Before Rimu, I spent five years helping scale an LMS to 3,000 school deployments across New Zealand and Australia. The product itself was technically straightforward by SaaS standards — a learning management system with teacher-facing course building tools, student assignment submission, gradebook, and parent communication features. What was not straightforward was everything about how schools actually procured, deployed, and developed institutional dependence on it. Those five years shaped every investment position I hold about the EdTech market, because they gave me a granular understanding of how institutional EdTech adoption actually works — which is substantially different from how enterprise SaaS adoption works and substantially different from how most EdTech founders model it.
The first surprise was how much of the procurement decision was driven by existing relationships rather than product evaluation. When a new cluster coordinator arrived or when a principal had a collegial relationship with someone at a neighbouring school that had adopted the platform, the likelihood of a procurement conversation starting was substantially higher than any amount of direct marketing could produce. The NZ school sector is a small professional community. Teachers and principals move between schools, communicate regularly through professional learning networks, and make significant decisions based on trusted peer recommendations. This is different from enterprise SaaS, where procurement is often driven by industry analyst reports, RFP processes, and formal vendor evaluation. In school technology, the informal recommendation network is frequently more decisive than the formal evaluation process. The implication for founders is that investing in community — teacher user groups, annual conferences, informal practitioner networks — is not a marketing cost; it's a sales channel.
The second surprise was about implementation. Our deployment numbers were often misleading as a measure of genuine adoption. A school that had signed a subscription contract and had the platform available to teachers was technically a deployment. A school where teachers were actively using it to set assignments, communicate with students, and manage their gradebook was something qualitatively different. The gap between the two was almost always about professional development and ongoing support — specifically, whether the school had someone in a position of influence who understood the platform well enough to model its use for colleagues and help people through the initial learning curve. Schools with a tech-enthusiastic deputy principal or a head of department who had been through extended professional learning with the platform showed adoption curves that were completely different from schools where the software had been purchased by the ICT lead without pedagogical buy-in from teaching staff. Implementation quality was not a deployment variable; it was an adoption outcome variable, and it was almost impossible to control from the vendor side.
The third surprise — and the most consequential for how I now think about EdTech investment — was about the gap between teacher satisfaction and dependency. We consistently had high satisfaction scores from teachers who used the platform. What we found harder to generate was genuine workflow dependency — the state where a teacher would actively resist switching to an alternative because the switching cost in terms of institutional data, established workflows, and personal time investment was too high. Satisfaction is relatively cheap to produce with a well-designed product and responsive support. Dependency is harder; it requires that the product be embedded in processes that are genuinely difficult to replicate elsewhere, and that the data history in the system has accumulated enough value that abandoning it feels costly. The products in our current portfolio that we believe have the strongest long-term moat are the ones where institutional data accumulation and workflow embedding are central to the value proposition — not just products that teachers enjoy using.
What I'd tell a founder building an LMS or school platform product today is this: your first-year metrics should not primarily be subscriber count or pilot school count. They should be depth-of-use metrics in a small number of schools — how many teacher-created activities, what percentage of students have submitted assignments through the platform, how many parent communication events have occurred. Those depth metrics are the leading indicator of the institutional dependency that generates durable retention. Getting ten schools to superficial adoption is much less valuable than getting three schools to deep adoption, and deep adoption takes time, support, and genuine engagement with how those specific schools work. The founders who understand this build differently from day one.