How to set up compounding education programs

Khushi Lunkad
4 days ago
3 min read

There are a bunch of education programs out there where software companies give access to students and/or teachers.

This might mean:

a free product
a lite version of the product
a custom product
a discounted product

I've set these up a few times now, and wanted to share some learnings.

Always set up a loop

It's easy to just discount the product and allow access.

But, if you're not the incumbent, I'd encourage you to go a step further.

Can you encourage educators to bring all of their students along? And vice-versa?

For example, this form asks students to refer their educator.

(Tip: Let the student opt-in to an introduction before you ask this question.)

I've found that sharing educators handbook improves adoption rates. These typically cover do's and don'ts.

BJ Fogg Model explains users takes action based on

how easy something is to do and
how motivated they are

But what you can only learn in his paid course, is that it's far easier to move people along the X axis than Y axis. Essentially, it is very very hard to motivate people.

So just make the task simple. And then make it even simpler.

In this case, if you can make it simple for educators/students to opt-in, it helps far more than you would realize. You could get away with an average benefit if you made it easy to opt-in. The contrary is true as well.

In the past, I've offered each educator a custom URL that they can share with their students.

This it was quite successful and helped with retention on both sides of the market (student + educator). This custom URL gets embedded in the course forever.

Add it where the friction appears

I love adding on the pricing page as an FAQ. Pricing is typically a friction point for students. So, I've found it to be an ideal place to add it.

Figma also places the education program in the pricing page.

You can add it in the onboarding flow. This is what Notion does, and it's typically more generous (and aggressive!). It's proactive vs reactive.

In-app pricing modals are another good place to add them. These show up when you click on an upgrade button in-app and aren't navigated to the /pricing page URL.

3. Automate when you hit scale

The third tip is to automate. Once you hit scale, you want to monitor for fraud and unauthorized use.

There are a few tools to help with that.

The simplest setup is just to use some Zapier/Relay app logic. And connect that to your email marketing system.

For example, for one company, we wanted students to use the product and share their learnings publicly on Reddit, Medium, Instagram etc.

That was the growth loop that we ideated. It was designed to help generate UGC. For students, learn-in-public was a good strategy to build a portfolio of work.

We wanted to automate the follow ups. If a student had 3 months worth of access, we wanted to send a 'collection' email at the end of each month.

It was easy to orchestrate with a simple email marketing tool. Just look at their start date and trigger every 30 days after that.

There are a few other tools too.

SheerID can help verify educators and students. This is useful if you're giving free access to educators but monetizing students.

Harvard uses them.

Another option is to use Github's Student Developer pack. Useful if you want to reach a dev-first audience base. This takes out the need to verify students yourself but will restrict people who don't have a verified student ID.

See MongoDB, Heroku, and datacamp are all on this list.

UNiDays is another one for a more mass-market product that can handle verification for you.

There are many permutations on how to offer access. It really depends on your tech stack and ability to invest more into it.

You can even localize to each country and each region!

The biggest challenge I've seen is that you may not want to restrict to only those people with a .edu email address. People often learn on-the-job or in bootcamps. This happens with a more niche product where your market isn't as horizontal as a Notion. But being the default tool of choice is far more important.

In that case, you may have more flexibility to give them access with a slighly more manual process.

You can allow students/educators to upload an ID instead of using a .edu domain. And there are more creative ways to consider ;)