Last week, we signed our tenth district partner. I want to talk about what the first ten taught us — not about our product, but about what it actually takes to sell into K-12 and build something districts will use.
I've been in education partnerships for eight years, and nothing in my career prepared me for the specific combination of urgency and patience that K-12 procurement demands. Districts need help yesterday, but the process of getting that help approved can take six months. If you can't hold both of those truths at the same time, you're not going to make it in this market.
District Number One: Baldwin County Schools, Alabama
Baldwin County Schools was our first signed district, and the story of how that happened says everything about what matters in this work.
We didn't win Baldwin County with a product demo. Their Director of Technology, Mark Lassiter, had seen plenty of demos from plenty of vendors. What got us in the door was a 40-minute phone call where Alex — our CEO — talked about his time working in a district office. Alex had spent years watching data coordinators pull the same attendance reports from the same systems into the same spreadsheets every single week. He understood the problem not because he'd studied it from the outside, but because he'd lived it.
Mark's reaction was immediate: "The problem isn't data — it's that nobody can get to the data fast enough." That sentence became something we repeated internally for months. It reframed everything. Districts aren't short on data. They're drowning in it. What they lack is the ability to get the right number in front of the right person at the right time without a three-day turnaround.
Baldwin County signed in April 2025. They remain one of our most engaged partners, and Mark's team has shaped more product decisions than they probably realize.
Pattern 1: Districts Don't Buy Tools — They Buy Trust
Every single one of our first ten deals started the same way. Before anyone asked about features, dashboards, or integrations, they asked about data privacy. Where is the data stored? Who has access? What does your Data Privacy Agreement look like? Are you FERPA-compliant? SOC 2? Have you worked with our state's student data privacy laws?
This isn't a checkbox exercise. District technology directors have been burned — by vendors who stored data in ways that violated state law, by startups that folded and left student records in limbo, by companies that changed their privacy policies after contracts were signed. The skepticism is earned.
We learned to lead with our DPA, not our demo. When a district asks about data privacy first, that's not an obstacle — it's a sign that they take this seriously and they're looking for a vendor who does too.
Pattern 2: K-12 Procurement Is Nothing Like SaaS
If you come from the B2B SaaS world, the K-12 sales cycle will humble you. There is no "sign up and start a free trial." There is no self-serve pricing page. There is a process, and that process exists for good reason — these are public institutions spending taxpayer money to serve children.
Here's what the average deal looked like across our first ten districts:
- Weeks 1-3: Initial conversations. Discovery calls. Understanding the district's specific data landscape — which SIS, which assessment platforms, which state reporting requirements.
- Weeks 4-8: Data privacy review. Legal review of the DPA. In some states, this involves the district's attorney, the state privacy office, and our legal team going back and forth on specific clauses.
- Weeks 8-12: Pilot scoping. What does a proof of concept look like? Which schools? Which data sources? Who's the point of contact?
- Weeks 12-16: Board approval. In most districts, any new technology purchase above a certain threshold requires school board approval. That means getting on the agenda, preparing a presentation, answering questions from board members, and hoping the vote falls your way.
Average time from first call to signed contract: four months. Our fastest deal was seven weeks (Millington, TN — they had an urgent state reporting deadline and an unusually streamlined approval process). Our longest was five and a half months.
Patience isn't optional in this market. It's a core competency.
Pattern 3: Listen to the Data Coordinators
Superintendents set the vision. Technology directors evaluate the platform. But the people who know exactly where every system breaks, where the data doesn't match, and which reports take three days when they should take three minutes — those are the data coordinators.
In seven of our first ten districts, the most valuable feedback we received came from someone whose title included the words "data coordinator," "data specialist," or "data manager." These are the people who live in the gap between what the systems are supposed to do and what they actually do. They know which fields don't sync between the SIS and the assessment platform. They know which reports the state changed the format on last year. They know the workaround for every broken integration.
We started scheduling dedicated sessions with data coordinators during the pilot phase — not to demo, but to listen. Those sessions reshaped our integration architecture, our error handling, and our reporting defaults more than any other input we received.
Pattern 4: Show Them Their Own Data
This was the single biggest shift in our sales process, and it came from a failed demo in our third month.
We were presenting to Elk Grove Unified in California — a large district, over 60,000 students — and we showed them a demo environment with sample data. Polished charts. Clean numbers. The presentation went fine. The response was polite. And then the Director of Assessment asked: "What would this look like with our data?"
We didn't have a good answer.
After that meeting, we built what we now call a "data audit" into our sales process. Before the formal demo, we connect to a district's actual systems — with their permission and under a signed DPA — and show them what they'd see on day one. Their enrollment numbers. Their attendance rates. Their assessment results. Not sample data. Their data.
That changed everything. When a superintendent sees their own district's chronic absenteeism rate displayed by school and grade level — data that currently takes their team two days to compile — the conversation shifts from "what can this tool do?" to "when can we start?"
Six of our last seven deals closed after a data audit. It's now a standard part of how we work.
Thank You to the First Ten
I want to close by naming them, because they deserve it. These are the ten districts that took a chance on a small team with a big thesis about what K-12 data infrastructure should look like:
- Baldwin County Schools, AL
- Elk Grove Unified School District, CA
- Mason County Schools, KY
- San Marcos CISD, TX
- School District of Janesville, WI
- Duval County Public Schools, FL
- Florence City Schools, AL
- Millington Municipal Schools, TN
- Cabarrus County Schools, NC
- Weld County School District RE-4, CO
They didn't just buy a product. They gave us their time, their feedback, their patience during pilot phases, and their honest assessments of what worked and what didn't. Every feature we've built, every integration we've prioritized, every design decision we've made has been shaped by conversations with people in these districts.
Everything we build going forward carries what they taught us. We don't take that lightly.
