Looking for Product and GTM feedback for my Parent / Teacher Reading tool!
Hey all, Oral Reading Fluency is incredibly important for burgeoning readers. It needs to be measured tracked, and if needed, used to justify reading interventions. Currently, teachers do this the old fashioned way, 1-on-1 teacher to student with a "levelled"…
Hey all, Oral Reading Fluency is incredibly important for burgeoning readers. It needs to be measured tracked, and if needed, used to justify reading interventions. Currently, teachers do this the old fashioned way, 1-on-1 teacher to student with a "levelled" reading passage (false precision) and a stopwatch. The accuracy is only as good as the teacher's skill and training. Historically, Automatic Speech Recognition software has been hamstrung by being overly-strict, not understanding children's inflection and pitch, and generally being impersonal. I tried to address this by building my tool which I call Reading Pacer, which allows any parent or teacher to use any physical book (or from our digital library) to quickly and easily run regular, long, or specialized ORF assessments on their own. All the feedback I have received has been positive, but online marketing is not my strong suit. I would like to submit my website for feedback but I think that might be against the sub rules(?) Thank you for reading
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thanks for the reply!
this is a great comment but was it written by ai? totally right about school district sales cycle and that is basically what im trying to do, but still very difficult to sell reading practice because people assume its a school's job.
very good question and the answer is a little squishy. When doing inter rater reliability tests it scored well over 95%. However it still tends to be a bit stricter than a teacher's ear. However, teachers also tend to bias toward not counting certain mistakes. In general I believe it has very solid accuracy. I use two ASRs, one is called rev.ai which is the best "verbatim" transcription in that it was trained on hundreds of thousands of hours oh real transcription from professional transcribers (its often used in legal / law enforcement). The other model I am using is a version of NVIDIA's open source parakeet model, which has shown to have the lowest word error rate on children's speech of any model. If the child register's a correct word on either model, it counts as correct.
good point. I have actually been piloting in a school for the last 6 months and it has been going well, but the school is small (~90 students) and the edtech sales cycles are brutal. Combined with recent budget cuts and anti-edtech sentiment and I am not too optimistic about monetizing this path. However it has been invaluable for building the product and the pilot studies will lend credibility to future sales efforts on or off schools. So at the same time, I have created 2 different spin-offs of the same underlying tech: 1) a direct B2C app marketed toward parents / home schoolers that allows the child to practice at home without parent hovering, with minimal gamification like unlockable avatars and streaks (detailed reports sent to parents inbox). 2) A tutor facing version that can be marketed to private tutors to help them streamline and improve parent communication / value add.
great idea about the demo video, I really need to do this. I am currently piloting in my wife's classroom and with the progress monitoring department. Also good point about making it frictionless. I believe it is pretty well optimized but I'm always looking for further feedback. If you are open to testing it I would happily give you access. One issue with schools is that I believe this can only really be used for formative (practice), not official RTI type classification. Because its an automated ASR there is an equity issue because minorities tend to be underrepresented in the training data on the ASRs. In reality, I believe it would be a helpful tool for teachers and students of all backgrounds despite some limitations
you are 100% right on the money. I've been working on this project for over 6 months (mostly building and piloting in my wife's classroom), but the last 1-2 months I've been done building and just marketing. For context, my wife has a PhD in education and teaches at a "precision education" private / non-profit (mostly non-profit, its complicated). Her students are all very far behind and mostly RTI tier 2 kids. Many are autistic, dyslexic, have speech and/or behavioral issues. In many ways its the perfectly challenged cohort for my purposes. I have joined all the dyslexia / homeschool / ADHD / parents groups I could find on facebook and have gotten some genuinely good traction by posting high content articles (the best performing one is a state by state map detailing the exact third grade retention policies re: reading for each state). On good posts like this I will get a good 300-500 traffic to my website and sometimes ~10-20 people who sign up for the free scan. However these communities and posts are hit or miss because all the mods are rightfully protective of their communities. I have also reached out to many tutors and got some teachers who have signed up for the free teacher pilot program. I have also cold emailed some 30 tutors in the local area but have received very little response. I do believe I need to work harder in this regard, go to conferences and find more teachers to talk to one-on-one. However even with my fortunate situation (my wife as a teacher, good relationship with admin who are saying they will help with distribution however they can) I find it incredibly difficult and discouraging - it kind of seems like I am just banging my head against the wall, even though I am heartened every time a random stranger runs a free scan. So in other words, I have learned the long way exactly what you are describing here, I believe it is exactly the right strategy, but I don't feel like I have been having enough success. I have not spent anything on ads, just trying to grow my instagram and post on facebook (subreddits have not been positive for marketing). The other question is pricing. Currently I have much of the functionality, maybe 60-80% as free, in order to get the most people interested in trying it (its still hard because due to COPPA I need to ask for their email address, send a link to them... its not 1-click and I lose people in the funnel. I had thought maybe charging $7/mo for a subscription, but only got one interested person :( So I have changed it to $29 for a 12 weeks "set" which will provide enough data for the app to collate all the individual reports and produce and "AI Deep Dive" where the AI analyzes all the mistakes and patterns to come up with science of reading based hypotheses and interventions. Thank you for your comment, I appreciate the time it took for you to write it all out. If you have further feedback for me I am very open to hearing it, feel free to chat me if interested.
The stopwatch and levelled passage detail is the part that sells this, keep leading with it. Two things I'd check early: teachers rarely control budget, so a district sale has a 6 to 12 month cycle and a pilot before any money moves. Parents pay next week. I'd build for the teacher, charge the parent, and use classroom usage as your proof when you eventually walk into a district. Also, whatever your ASR word-error rate is on actual kid speech, publish it, because that number is the whole objection.
good point. I have actually been piloting in a school for the last 6 months and it has been going well, but the school is small (~90 students) and the edtech sales cycles are brutal. Combined with recent budget cuts and anti-edtech sentiment and I am not too optimistic about monetizing this path. However it has been invaluable for building the product and the pilot studies will lend credibility to future sales efforts on or off schools. So at the same time, I have created 2 different spin-offs of the same underlying tech: 1) a direct B2C app marketed toward parents / home schoolers that allows the child to practice at home without parent hovering, with minimal gamification like unlockable avatars and streaks (detailed reports sent to parents inbox). 2) A tutor facing version that can be marketed to private tutors to help them streamline and improve parent communication / value add.
you are 100% right on the money. I've been working on this project for over 6 months (mostly building and piloting in my wife's classroom), but the last 1-2 months I've been done building and just marketing. For context, my wife has a PhD in education and teaches at a "precision education" private / non-profit (mostly non-profit, its complicated). Her students are all very far behind and mostly RTI tier 2 kids. Many are autistic, dyslexic, have speech and/or behavioral issues. In many ways its the perfectly challenged cohort for my purposes. I have joined all the dyslexia / homeschool / ADHD / parents groups I could find on facebook and have gotten some genuinely good traction by posting high content articles (the best performing one is a state by state map detailing the exact third grade retention policies re: reading for each state). On good posts like this I will get a good 300-500 traffic to my website and sometimes ~10-20 people who sign up for the free scan. However these communities and posts are hit or miss because all the mods are rightfully protective of their communities. I have also reached out to many tutors and got some teachers who have signed up for the free teacher pilot program. I have also cold emailed some 30 tutors in the local area but have received very little response. I do believe I need to work harder in this regard, go to conferences and find more teachers to talk to one-on-one. However even with my fortunate situation (my wife as a teacher, good relationship with admin who are saying they will help with distribution however they can) I find it incredibly difficult and discouraging - it kind of seems like I am just banging my head against the wall, even though I am heartened every time a random stranger runs a free scan. So in other words, I have learned the long way exactly what you are describing here, I believe it is exactly the right strategy, but I don't feel like I have been having enough success. I have not spent anything on ads, just trying to grow my instagram and post on facebook (subreddits have not been positive for marketing). The other question is pricing. Currently I have much of the functionality, maybe 60-80% as free, in order to get the most people interested in trying it (its still hard because due to COPPA I need to ask for their email address, send a link to them... its not 1-click and I lose people in the funnel. I had thought maybe charging $7/mo for a subscription, but only got one interested person :( So I have changed it to $29 for a 12 weeks "set" which will provide enough data for the app to collate all the individual reports and produce and "AI Deep Dive" where the AI analyzes all the mistakes and patterns to come up with science of reading based hypotheses and interventions. Thank you for your comment, I appreciate the time it took for you to write it all out. If you have further feedback for me I am very open to hearing it, feel free to chat me if interested.
the two comments about positioning are right but they skip past the actual question you asked, which is where do you find people, not just what do you say to them once you found them. teachers as a channel are slow like the other commenter said, district budgets and long approval cycles, so if you want traction soon id go around them not through them. id go straight at parents of kids whove already been flagged as struggling readers or are getting some kind of intervention, not general parents of any kid. A parent whos already been told by a school "your kid is behind on reading" is actively anxious and searching for anything that helps, versus a parent of an on track reader who has zero urgency to try a new tool. that group hangs out in pretty specific places, dyslexia parent facebook groups, homeschool communities (alot of homeschool parents are doing exactly the 1 on 1 reading assessments you described by hand already), and forums for specific reading intervention approaches. those are small but very high intent audiences compared to posting broadly to "parents." reading specialists and tutors specifically (not just classroom teachers) might also be a faster wedge than either parents or teachers, since they see multiple kids and would notice the time savings immediately, and if a few of them start using it with their private clients that becomes some of the case study proof the other commenter mentioned you need before ever walking into a school district.
The core idea is solid. The biggest risk is distribution. Teachers are overloaded and skeptical. The tool has to be frictionless. If it's more than two clicks from opening to result, it's too many. Target Title I schools with mandated reading programs. A pilot with one school is your best bet. Create a simple demo video and share it in teacher communities.
positive feedback is not a product market fit. the real test is whether teachers or schools adopt and pay. focus less on online marketing, more on who decided, individuals or districts, once clear, your marketing simplifies because you know exactly who to reach and waht problem to solve.
How accurate is it though?
I'd spend less time convincing people the tech works and more time proving it saves them time or improves outcomes. Teachers already have too many tools, so the pitch has to be "this saves me 10 minutes per student" not "our speech recognition is better."
really thankful for all the positive comments in this thread
Wow OP this is amazing I love the idea 🤯