Lessons learnt from building a Maths app

By Tom Minor, Founder, EdTech Entrepreneur, Venture Partner at If Capital

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In 2014, we launched a beautifully designed maths app that helped children learn in a way that adapted to their level, strengths and weaknesses. It was ahead of its time and found an eager audience among pioneering parents in the early days of the App Store.

Then someone said, “You should sell to schools.” To this day, I am not sure if it was the best or worst advice I have ever received.

Selling to schools nearly broke us.

We went in with energy and a scrappy, optimistic mindset. Like many startups, we had a small but hungry sales team and a growth hacking mentality that was just on the right side of ethical. But we made every mistake imaginable: selling too cheaply, charging schools for training, even accidentally selling to the same school twice in one year.

We were under pressure to show growth. But we quickly learned that selling to schools is not a sprint. It is a long journey. The procurement cycles, the budgeting windows, the need for real proof of impact, none of it matched the fast iteration mindset we had been living in.

Eventually, we figured it out. We learned that if a teacher does not understand your product, that is your problem, not theirs. We brought former teachers into our team and everything changed. They helped us communicate the value in ways schools could relate to.

We simplified onboarding. If the product was not being used within six weeks of sale, we knew we were at risk of losing that school. Retention became the metric that mattered most. Not contracts signed. Not downloads. Just: do they stay?

There is a hard truth I now share with other EdTech founders: if your school retention rate is not above 75 percent, your business is probably not viable. If it is not above 85 percent, it likely will not be acquired. It is that simple. That one metric affects everything – lifetime value, acquisition costs, investor confidence, your ability to grow.

We learned these lessons the hard way. It cost us time, perhaps even an extra round of funding. But we built something lasting.

The education sector does not reward hype. It rewards trust, results, and reliability. That is why I am now helping other founders through If Capital. Because building a product is hard, but getting it to work in schools is harder. And doing both is worth it.