Two years after bartleby launched, they began exploring additional growth opportunities outside of subscriptions sold to students. The parent company at the time had several strong relationships with learning software vendors and universities. One potential opportunity for growth was to offer the product to university students through a learning software vendor.
Insights
The was a growing opportunity to reach university students through this vendor. The number of students accessing their textbooks through this vendor was growing because more students were choosing digital textbooks over physical ones due to their lower cost and the increasingly tech-savvy nature of students.
At the time, bartleby had rapidly grown to over 150k subscribers, so product desirability was mostly de-risked.
When students opened their digital textbook through the vendor, third-party tools could be displayed alongside the textbook and provide specific help to students.
We discovered that we need to comply with the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standards in order to connect and deliver our product through the vendor.
Experiment
Ebook Prototype Example
The broad hypothesis was that if we built a POC where students could use bartleby alongside their digital textbook, they would use it. For this to be true, we needed a university partner, become LTI compliant, and modify the bartleby’s user experience to accommodate the smaller display window and limited navigation.
What we did:
Found a university willing to partner with us to pilot the experience.
Developed the necessary authentication and data needs for the LTI standard so we could communicate with the vendor’s software and allow students to use bartleby.
Removed the complexity of signing-up and signing-in by providing free access to bartleby through the vendor’s software. This let us focus on validating that students could and would use bartleby, before figuring a monetization strategy with the vendor.
To simplify the POC and accommodate limitations of the container window, we displayed our mobile responsive site without navigation and provided access only to the Q&A feature.
Results
The pilot was successful with over 700 students using the POC from one university in the first 30 days and receiving a customer satisfaction score of over 60%. The pilot allowed us to validate the feasibility and usability risks associated with the initiative. Some early learnings also included the need for better messaging and easier access to previously answered questions.
Takeaway
The pilot provided positive signals to onboard 7 more universities, allocate more resources to the initiative internally, and solidify the partnership with the vendor.
