I sold my edtech company AdmitYogi to a $550 million education giant called Crimson Education. I spent thousands of hours in the education space.
Here's why I'm never building in edtech again (a quick thread)
Ananth Veluvali
651 posts
Ananth Veluvali
@AnanthVeluvali
Stanford, CA
Joined April 2022
- I sold my edtech company to a $500m education giant (while being a freshman at Stanford). Here's the crazy story of how that happened👇
- The debate kid to founder pipeline is real.
- My cofounder and I have been building out Interactify from our Stanford dorms. We're each only taking 12 units of classes (things like art history and dance lmao), so we can go all out.
- At AdmitYogi, I remember: - Getting my Stanford email banned - Getting a cease and desist letter - Getting banned from Stripe 2x - Getting a hate post on Reddit (most upvoted on r/A2C for a whole week) - And much, much more Super stressful at the time. Funny to look back at now
- I notice a surprising amount of young people hate on successful people their age. For me, it’s motivating to see very successful young people. I instantly respect anyone 10x more when I see them working very diligently towards a goal.
- the look and feel of emails hasn’t changed in 30+ years. customers are getting tired of receiving static, bland emails. I built a shopify app that lets you send your customers interactive, shoppable emails. that reduces time to convert and means more $$$ for your brand.
00:00 - People look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them I turned down my internship offer to focus on Interactify. Who else is doing their startup instead of an internship this summer? 🤠
- This was one of the scrappiest things I've ever done as a founder. Here's the story of how my Stanford email address nearly got banned.
- peep interactify, a shopify app that lets you embed shoppable widgets into your klaviyo flows. let customers shop straight from their inbox 🔥
00:00 - Holyyy. Interactify just drove 1.46x more revenue from abandoned cart emails for one of our customers.
- Building as a college student means taking calls at the weirdest hours
- What if you could shop for your favorite clothing directly from your inbox?I'm calling it "Interactify" 👕 Try it for yourself. Pick any store, and get a personalized example of an interactive email (in under 10 seconds) at: interactify.email
00:00 - Replying to @AnanthVeluvaliFirst off, your customers suck. You have two options: sell to parents/students, or sell to schools. If you sell to the first group, your annual churn is almost 100%, requiring constant customer acquisition. Even edtech darlings like Chegg are only growing 4% year over year.