How to Overcome the Chicken Egg Problem in Data Collection for EdTech Connect

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our seasons of interviews and a series of interviews with Jeff Dillon with EdTech Connect. In this episode, we are going to dive into how you take something where you don't have all the data you need and find ways to start getting that data together. Talk a little bit about getting to that point where you have enough data, enough content to draw people. But of course, since you have to have a certain amount of content to have that draw, you run into a little bit of a chicken egg problem. You need the content for them to come, but you need them to contribute in order to build the content in some cases. This happens to be one of those. We're going to talk to Jeff about that and finding ways to enlist verified sources essentially as part of your product, as part of your solution. Let's get back to our conversation. As you got into this, you've probably had, I mean, obviously you've been around this enough, so you probably had some starting points for EdTech Connect as far as here's some things that we can do to guide visitors to sort of help them maybe craft their search, to help them know what they don't know in a sense of maybe some suggestions of if you're looking for this, here's maybe some things that you may consider to differentiate the products or some essentially some search terms or some key words that you can check a box or something like that to basically say, yes, I want to restrict based on that. How much, I've got a second question I want to make sure I get to so I don't forget that one, but how much of the last, since you started this, how much of that are you feeding back into the system and sort of looking at how people are searching, getting their results and maybe even feedback from them on how they've used your site to be able to then turn around and adjust how you present the site and more, I guess, more specifically the data that you have to help the next person that comes in with that search? Yeah, we're still pretty new. We haven't done too much of that analytic kind of view. We are really leveraging the crowdsourced aspect of this, which I think is going to be in the long run a really, we're really trying to make the platform as flexible as we can. So if a higher ed user, verified higher ed user wants to be a contributor, they can help us with the tagging of the topics and the products. And so, anyone who wants to in higher ed can help with that. And so that's really helped us keep up with how are we finding these different solutions, but to go back and look at maybe the patterns of the usage of the site, we haven't really gone too much into that yet. It's been such a in growth mode. Let's get as many people to sign up and make sure we have all the products listed. We're adding, we have over 700 listings now, which means software titles. Whereas I think in March we had just, March is when we kind of went live, about half that, maybe a little less. So the adding software is slowing down, but we really need to add, have more users sign up. And so far it's been not too many comments about like, I'm not able to find something, but yeah, we need to dig into that data. We haven't done too much of that yet. So that actually, that's the other question I wanted to ask is how as these products are being added, and this is sort of a two-parter, I guess, is what is that process for adding a product? And then you talked about vendors being able to claim their page. Is there a, for like a better term, like a vetting process that you go through or some sort of review that you go through? Because I'm assuming there's some level of a vendor telling their own story, but how much is it you also making sure that it's not just pure sales and marketing? Yeah, on the expert side, which is a higher ed user, we call them experts, any expert can sign up. If they add a piece of software we don't have in the database, which it hasn't been vetted, another expert has to approve it. So another expert goes in and directly goes to the website. It's a pretty, not super formal, but we go to the website and see if they even have a higher ed content on their page, if they even have a web page, if it's at all legit. And if we can, often if we don't see any mention of higher ed on the page, they don't get in. That's kind of one of the rules is they have to prove they're a higher ed vendor. They could come back and say, you know, we're an emerging higher ed vendor, here's this and this. And yeah, we've done a couple of those, but there's a lot of, a company can find us and claim their page directly. And that means that no higher ed user has looked at it. So then a higher ed user has to look at it, go do the same thing and then make sure they're classifying their software properly. And then we will add them. We probably declined 20% of the listings that try to get claimed or try to get added because they're not higher ed. So they don't have to be full higher ed. I mean, Microsoft Teams is higher ed. I mean, their percentage is tiny, but they are higher ed. That brings up a good question. Do you, within your products, trying to figure out how to phrase this question, do you include references and ability to look for those like Microsoft and all the big players do this that have higher ed specific offerings? So if I'm an administrator on a campus and I'm evaluating and say email tools or email offerings, and it's one thing that I can go look at the general Microsoft Office 365 stuff, but they have, I'm sure you know, they have a whole different education portal. And a lot of vendors have that kind of stuff where you have their general site, but they have specialties for government, for education, for nonprofit. Is that part of that vetting process? Do you sort of direct and funnel your users to say, hey, you don't want to go to the homepage. This is where you need to go to get really the higher ed focused products from this vendor. Yeah, that's a tough one because we've thought of that, like, can we add a field that said, do you have .edu pricing or .edu programs? And everyone just checks yes and they don't really have it. So they have the control to kind of have a link. And so we always encourage the vendors, make sure you link to your higher ed page. This is higher ed wants to feel special and make sure that the use cases are for them. And so we don't have a real data set or a way to standardize that across all of them because a lot of times it is just one product that can be multi-purposed. And if it's a vendor that their primary audience is higher ed, the whole site is devoted, their company is devoted to higher ed and they might have secondary markets. They just don't fit into that model either. And that's probably half our products is higher ed is the primary audience, if not the entire audience, if not more. When you get into our security category, there's very few that are just security for higher ed. Higher ed is just one of the markets. We have to do a little more vetting there. But yeah, we don't have a, it's tough. That's a great question. I wish we could, the first thing I've been asked is like, can we just have a .edu pricing? But they're all just saying yes. And then it's hard to vet that. So is that part of the, how are those conversations? I wonder, is it, are vendors typically understanding of what your goals are and working with you or do you find more often, or maybe it's a mix of where the vendors really just, they see you as yet another advertising platform, a place they can get their name out. And they're more, they're going to be quicker to just say, oh yeah, we can do all that as opposed to working with you and understand that, hey, this is our target market. These are the people that we're working with. And we really need you to be, you know, to understand these, this customer base and these are the people we're sending you. It's been pretty clear that the more focused the vendor is on higher ed, the more excited they are about our platform. You know, and some, I can't quite tell when we look at the site, we're like, how they look, they're good. Let's talk to this company, but they're not really higher ed. They're not super into the platform either, because we are completely higher ed. And so, but the ones that are, they're in immediately. I mean, the names, you know, they get it because they've been looking for this. Where can they tell their story? The big rating platforms, software rating platforms are really, like you say, are really tough to navigate. And there isn't, there is a higher ed category, but it's not as, not as clear. So it's, yeah, I would say most of the time we don't really, we don't really focus on the vendors. We're building a tool for the experts, for the higher ed community. The vendors are coming to us, basically. So when they come to us, we, you know, often if it's, we're not quite clear what they're doing, we'll have those conversations. But often we just say, you know, we don't see anything about higher ed on your site. Is there anything we're missing here? Yeah. And to be clear, you're, when you talk about your higher, your customers, your visitors, this is, it's like administrators and educational professionals, right? You're not, you're really not even looking at students. It's more, because it's more the purchasers at a university or at a campus level, as opposed to individual, right? You know, I'm thinking like a lot of times you'll have places, you'll have like Apple, you can be a student. And if you go in with a, you know, .edu email address, you can get some student pricing and that, but it's really not, it's really, it's more of a mass market kind of thing. It's just, oh, by the way, and if your student will give you this, you're really at a level higher than that, right? That's true. If a student discovers our site, since they do have .edu email address, they do, they can log in. We do create an experience for them because there are a couple of use cases where, you know, Canvas has a very strong brand as an LMS. It might be very valuable to know like, how do you feel about your LMS? So they can, they can go through the process, but we do not target them at all. We don't, they don't put their job title in, they can put up a resume and then we can connect them with an employer possibly, but we only have about 1% of our users that are students. So you're right on with that. And so then that's also with, because you're this kind of a site, I assume you have some sort of ability to provide feedback and reviews. Is that only with registered members as well? Right. Yeah. Any higher ed user can do, it's all free. It's always free for higher ed. You don't have to go through your university. You just sign up. And then yes, you can rate and review any, any software in the database. Okay. So that, but that does at least give you that a little protection against, you know, bots and stuff like that, where people just go in and sign up, you know, get a quick, get a quick account. And then it's like, there are some types of get it where they're really good as good as anybody else's, where you at least have something you say, hey, this is such and such a person, or this is a person with this, this size organization, this type of organization, this type of role. Yeah. We guarantee they're higher end. The other thing is we can't, we don't pay anyone. We're all volunteering. So we've created a critical, pretty nice fun gamification system so you can earn badges by participating and adding software and doing ratings. So that seems to work, but you know, it's tough to give people to devote time to do a lot. I mean, we ask our users to give us a profile, tell us what software they have, they're using, tell us what skills they have, because we like to collaborate based on skill sets. And so at the very end, like, can you please rate and review some software? So we lose some along the way. We're trying to kind of make sure, try to get as many of those going as we can. But yeah, the gamification helps too. And we don't pay by gift cards like a lot of those places can. Well, some of those, it's, I mean, you're at that growth stage that sometimes you have to get to a certain level where you've got, if it's at initial growth, you got to get to a certain point where it's really valuable to everybody, but then you got to get enough people in there to make it valuable to everybody. So it's a little bit of a chicken and egg, but if you can at least, get it moving forward, then it, the information you provide is its own reward at that point where it's, you know, Hey, I'm, I got to go look for this product and go to the site. I can get what I need. And hopefully they, they appreciate it enough that they've, they give back by providing reviews and input of, of their journey so that it can help the next person that comes through. Exactly. And that will do it for part three. Hopefully you've learned a little bit about what goes on inside some of these sites, these recommendation sites and building them that it doesn't just show up. It's not like you just say, Hey, I'm going to do this site and boom, you've got all this data or it's all out there. You have to go gather it. You have to vet it. You have to provide an interface for your users to give feedback. And it's going to take some time. It takes time and patience and effort. As Jeff mentioned, that's part of what he was hoping to get from moving over into retirement, being able to focus on this full time to see EdTech Connect really grow and become a much more valuable tool to the users. And we will come back and finish up our conversation with him in the next episode, talk with him a little bit more about this community he's built, these products that he's worked on, and maybe a little bit about the next steps as well. For now, we'll let you get back to your day. So go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noor podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoor.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. Hi, this is Rob from Building Better Developers, the Developer Noor podcast. We're excited to be on Alexa now. You can enable us by simply saying, Alexa, enable Building Better Developers, and we will be there ready for you every time you want to listen to your now favorite podcast. Whether we are your favorite podcast or not, we would love to hear from you. So please leave a review on Amazon.