- The CEO and co-founder of Informed K-12 (formerly Chalk Schools) discusses their work in helping school systems bring paperwork processes online.
- They started by digitizing forms that go home in backpacks, such as permission slips, and expanded to include internal district office paperwork.
- They have over 600 forms on their platform for some districts.
- The CEO previously worked in the non-profit sector and then for the Providence Public Schools, where she managed professional development.
- The company initially had a different idea for a Q&A system for teachers but pivoted after receiving feedback that it would not be practical.
- They went through a process of interviewing teachers and brainstorming ideas, eventually deciding to focus on digitizing paperwork.
- It took some time to gain users, as they initially tried to offer the app for free but found it difficult to get teachers to pay for it.
- The challenge with their work is that paperwork is a widespread problem in school systems.

- The company faced challenges in identifying the target market for their app that solves paperwork problems in school systems.
- It took about a year to get the first pilot districts on board, and initial sales were made using a PowerPoint prototype.
- It was difficult to determine who would ultimately purchase the product, and the company had to demo and reach out to various levels of staff.
- The company eventually found that chief business officials or assistant superintendents were the primary purchasers of their product.
- Building relationships and trust with customers, including school leaders, parents, and students, is crucial for success.
- The company focuses on providing personalized support and maintaining strong customer relationships.
- The company currently has 22 employees and the CEO is actively involved in customer support.
- Understanding the unique context of each school system is important in building trust with customers.
- Privacy and security are important considerations when dealing with parents.
- Raising money was a lengthy process, and the company had to restart from scratch after participating in Imagine K12.
- The company had no users and only a bare prototype at the time of their demo day.

- The company had no users or active launch after demo day
- They focused on pitching and meetings, but realized it took away from building their product and go-to-market strategy
- They ended up with a 10 bullet point list of their company's story
- Over a year later, they unexpectedly received an email from an investor who wanted to have lunch and ended up investing in their company
- They had focused on product and pilots, which helped with the investor's decision
- The speaker is excited about the efficiency and back office side of the education technology industry
- Many districts are preparing for budget cuts and facing challenges in hiring millennials
- There is a need for improvement and innovation in various departments within districts
- The speaker believes there will be more developments in making processes more efficient and better in the future.

- Informed K-12 helps school systems digitize paperwork processes, starting with forms that go home in backpacks and expanding to internal district office paperwork.
- They have over 600 forms on their platform for some districts and initially struggled to gain users and determine their target market.
- They eventually found that chief business officials or assistant superintendents were the primary purchasers of their product.
- Building relationships and trust with customers, including school leaders, parents, and students, is crucial for success.
- Privacy and security are important considerations when dealing with parents.
- Raising money was a lengthy process for the company, but they eventually received investment after focusing on product development and pilots.
- The speaker is excited about the efficiency and back office side of the education technology industry.
- There is a need for improvement and innovation in various departments within school districts.

At YC Edtech Night, early-stage edtech founders from around the world gathered to meet and learn from each other. The sessions included fireside chats with edtech alums from YC and Imagine K12. 

Sarah Chou is the founder of Informed K12 (Imagine K12, S12), a company that automates business workflows for K-12 school districts. At Edtech Night, Sarah shared with Karen Lien the experience of finding product-market fit after an early pivot, plus her strategies for selling to K-12 schools and districts.

It's so exciting to see, I mean this is a lot of companies, this is really exciting.

So I'm the CEO and co-founder of Informed K-12.

We did recently go through a name change, so we were formally Chalk Schools.

I still catch myself saying both, so if I do that today, you know.

And so just generally what we're doing, we help any school systems, we work with district offices primarily, and we help them bring any paperwork process online.

So what that looks like in practice, we started out with things that go home in backpacks that you know about, probably permission slips, back to school things.

And as we got further and further into it, we do everything now that is internal to the district offices as well.

So everything from mileage reimbursements, conference and travel forms, to chair requests, stoplight violation forms.

I've seen everything, I think, but there's always new stuff that comes up.

With the districts that we've been working with for the longest, They have hundreds of forms on our platform.

I think the record right now is over 600.

And that's just, it's how the back office works.

And what were you doing just in your career before you started this company?

So before I started the company, I actually came from the non-profit world.

I don't know if anyone else here has that particular background.

I was always really interested in doing things that I felt had impact, But my challenge there was trying to find things that could scale with that impact.

So what I ended up doing is I started a couple of non-profits sort of early in my career, ended up deciding to work for the school system.

And I worked for the Providence Public Schools out in Rhode Island.

So I worked for the Providence Public Schools and I managed PD so I don't know if there are any PD people here managed PD for all staff so all the teachers the principals the speech therapists everyone I was pretty firmly in the world of floor to ceiling, filing cabinets, lots of sign-in sheets that we collected on paper.

Funny enough, which I think we might talk about, the first company idea that my co-founder and I worked on was not this, was not that, even though I did actually deal with a lot of paperwork.

I struggled a lot in my district just trying to track what was going on with teachers.

Are we actually, are our trainings effective?

It made me decide to go back into technology and to seek ways just to scale more impact and to solve those things that I was seeing.

It led me to Stanford where I was in the Learning Design Technology program.

And that is where I met my co-founder, Chen.

She escaped the world of finance because she wanted to do more impactful work.

And when we met, we both, this is the same year, I was in the same cohort as Preston, so MOOCs were a really big deal that year and we were like we're doing something for districts period.

So we were probably the only 2, I know we were actually the only 2 in our entire class that cared really specifically about school systems and that set us on the path, we created an internship together, we were working at an elementary school, highly recommend getting on the ground really, really immersed if that's what you're looking to do, if it's to solve problems for schools or school systems, there's nothing quite like doing that.

And so we ended up working closely with teachers on a program where they were launching iPads.

And along the way we looked at a lot of different apps and a lot of different things.

And that's where we came up with Chalk 1.

I don't know if I should be going into that now.

We met in 2012 when you were leaving the LDT program and starting Imagine K-12.

And yeah, you applied with a very different idea.

So yeah, tell us what the idea was and why you decided to pivot away from it to something else.

And then we can talk about how you came up with.

So when Chen and I were working at the school sites, 1 of the things that came up pretty quickly while we were trying to help teachers launch iPads was just this feeling that people weren't sharing their best practices or they didn't know what other teachers next door were doing.

Schools are very siloed, classrooms are often siloed.

So we were like, okay, we're going to build this Q&A system.

Basically, I know Jeff calls it a Quora for schools.

We were working on it for the entire year, we got into Imagine K12 thinking oh this is gonna be a great way to continue working on this idea because we care about this so much and we really, really, we really believed in it.

We were probably, I can't remember how, so we had no users but we did have prototypes And we were in probably 3 or 4 weeks in, I think is what it was.

Yeah, in Imagine K-12, when we ended up doing a user study where we had a group of teachers in a room, and I remember this really clearly, we recorded them and we stepped out.

So this whole thing about teachers being too nice to say things to your face around whether or not it actually works well or whether it's something they want, it's so true for us, unfortunately.

We ended up putting a group of teachers in a room, teachers who we had been talking to for a good portion of that year, turned the recorder on, walked out, and then recorded them while they were trying to use 1 of our prototypes.

And we have on tape, like the exact words were, I would never use this, my teachers would never use this, And we were both like, we were looking at it afterwards, we were like, oh boy.

So the thing with teachers, at least with this particular idea for us, was that we had sort of forgotten the context of the school, which is that teachers are often in their classrooms on their feet most of the day.

So who is going to really have time to sit down, submit the questions, and have the answers, and how is that gonna really work?

And so that's what it came down to for us.

The moment was when we saw that on tape, and we were like, okay, I don't know.

Like, how are we gonna actually do this in practice?

That's kind of a gift that you were able to get this honest, like I would never use this.

You're like, all right, that's pretty clear.

Rule number 1, you should hope to have users, and you should hope that they're happy to use it, able to.

Like how, once you decided, all right, they aren't using this, how did you convince yourselves to let go?

And then how did you come up with your very different idea that's now used in many, many schools and districts.

It was sort of the first step, but I think it took us less than a day to just be like, all right, off we go.

And if I remember right too, this was probably 2 weeks before we were graduating and we needed to present what we had worked on all year, so that was 1.

And the other 1 was, I think we were 1 week away from the teacher day, I forget the name now.

But the day where we were gonna have people to hopefully come and see what we had built and created, which we had nothing anymore at that point.

I think we spent 1 to 2 weeks of doing everything we could and talking to everyone.

And I mean, like all day, as many people as we could.

I remember we did things like we offered to be in the school year around that time I remember this clearly we offered to help a couple of teachers we were like anything talk to me about any pain you have.

We offered to help a couple of teachers set up their classrooms so we could get more of their time.

And then we would go late into the night just coming up with as many ideas as we could and I think it was about 2 weeks of that and it was a really intense 2 weeks.

We end up narrowing it down to 2 ideas 1 was for paperwork and The other 1 was called Lightning Ideas, which I don't know if Tim or Jeff remember at all.

But Lightning Ideas, surprise, came from trying to come up and brainstorm with a lot of ideas.

So when we were really evaluating the 2 with the help of our advisors.

It was sort of 1 had potential to be a business probably with the market and the other 1 maybe an app, not sure where that could go.

And so we doubled down on paperwork and that's pretty much that's where we've been since.

And so, from that decision, how did you get to having some customers?

So, we had users after some time, it took us a long time honestly, I think it took us, we certainly had users, the thing for us that was difficult is we tried to get teachers to sign on to the app for free to do permission slips.

We did end up along the course of that finding a couple things.

Just for us that it was hard to get teachers to pay for it.

So we sort of muddled around for a period of time trying to find our user.

The challenge for us with paperwork is it's a very dispersed problem.

And with school systems I think 1 of the challenges depending on what you're building is just that you have a lot of potential users, and each of them see different parts of the picture.

So it's challenging to know who you're necessarily going to sell to or solve the problem for if you're like us and you're doing something that is sort of systemic.

I'd say we were also simultaneously building the app from ground without a team, so it was just Chen.

It really did take us a good amount of time.

I'd say probably a year before we had the first couple pilot districts on.

I sold our first couple pilots with a PowerPoint prototype.

We had nothing built and that's how I got our first people to sign on to use it.

And even then it took a while to find out who was going to purchase our particular product.

So there were the permission slip product people were using for free but then you used your PowerPoint presentation of something else to get districts

to buy it correct okay yeah and so it was challenging even from there to find out who was actually going to be the ultimate person to buy it there was a period of time where I demoed and either cold-called or emailed pretty much almost any level of staff you can think of.

I demoed a lot of like athletic directors for instance and they were wonderful but it was also hard for them to purchase so it took took some time to figure that part out.

And again, I think part of that is due to the specific problem that we're solving and how we're doing that.

So the market half of product market fit you were searching for a while.

So When you did find out, I guess I'm interested in kind of the systems you found to learn from these users when you found the person who was your market.

Because I imagine for, not chalk, for informed K-12, the person who's purchasing isn't always a person who's using the product.

So how do you learn from these different parties that are involved with, as your market?

So we did actually find out that, so right now for the most part, we work with different departments in the school systems, but we sell primarily to the chief business officials or assistant superintendents.

It took us some time to figure out how to even get in front of those particular people.

And it turns out that they actually do sign a lot of forms.

So for us, it wasn't quite, we did find that they were sort of people able to buy, but also, I mean, a lot of the assistance groups that I work with personally sign, and even superintendents personally sign a lot of documents.

Oh, so they were using it to sign off on things.

So, Any more, so you were telling us about finding that product market fit, so when did you know, was it like the first real sale, and you thought these are the people we're after, or it was 25 sales in?

I would agree with, at least for me, what Preston was saying, there wasn't a moment.

We actually sold a couple, and sometimes you get false positives.

Like I sold an outdoor education school and for a while I thought that we sell to a bunch of those and that didn't quite it wasn't like the big enough portion of the market either how did I know I think it must have been 2000, towards the end of 2014, early into 2015, we started getting it consistently.

We started consistently with a process knowing that if we called this person this way with this message, et cetera, that we would be able to actually start landing those contracts consistently.

Because even our first 10 didn't necessarily tell us that much.

For me, it was more that when I was like okay we're actually this this is the 1 this feels like

was that the point where you raised money or had you raised money before that or

we had raised money before that we raised money on pilots before that so yeah

So 1 thing we talk about a lot at Y Combinator and Paul Graham writes about this a lot is doing things that don't scale as a startup.

So you already told us that you sold PowerPoint versions of your product, which definitely is like a limited time thing to do.

What are some other things you guys did in the early days that didn't scale to get you to product market fit?

And or, What are things that your company does today, like in terms of things that don't scale, to keep you moving forward?

I think there are so many things we probably did that we couldn't scale that it's hard for me to remember exactly like what set of things.

I will say now and the things I don't regret spending any, like I would spend a ton of time on and continue to, is spending a lot of time with basically building the relationships.

I think schools at the end of the day, and districts, there is a really strong relationship aspect of it.

I think as customers, they can be pretty unique in that lifetime value, can definitely be longer, and you want a product that's pretty sticky.

So what I And what we continue to do is we will spend, like I can give you an example.

There have been a couple of times where either things have broken or if the site went down somehow, times where we've personally called every single customer.

That is 1 of those things where you're just on the phone dialing all the way through.

There are times where if I really wanna make sure that something is going to go well and that I think it's really important for us to keep our promises that we make to the school system.

So if that's in my mind, a lot of times it's whatever it takes.

Of course, as we do that, we wanna find the right way to implement that will scale.

But at the same time, there's a lot that you learn on the ground through multiple visits and what it might be that you just kind of need to do.

And you do get a lot more information on those on-site visits than you do over webinars or phone.

So things that we do that don't scale now, it's just focusing on the customers.

I personally spend a lot of time on our support and we'll like check our net promoter scores and call people school office managers if it's something that looks like it's not working well for them.

I'd like to keep continuing to do that but that probably falls into the bucket of do I know if that will continue to scale.

Not sure about that, but those are things, the customer piece and the building that relationship and the commitment to them, those are things that we just try not to compromise on.

And Just for context, how many people are in your company now?

Okay, so you probably have some focus support people, but you're spending time on support as CEO as well.

Can you tell us a little bit about building trust?

You gave us, I think, some good examples, but building trust with school leaders and are there other parties, are you dealing with parents or students and building trust there as well?

Yeah, so given the nature of what we do, we end up working with kind of everybody across the school systems, parents all the way.

So to build trust, there's sort of, depending on the set of people, there's gonna be different things.

But the 1 thing I see consistently across schools and school systems is that everyone thinks they're pretty unique.

There are a lot of things that are contextual.

Like every district I go to, I'll be like, oh, this is the way we do things here.

Or like, oh, we have typewriters, we do it.

And I'll be like, I definitely just talked to a district that also has them.

But it's sort of, it's that local context piece.

So district to district, county to county, state to state, things will be different.

Of course there are things that are sort of across the board common, but that feeling of really needing to understand their context, that's really important.

It's really important that when you're partnering with someone and taking on a risk of a big contract or a big implementation, a big public thing like that, it's really important that you feel who you're working with understands what that is.

It's just I don't think that's the best way, but it's also, it's just really important.

That's on pretty much like teachers and up school system people.

For parents, it continues to keep being a big thing, but privacy and security, whatever it is, start early and keep working on it and expect that parents in certain areas, they might pull up your privacy policy and really read it in great detail and maybe understand it correctly or not.

But all those things on the parent end are really important.

Let's talk a little bit more about fundraising.

Can you tell us about when you first raised money and how you got your first investor and maybe about relationships with investors and how you find investors that will add value for your company.

So raising money took a long time for us too.

We were really, we had to restart from scratch all over again when we were in Imagine K12.

So demo day definitely came and went and I think even at that point we still had no users, we still had a bare prototype, I don't think we'd even had necessarily an active launch at that time yet.

And we did though, right After it, we got a bunch of people that we had met.

And we were up and down Sand Hill just pitching and doing it.

It takes a lot of time and effort to work on that.

And So it was for us, we sort of came after a couple of months to the realization that it was time and effort away from building the products and building our go-to-market strategy, which is what we really needed.

So we did after, I'm going to say, like 3 or 4 months, just we were like, we're not ready.

So we started focusing again back more entirely just on product and getting pilots in a couple of things there I think so in the time we were pitching we focused a lot at the time on creating our deck.

And I think our deck probably went from like 10 slides to over 40 at some point.

You go to these meetings and it's like, oh, we need to adjust this, or we need to tell it this way and do this.

And truthfully, I think our story got really watered.

Like it just got really hard to know what we were even talking about at some point and then we sort of hit pause on it and then it must have been over a year later and this is 1 of those things that you kind of just have to prepare to pitch really at any time eventually we had sort of gotten to the point where Chad and I had probably like a 10 bullet point list of just what our story was.

Like this is, whether we're talking to people we're pitching to hire or potentially investors.

These are the things that we, this is how we want to tell our story about our company.

And so we did have that and we were actually pretty well rehearsed on that and we were on the same page and constantly updating it.

But I'd say over a year later out of the blue we got an email from an investor who we had originally sought advice from like over a year and a half ago, so it was very much out of the blue and he was just like Do you want to have lunch and I remember at the time Chen and I were like Sure, like of course, But we didn't really know what was going to, what was happening there.

But it was a good thing, because of course we were prepared.

And we went to have lunch, and I remember at the end of lunch, we were just, I remember exactly, we were eating, all those things.

He just sort of looked up and goes okay I'm in and I'm 1 of those people where like everything is on my face and so Chen says afterwards that I looked like someone had kicked my dog or something I was like shocked or just really like a combination of shock and like, I really hope you're not kidding.

It's like 1 of those, but that's actually what happened.

And actually from there, it was much faster.

And at that point we had focused on product and on having a good set of pilot districts.

So it was just really good timing, but there's sort of an element of luck and networking consistently and being prepared.

Just in our last minute or 2, from your position in the industry, working with districts, having worked inside districts, and now working in the ed tech industry, what changes have you seen over the past 5 years?

So I'm probably always going to, I'm like full on on the like efficiency back office side of things.

So I'm just going to sort of probably keep talking about that 1.

I mean I think I came out at a time where again, MOOCs were a really big deal.

The thing about back office or district administration stuff is that it's kind of hard to know.

It's even me personally having worked in a school system, I had my own set of things that I did in PD, but the whole scale of what happens and that whole piece of it, there's a lot.

So what I hear a lot of now is definitely almost every district I'm talking to now is preparing in some way or other for budget cuts, or at least thinking about it.

If you are at all interested in HR things, I hear a lot about the challenges of trying to hire and attract millennials.

And there's also, depending on the department, there's usually some really, really just things that people have been doing for a really long time, that they're really eager to do better and do differently.

And I think with sort of what's coming next and the need to do things more efficiently and better, I think that is an area that we'll be seeing more things in.

Wonderful, thanks so much Sarah for coming in and sharing your story.

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Sarah Chou on Finding Product-Market Fit in the Education Industry - at YC Edtech Night