What features do I need to make a mindmapping application sellable to teachers / schools / classrooms.
Context: I developed forky.io for a long time, growing it organically. In fact I have sent 0 marketting emails, and have no blog worth mentioning. I have about 3600 signups from word of mouth and random clicks from around the web / producthunt / search engines.
However my mindmapping application forky.io is currently completely free.
I have noticed that 2 schools have signed up several classrooms (and continued to do it for two years)
I want to turn this into the $$$$$$$$.
Any ideas? I am thinking of creating a classrooms plugin. This allows teachers to set up a classroom, and efficient use the application in their classroom (as opposed to tediously doing whatever they are doing, such as getting students to take notes, or collaborate on their brainstorming in Forky.)
I still haven't been able to get in touch with these schools. Anybody with experience in the education industry have some hints how to go about selling to the education industry?
Actually, if you can bring in the $$$ I might even be down for even partnering somehow though I lack a legal business entity.
This may sound obvious, but you need to understand the challenges teachers are facing that a collaborative mind-mapping tool is likely to help them with, and you need to convince them that your product is worth using. For this reason it'd be great to find a teacher friend or get in touch with some kind of educational body to have a chat with them and understand these things -- it's especially valuable to just have an open-ended chat explicitly without trying to sell them on anything, but just to listen to their observations and thoughts and try to understand them.
One thing that could help is to put together some blog/marketing material summarising the many research studies that have indicated that mind-mapping is useful for things educators care about. For example, that it can help learners not just take notes more efficiently and easily, but also encode knowledge in a more structured way that makes it "stick" better. There's also some interesting research suggesting that mind-mapping can help people generate more creative ideas -- for an interesting extension to this you might check out the paper by Malycha and Maier on the "random-map technique", which claims to improve creative even further (especially compared to popular structured techniques like SCAMPER), although after reading it I didn't fully grasp how to apply the technique.
I'd suggest hitting up Google Scholar and searching for papers related to mind-mapping over the last 5 years or so. There's lots of poor quality ones but you'll quickly learn to skip past those. I'd love to hear your take on it all, too!
Thanks a lot for the thoughtful reply.
Agree 100% about the need to connect with educators and educational bodies to have a chat and understand them better.
And all of your other points are great too, I will look into each of them (lots of work to do :)).
Thanks again.
Apparently, the first step is to register a company that can legally operate, which is a prerequisite for everything else. Then, it may be necessary to have someone negotiate with school staff.
Thanks, will get on it ASAP
how are the schools using it differently?
have you spoke to the schools using it now to understand them better? why did they sign up? what do they like / hate?
the best people to tell you what features to build for schools are not just any schools, they are schools actively using your product - otherwise their feedback is just an opinion
the education industry is huge, try to narrow it down:
I just have two schools that use it. Both in Ohio.
Should i send an email, or phone them, or maybe both? I don't want to be too pushy, I guess. But I don't know what I'm nervous about... Sent the dean of one school an email but they didn't reply and it's been a week.
My email was just kindof asking if I could understand their use of Forky better and what they think of a custom classrooms plugin that would make it fit their needs better.
I also am afraid of looking weak.. or like the product is weak...
man you are doing great, you have actual people using your product and that's a huge milestone.
you and your product are definitely not weak, and what you want now is to make it even better for your users
is the dean the one using the app? if not then need to talk to the person using it
also how about add a feature in-app to collect feedback on next login or after they do a certain action?
also have you tried joining school communities and looking for people there to talk about this? ex Reddit, look for posts from people seeking a similar solution or talking about a problem you solve
I love all three points. Thanks.
they were the first signup from that school. that's why I emailed them. It's hard to tell teachers and students apart. I have to cross-reference from the school web-page for email addresses (pain in the butt). But I will look into who is using it the most, and try to contact them.
yeah. about time to do that more actively. My current feedback form is hidden in a dropdown menu, so I've only gotten like 15 people giving me feedback. Could use more, because I've found it to be valuable and also exciting.
Awesome idea. Tried facebook groups but those seem to be useless. Reddit for the win.