The Challenges of Building an EdTech Company in the Post-COVID World

Remote technologies and opportunities were already sweepingly popular before the nasty COVID-19 outbreak. 2020’s global pandemic and the resulting massive lockdown reinforced the industry-wide reach of online education and underlying technologies, boosting the growth of the EdTech industry by an annual 17-25%. The shift of both formal (school and university) and corporate education toward online is now stronger than ever, spawning new tech and business trends and dramatically popularizing the existing market tendencies.

This extends the horizons of the E-Learning and EdTech market for all eager entrepreneurs and service providers to grab a piece of cake. Along with new wide opportunities, however, niche challenges come into play as well. We’ve surveyed a number of EdTech CEOs working in the industry to learn what relevant issues they face and how they overcome market challenges when it comes to software development and product distribution among the ever-growing audience of users. 

For this EdTech report, we’ve also analyzed the major market statistics to see the big picture of the industry conditions and software building tendencies that form the massive popularity of EdTech nowadays.

Challenges EdTech Companies Must Overcome

As rich and promising as the EdTech market is, it can’t but have a good share of competition. EdTech solution providers have to fight for their right to sell their creations to clients. The brightest examples include challenges of technology in education related to lack of funding. 

Many companies struggle and lose a lot of money in attempts to acquire customers. All because numerous ambitious startups lack sufficient funding. And that’s in the market where the potential demand greatly exceeds the offer, with millions of schools, thousands of colleges and universities waiting for their time to upgrade technologically.

Then, there are also debatable EdTech business questions, like what should be the top priority for providers in the field - scaling or monetization. The thing is, investors are more focused on working with long-standing, established businesses able to bring regular profits stably. 

That’s why the scale-first-monetize-later business development strategy becomes increasingly preferred in the field. This model may even help change the situation with funding shortages if enough startups start adopting it timely.  

To dive into more detail, according to our own thorough EdTech industry analysis, here are the most relevant EdTech challenges businesses must face to break into the education sector:

Long Sales Cycles (32%).

When it comes to corporate politics and K-12 specifics, lots of bureaucracy is involved in the approval and adoption of new functional elements, which takes a lot of time to settle. The ultimate way to tackle this challenge is to focus on customers, their needs and rates of satisfaction to build transparent, smoothly-flowing business relationships.  

Limited Budgets (26%).

Establishments may also lack the budget and wait until they get another round of funding from their sponsors to purchase a new EdTech solution. Other reasons for budget shortages may be numerous (lack of funding, poor economics, etc.).        

Oversaturated Market (16%).

The competition is fierce. We’re talking about a growing and emerging field that still has lots of unexplored and unmonetized patches.               

Slow-moving in Accepting Innovation (11%).

Companies, as well as people, are also afraid to integrate and invest in something not yet properly assimilated in their country. Even if they see great results in other countries, being a pioneer may be too much of a weight to carry.                                                                                           

Non-sustainable Monetization Model (5%).

Many companies still need to adopt efficient monetization models to be able to better introduce their solutions to the mass market.

Achievability for Non-technical Users (5%).

Many people need time to get a hang of certain technology, even if it’s very intuitive. There are people who don’t really use electronics that much in their daily lives. This spawns difficulties with integrating certain EdTech solutions among studying audiences.

Read in full The Challenges of Building an EdTech Company Report.