135: 🇪🇺 Revyze & The European EdTech Boom
+ A Revyze review; comedy wildlife photos; Amazon attrition
Hello,
As you know, I mainly work in higher education these days. When I heard about a new app called Revyze, which positions itself as the “TikTok of education”, I was naturally intrigued.
When I found out one of my favourite Leeds United players of all time, Olivier “da bomb” Dacourt, is an early investor, I had to download it and see what the fuss is about.
Revyze is, to be entirely upfront, not intended for me. Not even close. It’s for French high school students, although it will expand into other areas soon.
However, I do speak French and I’m pretty au fait with the trends of the day, so I popped on my trendiest hoody and gave the app a try.
Teachers suck, am I right?
🤚 First:
😃 hi, tech. needs you!
A second call for the very short hi, tech. feedback form. If you can, please spare 15 seconds to share some thoughts:
I was very pleasantly surprised by the level of response last week, so thank you to everyone that took a few moments to respond. I received some excellent ideas for improving the newsletter too, so it looks like we won’t run out of content any time soon.
Amazon’s attrition costs $8 billion annually according to leaked documents. And it gets worse.
It just doesn’t sound like a pleasant place to work, does it?
“The issue is widespread throughout the company, not just with warehouse workers; from entry level roles all the way up to vice presidents, the lowest attrition rate for one of the company’s 10 tiers of employees was almost 70 percent, with the highest reaching a staggering 81.3 percent.”
While Amazon’s main problem is people choosing to leave (this is twice as likely as people being fired), all the other big tech firms continue to lay off staff.
Speaking of Microsoft:
Microsoft is building an Xbox mobile gaming store to take on Apple and Google
The Verge reports that “Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal is key to the company’s mobile gaming efforts.” The acquisition is under investigation by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, with Microsoft arguing that it needs new content to compete in mobile gaming.
You’ll recall the hi, tech. special on that deal:
That edition did unearth an argument that Microsoft has fallen behind when it comes to high-quality, exclusive games.
As we mused back then,
“Personally, I would be very surprised if Microsoft now pulled existing Activision games from other consoles. It would be anachronistic and antagonistic to do so.
That said, Microsoft has hinted that it will retain some future exclusives from Activision for its monthly Game Pass subscription. Perhaps, it will keep some Call of Duty updates or special missions, for example.”
And it seems that’s what they will do - leaked contract terms show that some Call of Duty content will be Xbox-only for 12 months before its PlayStation release.
hi, tech.: Come for the jokes, stay for the predictions. 🔮
Beauty Pie founder Marcia Kilgore on loyalty, influencers and the lure of multichannel
An excellent interview with the founder of a beauty brand, from our chums at Econsultancy.
Marcia Kilgore explains why education is a crucial part of their marketing strategy, and why that means working with fewer influencers:
“Most influencers, really, aren’t used to explaining business models.”
That’s a diplomatic phrasing of a sentiment shared often in hi, tech.
4 Steps to a Personalized PR Lifecycle - Ebook
I kept seeing this ebook advertised in other newsletters, so I gave it a quick read. It has some handy tips if you’re in the PR game.
That said, people keep telling me that I want “personalised brand experiences”. I don’t know about you, reader, but what I really want is to be left alone. Especially by “brands”.
And now, this week’s big story!
🇪🇺 The EdTech Boom in Europe
Unleash.ai reports this week, in an article with the bombastic title “EdTech startups are booming in Europe”:
“Education and upskilling can be a sizable benefit to staff who want to develop. With that in mind, EdTech may be seen as a smart avenue to explore for both businesses and investors.”
It is sound logic on the face of it, but globally this does not actually seem to be the case.
As you may be aware, the EdTech bubble has “burst” in India after this rampant period of Covid-driven growth:
LiveMint reports:
“Valuations are plunging. Funding is drying up, and existing investors are no longer willing to support the carefree cash burn the sector had become used to, resulting in waves of mass lay-offs.”
India is one of the biggest EdTech markets in the world and there are understandable concerns that other regions will follow its lead, bubble-wise:
Global VC funding into EdTech startups totaled $6.5 billion in H1 2022 compared to a total of $20.1 billion raised in 2021. Clearly, they are taking stock as people return to in-person learning and their funds count the returns from earlier investments.
Yet there are also signs that VCs are placing bigger bets now, albeit into fewer companies.
For example, 70% of deals in 2017 were of less than $1M, but this has shrunk to 40% in 2021.
The same is true in Europe.
Before 2021, only two markets had exceeded $100M in EdTech VC investment in a single year (the UK and France), but in 2021, this became 6 markets (UK, Austria, France, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands).
No doubt, investors are more judicious about where to put funds today. However, the startups that can prove their product-market fit will stand out and therefore, benefit greatly.
Against this backdrop, I saw this story on TechCrunch:
Revyze is building the TikTok of education
Revyze is a French app that launched in advance of the annual baccalauréat (or “bac”) exam for graduating high schoolers.
Fun fact: The bac was instated by regular hi, tech. subject Napoleon Bonaparte.
If you ask me, we need an all-new bac for the 21st century, but until then let’s look at what new tech can do to improve existing test scores.
Revyze has had over 35,000 downloads in France already and aims for 500,000 downloads in the next 12 months, along with a launch in the US. Revyze has raised $2 million in its pre-seed round, too.
The core value proposition is that it offers TikTok-style videos, created and shared by students, with manual moderation of content before it is uploaded.
Students are increasingly heading to TikTok for everything, including revision for exams. Yet the TikTok algorithm simply provides more of the same content to users ad infinitum, with little concern for old-fashioned notions like “learning objectives”.
Although social networks claim to offer personalisation, they instead depersonalise the user, reducing them to a dopamine centre and little else. Well, maybe a wallet too.
We could rail against the popularity of TikTok and YouTube and insist that students get back to the books, or we can work with the direction of travel to ensure we create a beneficial learning experience in a snappier format.
Revyze chooses the latter route.
How it works
As a new user, you set up a profile and then you can browse the different topics:
The content is structured and there are clear learning pathways within each subject.
The videos are created by students, which brings an additional benefit to the platform. After all, the best way to learn a subject is to teach it.
In the videos I have seen, these tiny teachers use the format inventively to test their peers. In future, Revyze could add a number of new features to help students learn through games and assessments, too.
Revyze vs. Social Networks
Revyze’s co-founder Florent Sciberras told TechCrunch that the company does not want to be a social network, although it does have some “gamified” elements to encourage content consumption.
This calls into question how the app can compete against social networks, which are famously quite addictive and already have huge audiences.
If I can pop my professor cap on for a moment, the theory (based on Metcalfe’s Law of network effects: Value = Number of users²) runs that platforms become stronger as they add users.
Like so:
The theory assumes that the nodes will interact, thereby fortifying the network and defending it against external threats.
That makes some sense for a marketplace like Etsy, for instance. The more makers they have on the platform, the more likely it is that there will be appealing products for more users. That incentivises more makers to join, who encourage more users to join, and so on.
The buyers know what they like and can leave reviews to help other users.
Such platforms operate on dynamics that allow some natural selection to occur, to the benefit of all.
Education is an altogether different case, however.
The “buyer” is at the wrong end of an information asymmetry; that’s why they want the education.
The “seller” (on TikTok, for example) is anyone that can use a smartphone camera and a hashtag.
#LearnOnTikTok videos can reach millions of users without offering any educational benefit. If enough people watch, the engagement algorithm will kick in. Network effects, with diminishing value.
Revyze aims to develop a smaller network, with stronger connections. It has a community on Discord and by involving students as creators, it gives them some stake in the product’s success.
This sense of community is essential.
Because, let’s be plain about it: where children are guaranteed to be, there are likely to be safety threats. Children may study on TikTok, but they are guaranteed neither an excellent tutor nor a safe experience.
Revyze’s fortunes surely depend on providing both high-quality, structured, fun education, and safety. That inevitably means adding operational costs to the business, so it needs to find viable revenue streams to fund them.
Much larger businesses have tried to replace manual curation and approval with fuzzy “AI” concepts, to very little avail. Yet the demand to grow, and profitably, leads them to experiment with this technology until they have no option but to go back to using real people.
Nonetheless, the customer for Revyze could be the public sector, or parents of students. If it can crack the code and offer effective education for the 21st century, that’s a product people will pay to use. Especially when the prize is children’s education.
TikTok’s attentions are elsewhere: it is launching its ‘adults only’ livestream mode soon. It also has no idea how to craft educational experiences that deliver learning impact, beyond “views”.
There is certainly space for new approaches to the education problem, which I believe is at the heart of pretty much every social issue we face.
Revyze won’t solve that problem alone, but it is encouraging to see creative new businesses invest in asking the right questions.
On the back of the altogether depressing news that global wildlife populations have fallen by 69% since 1970(!!!), we could do with something lighthearted as we all figure out how to protect our animals.
And lo, the comedy wildlife photography awards arrive, right on cue. You can check out the finalists here.
I like this guy. He looks like he’s shouting at someone out the back of a taxi.
Until next time!
Hello clark :) great article! Will you support me by recommending me in you main page? I'll do the same back to you.