign up was costing around $20 👌. We had 10x’d our business in a week.
Now that we had a reliable, not too expensive way to get sign ups, we revisited the product. With actual new users clicking about and hitting the rough edges, we could see the product bits that needed love. One of the most obvious was that teachers wanted to test the product as a student almost immediately after signup. It also took a week to build, but now a new teacher comes can test any of their assessments as a student with the click of a button. That was last week. I’m excited to see whether that bet will pay off.
I also started scheduling phone calls with these new sign ups to dig deeper into their problems and lives.
This has been insightful, but also helped me understand a huge downside of this product.
Because it’s not used everyday, between sign up and when they run their first assessment, it’s very difficult to tell if a teacher has moved on and forgotten about us, or if they’re super excited but their next written assessment isn’t for 6 weeks.
Either way it’s a nurture problem that needs solving. I would really like to get to some type of upfront commitment, that keeps them engaged, but we’re not there yet. You’ll have to check back later to see how we solve this.
Not all insights were directly product related. Many teachers are seeing students who aren’t held back, but still can’t write. I heard stories of year 11s who couldn’t identify incorrect sentence structures, let alone fix them. Many teachers told me that more and more students were missing the fundamentals of writing. I also heard their struggles of dealing with parents. Denial that their child would use ChatGPT. More likely the teacher was out to get their precious. I’m sadly glad that I’m not a teacher.
It’s made me rethink what we’ll do when this little baby hits school age.
Woeful education systems aside, the Inktrail goal at the moment is to get the first high school student submission. I think we are a few weeks from cracking that, after which the next goal will be to get the cost of first student submission after sign up down to less than $200 spend.
See you when I see you.
So how’s distribution going after 5 and a half months?
Well unregrettably for first two and half months Inktrail just sat there while my wife and I guided the little one through surviving outside of the womb. Magic time.
During this time my aunt who is a professor and the catalyst behind Inktrail tried to get her colleagues on board. Several logged in. Only one actually tried a test as a student. None have used it. It seems that the effort involved in getting students to write their assignments in a different tool is “harder” than having a class of cheats.
This took her by jaw-to-the-floor surprise, but for me was more disappointment. Changing habit and workflow is difficult. You need the bright sparks, the agents of change to drag all the others along. That or a 10x better product. Our product is on the way to being 10x better but isn’t yet. So I knew we had to instead hunt bright sparks that really cared.
At this point, I decided that we’re still a little bit too early for universities. We might get the odd lecturer that really cares about their students, but universities in general are high on their supply of international students and credibility isn’t even on their minds. A recent SBS insight episode really demonstrates how bad this is (I used Australian VPN to view from NZ).
So, after a week of shower thoughts I decided to pivot. We’re not doing top down sales (yet), and we’re starting with private schools. They’ve the most to lose in terms of credibility and the least red tape when buying. One of the intentional features of Inktrail is that any teacher can just start using it without integrations, so minimal product changes were needed. I built it this way in case we needed to pivot to land-and-expand sales model. Self high-five.
Over the next 4 weeks we improved the sign up, built a new website that speaks to high school teachers, set up Meta Ad integrations. In one week alone, I created over 100 ads to test different messages.
This wasn’t all done at once, each component was iterated and tested. For example, we started with a simple Meta ad and a landing page. Once we proved we could get sign ups, we improved the flow. We looked at where people were getting stuck, the ad copy, the landing page, the sign up flow. And each iteration we tested and improved it some more. Rinse, repeat.
At this point we were could get a sign up for about $200 of ad spend. But I felt like we were close to cracking meta. I set a goal of $33 per sign up.
We spent a whole week on a big bet, a video ad creative that hit the A-ha moment within 10 secs and hooked in 3 secs. After we put it live, each sign up was costing around $20 👌. We had 10x’d our business in a week.
Now that we had a reliable, not too expensive way to get sign ups, we revisited the product. With actual new users clicking about and hitting the rough edges, we could see the product bits that needed love. One of the most obvious was that teachers wanted to test the product as a student almost immediately after signup. It also took a week to build, but now a new teacher comes can test any of their assessments as a student with the click of a button. That was last week. I’m excited to see whether that bet will pay off.
I also started scheduling phone calls with these new sign ups to dig deeper into their problems and lives.
This has been insightful, but also helped me understand a huge downside of this product.
Because it’s not used everyday, between sign up and when they run their first assessment, it’s very difficult to tell if a teacher has moved on and forgotten about us, or if they’re super excited but their next written assessment isn’t for 6 weeks.
Either way it’s a nurture problem that needs solving. I would really like to get to some type of upfront commitment, that keeps them engaged, but we’re not there yet. You’ll have to check back later to see how we solve this.
Not all insights were directly product related. Many teachers are seeing students who aren’t held back, but still can’t write. I heard stories of year 11s who couldn’t identify incorrect sentence structures, let alone fix them. Many teachers told me that more and more students were missing the fundamentals of writing. I also heard their struggles of dealing with parents. Denial that their child would use ChatGPT. More likely the teacher was out to get their precious. I’m sadly glad that I’m not a teacher.
It’s made me rethink what we’ll do when this little baby hits school age.
Woeful education systems aside, the Inktrail goal at the moment is to get the first high school student submission. I think we are a few weeks from cracking that, after which the next goal will be to get the cost of first student submission after sign up down to less than $200 spend.
See you when I see you.