Pathworks.co | Product Performance Consulting

Academize

What they wanted

Academize are an education technology startup that raised seed funding to develop the first iteration of their collaborative video instruction tool. The founders had just graduated from AngelPad’s accelerator program and needed an extra pair of hands to come aboard as a team member on the next phase of their startup’s journey.

The initial focus of the MVP had been on managing shared learning resources and they had successfully signed up five schools in the UK. The goal was now to develop the product into a fully-fledged video instruction collaboration tool built on the principles of the ‘flipped classroom’ and drive traction and uptake on the beta.

The Project

What they wanted

Academize are an education technology startup that raised seed funding to develop the first iteration of their collaborative video instruction tool.

The Mission

what we did

Working within a multi-stakeholder group of external agencies and adidas stakeholders from PR and IT, we led the project and did the back and front end web development.

The Result

what happened

The tool was presented internally at a global PR stakeholder seminar at adidas’ HQ in Germany to unanimous satisfaction. The lookbook continues to drive traffic and social engagement to adidas’ web properties.

what we did

We first identified and prioritized the most important features to build on the beta. By talking to as many customers as we could from their target market of college educators, we gained valuable user feedback and insights that would drive the service and solution design.

Right from the get go we knew that integration with current learning managements systems would be critical to drive adoption with the clients’ target audiences - college and higher education institutions. So we opened up the API on the very first release and included support for Moodle and Canvas.

We did a bunch of research on collaboration and social tools from many different industries before we found consensus on a ‘Soundcloud’ player type user interface. This meant we would need to rebuild the current product almost from scratch.

Armed with the mockups in hand, we got to work on getting the product into the hands of key influencers and enterprise level educators. Over a two week period we pitched to over 500 instructional designers, CIOs and CTOs at leading colleges and educational institutions across the US - by positioning the free trial as a pilot program we believed that we would have a better chance of adoption.

what happened

The drive to engage customers on a ‘pilot program’ was a resounding success. We successfully engaged 15 institutions to pilot the platform including two Ivy League Universities. Academize was subsequently acquired in 2013.