How Innovare (StartEd '18) Refined Their Messaging
In November 2021, StartEd CEO and Co-founder Ash Kaluarachchi spoke with brothers AJ and Fernando DeLeòn, Co-founders of Innovare - Social Innovation Partners, Inc. ― a data and strategic planning platform for K-12 organizations. They are also 2019 StartEd alumni.
While working for districts and the Gates Foundation earlier in his career, AJ found that education leaders lacked the data and the tools to make the best decisions. So, he founded Innovare (which means to change, to reform, to innovate in Latin) to bring data from disparate systems into one dashboard and help leaders use the unified data to develop and oversee their strategic plans. Innovare knows that by empowering leaders with the right information to make smarter decisions, they can make a bigger impact on teachers and students.
As they worked to grow Innovare, AJ and Fernando found it challenging to explain their product to different audiences, despite having happy clients and great metrics. In this post, they share some insights from their experience in testing and honing Innovare’s messaging over the past couple of years.
Testing Innovare’s messaging with StartEd’s guidance
AJ DeLeon:
When my brother and I did StartEd’s Hyper Accelerator [now Immersion] program, the experience really helped us refine our messaging and focus on how we talked about our product, which has led to our continuous growth and our recent successful $3M seed raise.
During the program, we were staying up at night working on the one-liner and our 90-second pitch script. We were determined to hone in on our messaging. People kept asking us, “Why don't you guys do X?" or “Who do you work with?” We knew our work was good and that our clients really liked our work, but we now had concrete evidence that we couldn’t describe it properly, so, as data guys, we knew we wanted to change that.
We had a lot of really great metrics, but we felt like we were getting stuck on the one-liner and how we talked about ourselves. I remember a session on this at StartEd, and it was really instructive for us. My brother and I got to test our one-liner out, and then in the middle of the day, we iterated it. I told my brother, “Let's have you say this to the people you talk with today, and I’ll say this to the people I talk to. We’ll do some live A/B testing.” We started tweaking the one-liner, whether we should talk about the data features of our product more or the strategic planning or whether we should use the term “continuous improvement.”
Later, we hired a PR firm and worked with several marketing consultants. I also attended a lot of marketing sessions sponsored by StartEd and others. Long story short, we eventually arrived at a message: We are the only data and strategic planning application that every education leader needs to make good decisions, save time, and impact the people they serve. In short, we are an intelligence platform for education leaders. We now had a clearer message.
Once we started using this new messaging on our digital marketing platforms, we started noticing the traction right away both from a client standpoint and from an investor standpoint ― especially the big check investors. They were very excited when they saw that we were working with not just schools but also school supervisors, education nonprofit executives and philanthropists. They saw the market size expand.
Having a marketing focus was critical to our growth. We're still growing, and we're still focusing a lot on marketing. We're using the money that we raised to continue to tell the story of how we impact students by empowering education leaders with the tools they need to be effective at their jobs.
Leaning on personas to focus your messaging
Fernando DeLeon:
It was very difficult to stay true to what we wanted to do because we had different audiences that understood different parts of the pitch. We would talk to some leaders that really wanted to talk about the data piece of the work we did. Other leaders wanted to talk about the strategy part of the work. It was really hard to find the people that wanted to talk about both things together. We felt like there was sort of this shift coming with people thinking about continuous improvement and how data could drive strategy and empower them to drive the process. It was a relatively new concept at that time.
Investors didn't quite understand our process and how we wanted to stay connected to the customers and then help the customers overcome some of the challenges of implementing a change in culture at their school district or within their school. Investors wondered, “Why are you spending time onboarding them and integrating all these systems? That's not scalable.” We explained that we have to do that because otherwise they won't sign on the dotted line. We're not just another app that will hand over a product, leave, and not be invested in their success.
So it was really hard for us to really find that single pitch that connected with everybody. I think what we realized is that we just had to be true to ourselves and say, “People are going to understand different parts of it, and we just have to make sure that we understand how to connect with the right audience and have the right messaging for each of them while still staying true to what we want to do eventually as a company.” I think that we found the right language to talk to each of our different target audiences.
Instead of leading with what we do, we had to understand who we were talking to first. Based on that, we adjusted our language. We would ask them some questions, and that would allow us to say, “Ok, they want to talk more about this or they want to talk more about that.” So for us, that's been the challenge. And I think that we're still evolving on that. We're still trying to get better. If we were to go back and give ourselves some advice, it would be that instead of trying to sell to everybody, hone in on the personas that you're trying to sell to and focus on the right messaging for each particular persona. From there, you'll be able to build on everything else.
I think that was a challenge. Initially, we want to sell to everybody. We wanted to tell everyone about what we did. We wanted to make sure that our product was everywhere. However, I think we realized that we really had to narrow down our focus. We're better than we were before, but we haven't gotten to the point where we’re perfect at doing it.
Focusing on impact
AJ DeLeon:
What I will add is that, and I say this humbly, but when you're creating something that doesn't exist, it's hard to describe it to people. When Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, nobody knew what a social network was, and now everybody knows. When you're creating something that's new, that's innovative, maybe people don't understand it because it doesn't exist yet. You're the first person to actually create it. Everybody wants to put you in a box: “Oh, you're a data company,” or “You're like this company.” To my brother's point, stay true to your vision, be bold, and remember to focus on the impact you have on your customer.
We started talking more about how we will help customers do this and do that. And they understand. Investors all have their own language as well. So if you speak to our lead investor, he might describe us as a data analytics platform and an OKR system for the public sector. That's how he understands our work, and that's ok. He put in $1.5 million behind us. But when you talk to another investor who has more of an education background, he describes us as a continuous improvement suite. Or other people, they just say, “Big data.” Our other investor, she says, “they’re the data people for education.”
What we realized is they are going to understand what they want to understand. But at the end of the day, what they understand is that we have a data and strategic planning tool that impacts education. Everyone agrees on that. We work with leaders, and we leverage data to help leaders get better at what they do. And everybody understands that now, and that has become a very important way to think about it from a tactical perspective.
Taking a series of small steps in the right direction
AJ DeLeon:
As far as when most people started getting the messaging, I think it took us over a year and a half, to be honest. The StartEd program ignited it, and then we just kept at it.
What I think also helped us is when we started talking to investors because we knew we had to be very clear. Those calls are very short. When we had to describe ourselves and what we did, we relied on our advisors. We went to our advisors and told them, “We're having this big problem. Help us!” One advisor helped me draft the problem slide on the deck. The way he wrote it was that leaders need data analytics and strategic planning tools to impact students. I said, “That's it!” Literally, the next day I developed our new mission statement and updated our social media profile bios with our new messaging.
Also, people liked what we did, but they were saying, “I understand you work with the leaders, but I don't see how you impact students.” The word ‘students’ was not previously mentioned in our marketing. Because we work with the leaders, we know they impact the teachers, and then the teachers impact the students, but it wasn't clear to others. People said, “Well, I still don't see it. How is that going to trickle down?” So we actually had to put that in our mission statement to remind our audiences who our ultimate beneficiaries are: the kids.
So now we say: We're the only data and strategic application planning application that today's education leaders need to impact students and communities. We're very, very clear on who is the impacting party and who are the beneficiaries.
Bottom line: different people still have their own way of understanding our work and expressing it differently, but we have arrived at a clearer message that is intelligible to all. If you ask Ash at StartEd or my brother or one of our investors what we do, they're all going to paraphrase what we do in different ways, and that’s ok, but they will tell you that we have built a great company and platform that impacts education.