Vaillancourt: Silicon Valley advisors wrongly told Howdy not to charge universities
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 7:57
Darius Vaillancourt, founder of edtech startup Howdy, discusses early pricing advice received from angel investors and advisors during the 2021 market boom.
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“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 building a marketplace Like, keep getting the product right. This was maybe like a year in a product development, and they said, don't worry about monetization right now. Like, just make it so good that they can't ignore you.”
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“These companies are still charging the same amount, 10 K for a coding bootcamp or whatever, but the experience is like significantly degraded.”
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“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%.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“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 i…”