I am just getting in to this sector. It would really be great if you could write about your experiences in this domain. Those would help people like me avoid making some obvious mistakes, and also help us learn a thing or two for our ventures.
Your obvious mistake was going into this sector, unless you are targeting either pre-k or graduate students. Otherwise get out now, unless you're just doing lead gen or something.
So let's say you have some software that legitimately creates $30-100 dollars of value per student. In order to sell that software to the school, it's going to take 8 months and $20,000 dollars. That means you're going to have to sell it for at least $125,000 dollars to make it worthwhile. That you're A) reading HN B) asking this question suggests that you probably won't be able to make this sale. And even if you can, you'll essentially just be conning the schools out of money because your software is worth vastly less than what you're selling it for, so you're essentially just depriving kids of things that would actually help them learn.
From your profile it looks like you are building a Student Management system. My comments probably don't apply so much there, because presumably your system doesn't really have much contact with students (and probably not too much with actual educators - it's mostly for administrators, right?). In that case I think you'll find its probably borderline-sane - no worse than any other enterprise sales thing.
Just stay away from doing anything that attempts to change education itself.
Yes, eduOrbit's audience is primarily school administrators.
I have braced myself up for enterprise'y' sales cycles, but one small advantage I might have is that am based in India. I personally see a huge opportunity in making a dent with educational institutes here that have not adopted technology too much and the enterprise 'rot' has not settled in them yet. Of course, that brings in another set of challenges, but hey I don't wanna die wandering without giving it a shot.
Thanks a lot for your comments. Really appreciate them.
