Business Success 6: Two College Students Managing Learning Better

Another story highlighting a business success to inspire you with your business

John E. Richards, an angel partner, describes four types of entrepreneurships: 1) small-businesses to provide for a family, 2) scalable businesses with huge growth and quick exit, 3) large-businesses to build wealth, and 4) social entrepreneurship. He highlights that most venture capitalists invest in scalable businesses rather than the other three.

The Story of Instructure

I share the story from Brian Whitmer’s 2010 blog The Story of Instructure. He and Devlin Daley received an assignment in a master’s class at Brigham Young University to create a business idea and plan, and pitch it to a hypothetical group of investors.

They saw a weakness in the learning management system (LMS) currently used by their university. They served as teaching assistant’s and felt both confusion and frustration with the current LMS. They

• Identified that no company was driving innovation in the LMS market
• Generated ideas for how online learning could be improved
• Studied the size of the market and how contracts were signed
• Discovered why innovation stagnated
• Outlined the broken features of the main competitors and ideas to fix them
• Prepared a presentation to gather information from potential clients
• Surveyed 18 major and minor universities to gather feedback about their ideas
• Took exhaustive notes from each presentation, then reworked it based on feedback
• Found an angel investor who liked the ideas and gave startup funding
• AFTER ALL THIS, they started writing code based on the multiple ideas from their potential clients

As a result, Instructure has became a dominant player in learning management systems (LMS). 

Model of Lean and Pivot Business Development

Instructure demonstrates the principals of lean and pivot development:

• Create a business idea
• Present your idea to potential clients
• Pivot the idea based on their feedback
• Present the modified idea to the same and other potential clients
• Pivot again based on their feedback
• Continue the process until most accept the idea
• Only then do you begin actual development (that’s lean)

Monday we highlight how you can use KPI Marketing to compare your benchmarks to others