5X Growth in 8 Months: How Customer Research Transformed a UK EdTech Startup

What happens when an educational startup needs to show growth rates typical for SaaS companies?

In early 2023, MyEdSpace faced an unusual challenge: competing with SaaS companies for venture capital rather than other schools for students. Post pre-seed funding, they needed to show strong growth rates to secure the next round. With 1,200 students after 14 months, MyEdSpace had limited reach - one subject (Math), one marketing funnel with rising costs, and a small junior team at London salary rates.

Time for Change

The founders knew they couldn't achieve this growth while managing everything themselves - from tech and legal to marketing and sales. They hired a Head of Growth to build the marketing and sales department, and I joined as Head of Marketing Communications.

Getting Senior Talent at Junior Rates

Our first challenge was building a capable team while managing costs. Breaking from the practice of hiring local junior staff, we recruited senior professionals from Poland, Ukraine and South Africa—all at London junior rates.

The results were immediate: monthly ad creative production jumped from 8 to over 30 assets, and we revamped landing pages across the direct funnel.

This is what the hero section of the direct funnel landing page looked like before.

We changed approach to UX and UI, and moved from Shopify to Webflow.

This helped us finally halt the steady rise in acquisition costs.

With a dedicated team now handling marketing and sales, the founders could focus on product—leading to the launch of two new subjects, Biology and Chemistry, which expanded company’s market reach.

The Real Issue

Despite our operational improvements, I realized that the real challenge was the positioning. Our entire value proposition centered on price - '£5 per hour lessons with world-class teachers.' This created two limitations:

• First, focusing solely on affordability put us in an endless race to the bottom, competing with cheaper and freemium alternatives. We couldn't go higher without risking our price-sensitive customer base.
• Second, our message missed potential customers who valued quality over price. Even after stabilizing our marketing costs, they remained high - a clear sign that we needed to move beyond competing on price alone.

We needed a positioning that would attract a broader audience while keeping our existing students - something more compelling than just being the affordable option.

Learning from Our Customers

I conducted a comprehensive analysis of 9 online schools—our closest competitors—across 50 parameters, from marketing messages and sales response times to guarantees and product features.

But the most valuable insights came from our customers.

Parent research revealed busy professionals trying to keep up with their children's education. With limited time to help directly, they sought peace of mind about learning effectiveness, with even the most price-sensitive parents valuing engaging experience over costs.

Parent Interview. The lady was happy to talk—during her only break.

Student research uncovered another insight. They weren't just kids doing extra classes because their parents wanted them to—but mature learners with clear goals and long-term plans. They wanted guidance and a sense of community that their regular schools often couldn't provide.

This exposed a clear gap in the market. While competitors focused on exam 'high-stakes', our families wanted stress-free learning that made complex topics fun. Both parents and students valued enjoyable, confidence-building education over lower prices.

The Strategic Shift

Armed with these insights, I facilitated a strategy session with MyEdSpace's founders and team leaders, focusing on three questions:

• What do our customers truly want? (detailed analysis of student and parent needs)
• What does the market offer? (the bottom-line of market research)
• What can MyEdSpace uniquely provide? (beyond just affordable pricing)

The session revealed an unclaimed space in the market.

Instead of competing on price or amplifying exam pressure like our competitors, we positioned MyEdSpace as ‘the most engaging and affordable online school in the UK, led by superstar teachers.’ We kept the accessibility message but emphasized what actually mattered to our customers - engaging learning experiences.

A Miro board full of ideas from our strategy session that reshaped the vision for the company.

Implementation

Having an experienced team already in place proved crucial - we could implement our new strategy immediately after the session. This quick execution helped maintain stakeholder confidence as we rolled out changes across several areas.

We focused on three key growth areas:

Improving Existing Funnel

We knew our main funnel had potential but needed optimization. Through systematic A/B testing of 16 different landing page versions, we increased conversion rates by at least 17% across all subjects. We also created specialized landing pages for TikTok traffic, which performed 9% better than standard pages.

Our ad strategy evolved too. We expanded beyond simple videos with teachers to include podcast-style clips and mock street interviews, which reduced our cost per click. Adding static ads alongside videos let us test messages quickly and cost-effectively - some even outperformed our video content.

Building Organic Reach

As we positioned our teachers as superstars, we took growing their social media presence seriously. Our Head of Math’s following grew from over 1,2M to 2M across platforms, while Heads of Biology and Chemistry built audiences of 100,000 and 65,000 followers respectively—from scratch—all through organic content.

Our Head of Math Instagram page performance.

Creating New Funnels

Understanding that no single funnel stays effective forever, we launched three new ones to reach different audience segments:

Platform Demo Webinar targeted warm leads who hadn't converted. By comparing MyEdSpace's offering with traditionally overpriced private tutoring, we demonstrated our platform's multiple advantages without focusing on price too much. The webinar became a reliable conversion tool, generating positive returns from its first runs.

Here are some of the slides from the webinar:

Our lead magnet, 'Ultimate Guide for Parents: How to Prepare Your Child for Maths Exams Without Stress and Overpaying,' addressed a key pain point we discovered in our research. We created it by combining our Head of Maths' best webinar content with some new PDFs and existing video resources. The funnel proved efficient quickly, occasionally delivering lower acquisition costs than the direct one.

This is what the hero section of the lead magnet funnel landing page looked like (СR ~30%)

Recognizing that many potential clients lived in London, we launched a tube advertising campaign timed for Easter Revision: created memorable artwork and a dedicated landing page to track conversions. The campaign exceeded enrollment targets, and the artwork, landing page and messaging framework were used as templates for subsequent tube advertising campaigns.

Easter Revision tube campaign artwork.

Summer School campaign artwork.

Eight Months Later. The Numbers

Our new approach and rapid implementation delivered clear results:

• 5x growth in student numbers
• 176% decrease in CPL
• 2x increase in website traffic
• Launch of two new subjects

The next round investment was secured.

Key Insights

If you are a Growth Leader facing similar challenges, consider these:

• Price isn't always everything - even cost-conscious customers will pay more for peace of mind when it's communicated in the right time and language.
• Limited hiring budgets? Consider senior talent from overseas markets. Without a team in place before transformation, you risk losing crucial momentum after strategy sessions.
• Don't put too much hope in the "one perfect campaign that will instantly fix your acquisition costs." Digital marketing for startups is all about testing multiple approaches quickly and making improvements bit by bit.

Most importantly: sometimes, the path to growth is simply about breaking from industry norms and embracing what makes your company unique. If you're looking to create your own success story, let's connect and discuss how we can make it happen.