PART 3: HOW CLEVER POSITIONED THEMSELVES AS THE APPLE APP STORE FOR EDUCATION

In Part Two, I broke down the utility of Clever from school stakeholders: students, teachers, and administrators. In this part, I’m going to explore why EdTech vendors have agreed to develop on Clever.

Again, to summarize the value of Clever: it allows students to access a variety of curated student applications with the same username and password even if they transfer to another school in the same district. The hierarchical database structure makes data transfers very seamless.

Since Clever has captured over half of the U.S. K-12 market, it’s no surprise that prominent investors such as Lightspeed, Sequoia, Founder’s Fund, and GSV have a stake in the company. While Clever offers its product for free to schools, they charge EdTech developers that integrate with Clever $5 to $25 per school per month.

For popular supplemental learning applications like Prodigy, who is in over 1,000 schools, the monthly cost to be accessible through Clever could be around $5,000 - $25,000. And that’s for a single application. Clever currently hosts over 500 different learning applications on their platform.

Currently, Clever acts as the most sophisticated business on the market that makes technology transitions and access seamless. There is the potential that if education technology vendors develop an even more efficient system, they could convince schools to integrate directly with their application. However, it’s most likely too late.

With over 500 learning applications hosted on Clever combined with an efficient database management system from district to district, Clever has developed high switching costs for schools to consider an alternative system. If a vendor isn’t accessible through Clever, schools would have to build an entire system to ensure data is collected properly and students can access the application quickly in a classroom. It’s much easier for schools to only consider applications on Clever, forcing developers to integrate on Clever further pushing Clever’s revenue higher. It’s brilliant.

Apple has the same power through its App Store. They forced developers to develop on iOS because even though the Android market was larger, it was more common for iOS users to spend on mobile applications. Clever has earned this same power, except there isn’t an Android competitor on the market for Clever.

Clever doesn’t take this power for granted, their quality control process ensures that applications that are available on their dashboard are pedagogically sound and results-driven. Clever even allows application trials for Teachers to try out various EdTech products to see if they would be a good fit in the classroom. And I’m not sure if they’re doing it already, but I could imagine that Clever has the opportunity to benchmark student growth data from application to application across similar districts to see which EdTech products are achieving the best results.

There’s a lot of room for Clever to grow, but it’s no surprise that it’s one of the few K-12 unicorns on the market.