How To Be More Careful With What You Build According To Lessons In eLearning

4 years ago this month, the instant messaging service WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for a staggering $19 billion. While many initially balked at that valuation, it’s since turned out to be a good piece of business for Mark Zuckerberg. So, how on earth did a two-man team manage to build so valuable a product in so short a space of time?

It’s a fair question, considering the numbers that WhatsApp has achieved to date.

At the time of writing, the service currently boasts some 1.5 billion users – almost 1/5 of the entire global population. It is used to send upwards of 60 billion messages every day.

You’d think that reaching such mind-boggling figures would require the kinds of resources that any entrepreneur or CEO could only dream of. And if you were building your entire product from scratch, they almost certainly would. But WhatsApp managed to attain its first 900 million users with a team of just 50 developers. That kind of rapid growth sounds incredible—maybe even unattainable—but WhatsApp’s method for success was, and still remains, pretty straightforward:

Build a better product by building on an existing infrastructure.

For WhatsApp, this meant leveraging the popularity of mobile devices, the growing app economy, widespread internet connectivity, massive web servers, a suitable programming language such as Erlang, and so on – anything that allowed them to focus their relatively limited resources on differentiating their product by improving its core functionality.

"The number one lesson", said WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum in a 2015 interview "is just be very focused on what you need to do. Don’t spend time getting distracted by other activities, other technologies, even things in the office, like meetings".

That kind of tunnel-vision might sound extreme to some but the core intention is clear: strip away what’s not needed and focus on the problems that need solving.

Edtech Etiquette: Choose Your Product Carefully

It’s highly unlikely that edtech will see a WhatsApp-style explosion of growth, but I do feel we’ll see a tipping point where ubiquitous infrastructure will hasten change and support growth in a way not previously seen in the sector.

This will offer huge potential for creating more effective and engaging learning tools. Unfortunately, it will also increase the risk of attempting to do everything and achieve nothing.

Given that the edtech landscape is showing real signs of evolving, it’s worth thinking deeply about the kind of product you want to invest your time, money, and energy into creating.

I say that from experience.

The company I co-founded started life as an edtech consultancy business. We had that scrappy start-up confidence about us at the time and truly believed we could build better software than what was already available in edtech.

Things Change, So Revisit Your Decisions

But we found the consultancy process can be painfully slow, with different specifications for each deal. Simply put, it wasn’t the right direction for us to take, so we had to re-examine our business and try something new.

This kind of adaptability is a necessary part of life if you want to survive or thrive in any changing landscape. If Steward Butterfield hadn’t decided to redirect his efforts from an obscure online game called Glitch, he never would have founded the hugely popular team messaging portal Slack. If Nintendo hadn’t decided to pivot from its roots as a manufacturer of a playing card, it never would never have become a giant in the video games industry.

While you don’t have to make a dramatic U-turn to find success, you should be prepared to sanity check your choices every so often if you want success in the long term.

Inventing The Future

Re-examining our decisions allowed us to make the leap from consulting to building a "product".

However, we faced the same challenges as every other edtech vendor: how do you offer something that genuinely stands out from the crowd? We decided against trying to compete with the countless content creators out there.

After all, we were engineers, not teachers, so the best way to make a positive impact on students was by recognizing our strengths and using our skills to develop technology that could adapt to the function of the educational or training content that others were providing. For us, this meant creating the building blocks for a product rather than one single "product" that tries (and fails) to be all things to all people.

We did this by developing a suite of APIs (application programming interface) in a niche area at a time when few, if any, were doing the same thing in the edtech space.

A key benefit of this was that it meant it was possible to integrate our software with other platforms rather than compete against them. So just as we leveraged existing infrastructures to develop our offering, others could use ours to add to their products without wasting time and resources.

The EdTech Tipping Point?

"The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behaviour, crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire". -Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

More students have access to computers, mobile devices, and the internet than ever before: 92% of 18 to 29-year-olds in the US own a smartphone. The figures for other age groups are similarly high. Additionally, some 3/4 of all Americans have broadband at home. The increase in tech use gives edtech product owners the opportunity to reach more learners than was previously possible.

But mobilizing this always-on, tech-savvy market will require some lateral thinking.

In my opinion, trying to attract users to your brand-new learning platform is pointless if it just offers similar functions as existing competitors. A more efficient way of connecting with users and ultimately providing more value to those users is to build a specialized solution that integrates with other learning products.

Doing so is faster, cheaper, and lets you focus on efficiency, thereby ensuring you get more out of your available resources and do one thing better than anyone else.

In the end, there’s little point in reinventing the wheel when you can do more by rolling with it.