Edugameshub talked to BrainPOP, an extremely successful edtech pioneer, and asked them how to grow a global edugames company. They gave us some candid answers, as well as some pertinent advice for startups in the edugames space.
Hello BrainPOP! Can you introduce yourselves to those who might not have heard of you? Where are you based? Who’s in your team? What are you best known for?
Hello Edugameshub! Nice to meet you, I’m Chris, the Head of BrainPOP UK.
We’re based in Oxford, since 2009, and we help explain the world to kids through animated movies, interactive quizzes, informational texts, online activities, apps, and, most recently, learning games.
We’re the UK division of BrainPOP, an educational company formed in 1999 and now used in classrooms and homes all over the world. We welcome about 12 million visits to our websites each month and are growing internationally at a phenomenal rate.
Our UK team consists of content experts, animators, and marketing and sales folks. We work with a group of talented educators who serve as our Academic Advisors. We also partner with an array of educational game creators and other education technology companies and organizations.
We’re best known for our short animations starring Tim & Moby, the stars of BrainPOP. Each animated movie helps a student learn about a concept from 7 different curriculum subjects. Kids adore them and they learn lots while they watch.
Popular BrainPOP characters
BrainPOP products are aimed at students aged 7 and up. What’s your mission? What are you trying to help students and teachers to achieve?
Kids exist in a permanent state of curiosity. We aim to be there to provide a safe harbour for that curiosity, to guide them towards understanding and help them discover new opportunities to deepen their knowledge. Our content is designed to deliver exceptional levels of engagement. A quality of BrainPOP I’ve always been proud of is that it talks up to kids, not down. By choosing to use BrainPOP in a lesson a teacher or parent can pretty much guarantee attention. A teacher once told us the only homework she sets that she knows will be 100% completed is BrainPOP homework. That’s mission accomplished right there.
Kids using BrainPOP in the classroom
BrainPOP was founded in 1999, which makes it a veteran edtech company. How has the company developed and grown in that time?
The world typically moves faster than education, which has always been predisposed towards cautiousness, especially with technology. This is sensible considering teachers have the most important jobs in the world and trends come and go. This is why we try to keep engagement, emphasis on quality pedagogy, and a two way conversation with our educator community at the core of whatever we do. We’ve gone from a company that made a handful of short science animations 1999 to one of the most well loved and successful brands in edtech in 2013 (and beyond hopefully!). Stay learner-centric and everything flows from that.
Your products are used by students and teachers all across the world – you have millions of users! How have you become so successful? Are you planning to grow even further?
By sticking to our principles and building a super smart loyal team. We have a set of cultural principles that everyone in the UK team holds to. Number one is “Love Thy Customer”. Long term growth isn’t really achieved with big marketing budgets or sales forces – it’s showing that you have the user’s interests at heart in every decision you make. Our customers trust us, and find joy in our product.
The BrainPOP player is built in Flash. Are you happy to continue with Flash for the future, or will you be moving over to HTML5?
What’s important to us is being accessible when the learner needs us, whether it’s on a desktop, whiteboard or tablet. PCs have no trouble playing Flash and our apps are on the dominant mobile platforms. Schools employ an crazy amount of different platforms, VLEs, assessment systems etc. HTML5 was only recently ratified and moving our whole operation and content to it is no small undertaking. But we recognise that hardware agnosticism is an important technical aim in the school market.
You work on a subscription model to generate revenue. Do you see this as being a viable model in the UK and elsewhere? What are the challenges you face in keeping the business profitable?
Yes, absolutely. Accessing, storing and buying your content in the cloud is the future. We’ve always been a subscription business and that won’t change anytime soon. The challenge with subscription is to keep the customer motivated as you need to persuade them every year to buy back into your service. Subscription can work if you continually (over)deliver on your promises and show that you’re worthy of their repeat custom. If you get this right, and I think we have, then your customers become your greatest sales asset and this means we can keep our sales and marketing costs down.
You’ve made some of your content available on tablet and smartphone apps. What are the challenges here and what’s your strategy for the future?
I’ve never seen a technology gain such rapid traction as mobile devices in schools. They’re perfectly designed to enable a new type of learning experience and it’s only a matter of time before every school in the UK employs them as regularly as they do laptops or whiteboards. We were one of the first learning companies to make mobile a core part of our content delivery strategy and we’ve seen an incredible response – over 30% of our traffic now comes from mobile. But having an app is not enough. Our challenge (our responsibility?) is to show schools why it supports better learning and better student outcomes.
Kids using BrainPOP on an iPad
Finally, any advice to the smaller, newer edtech startups out there?
Don’t ever forget to appeal to the kids and teachers themselves, as tempting as it is to focus on the tech, systems, data, partnerships, exit strategies etc. The edutech market is in more flux than ever which presents incredible prospects for new ideas. But schools are inundated with new tech opportunities at every turn and they tend to prefer the devil they know.
Schools LOVE free but WILL pay for stuff they find valuable. Set a price from day one.
Give your product away to a school or two and get reaction early on. Visit lots of classrooms and ask for feedback. No one ever learned much from a compliment and teachers are usually very honest.
Create your network, even before you think you might need it – the ever helpful edutwitter crowd can be a great source of support, advice and discovery.
Build up evidence that your product improves learning – find pilot studies and initiatives and get your product into them.
Be prepared to feel like a “start up” for at least 5 years. Classrooms and kids have basically stayed the same since forever and the fundamentals haven’t change. Trying to disrupt 10,000 years of established practice and behaviors is not a challenge for the faint hearted!
Comments are closed.