Given the recent push for student-centered constructivist activities in the education, it makes sense for school districts to support teachers in this endeavor. School districts around the province have implemented project based learning in K-12 schools. Teachers are keen to participate, but they need help. ConstructWithUs makes it easy for teachers to get started.
The market:
In British Columbia alone, there are 59 public school districts with 1600 English-speaking schools. In the private sector, there are more than 350 schools. This is just one province. It’s easy to expand ConstructWithUs to accommodate other languages, or add learning outcomes from different provinces, even different countries, immediately increasing the size of the market and raising profits.
How to reach the market:
ConstructWithUs has ties to public education in BC and can leverage those connections. Having a presence at Education Fairs and Professional Development conferences will increase visibility. Relationships with Principals and Superintendents can build from word-of-mouth marketing. (Teachers always talk).
The Players:
The buyer of a subscription to ConstructWithUs is a school Principal, or the district Superintendent. The user is the classroom Teacher.
The competition:
At the time of its conception in 2012, there was no competition. As Project Based Learning has grown in popularity, so has the demand for quality project ideas and resources. The Buck Institute has begun to curate project ideas on their website. ePals is an Italian company that provides an e-learning environment for independent learning. They create lesson plans, and have also begun offering project ideas for teachers to purchase. Neither of these companies offer PBL projects satisfying the Canadian curriculum, nor do they offer projects that teachers can easily modify.
Cost structure:
ConstructWithUs offers projects using a subscription model. For the cost of $2000, a school has unlimited access to the entire database of resources for 12 months. The incentive for subscription renewal is that our database is always growing, so teachers will always have access to new ideas and resources.
Using this pricing model, there is a potential annual revenue of $3,200,000 from public schools in BC alone. Project resources will be created by BC certified teachers, contracted at a fixed rate of $1,000 per complete resource package. For this payment, projects are expected to be of the highest quality, satisfying ConstructWithUs standards. Each project resource developed is an asset in our inventory, to be used over and over.
What we need:
An investment of $50,000 will allow us to build our database and web interface ($8000) as well as begin to pay for project packages to populate our database ($42000 / 1000 = 42 complete project packages). With this investment, ConstructWithUs can be ready for business by January 2015.
ConstructWithUs will be able to recoup the investor cost once 25 schools have enrolled. This could be achieved by having just one entire school district subscribe.
What you get:
A partnership with ConstructWithUs is a lucrative investment. ConstructWithUs is open to negotiating the terms of investment return. Investors may choose to offer the $50,000 for 10% of the company as a partnership, giving a valuation of the company of $500,000. Investors may prefer to simply take a negotiated portion of each subscription purchased.
Exit strategy:
ConstructWithUs has a bright future as a multi-million dollar company with a global presence. At that time, ConstructWithUs would be happy to sell the company and the project inventory to a large publisher like McGraw-Hill Ryerson, or Pearson Education for $10,000,000.
Who's in charge? Learn more about Katherine Burden, our Founder and CEO here