Vaillancourt: Regulated Legacy Institutions Rarely Share End-User Priorities
Darius Vaillancourt · He raised $250K, had thousands of users—but here's what he'd do differently next time. | Darius V... · PMF Show · Jan 16, 2025 · at 25:13
Darius Vaillancourt, founder of edtech startup Howdy, reflects on why university buyers did not purchase his product despite high student engagement.
0:00 / 0:38exact quote · 38.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“There are certain industries, education, I know some people that have built in healthcare that share this, is that because of the regulation, in the way, like, some of these universities or institutions have existed for, You know, a hundred hundreds of years in some cases, their priorities are not always what their customer, you know, if you look at a student as a customer, like their customers priorities are always not, they are not always their priorities. And so really being honest with yourself about is what I'm building aligning with who ultimately is writing the check.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Darius Vaillancourt
Vaillancourt: Remote bootcamps charged $10K despite degraded student experience
“These companies are still charging the same amount, 10 K for a coding bootcamp or whatever, but the experience is like significantly degraded.”
Vaillancourt: Silicon Valley advisors wrongly told Howdy not to charge universities
“We had very smart angels and advisors. You know, I had like the former VP of product at LinkedIn learning and other vets that had been coming, you know, come out of Silicon Valley that basically said, don't charge the schools anything. Like you're effectively …”
Vaillancourt: Howdy Saw Course Completion Rates Reach 75% to 80%
“And so that wound up, I mean, it varied across courses. So if you like use 95% as a benchmark, we were seeing in cases like 80, 75%.”
Vaillancourt: Howdy should have cut off non-paying elite university pilots sooner
“In retrospect, we should have pulled the plug, like, maybe taken the device out and said, hey, listen, sorry, like, you see the numbers going down. We really love to support you, but we also have a business to run.”
Vaillancourt: Elite universities prioritize full-tuition students over MOOC learners
“At the end of the day, their priority is their traditional business, which is the core university, the people that are going there, you know, spending 80,000 dollars a year to get a degree, undergraduate, whatever, like, that's really their core constituency.”
Vaillancourt: Howdy could have used LLMs as automated facilitators before shutting down
“I could have pivot now, like right around a year before we shut down the company, we could have integrated large language models into the peer-to-peer sessions to basically be an automated facilitator for these different topics.”