Case study: BoClips’ route to market
How BoClips’ delivered on their vision to make learning captivating by finding the right route to market.
👋 This week another case study, this time on finding creative approaches to reaching learners. Our next online meet up is next Tuesday, 5 November. Allen Sanchez, Head of Product at Junto will be leading the conversation on building AI coaches. Sign up here. We’ll also be meeting in London on 26 November.
“‘David, how are we going to unwind this deal?’” David Bainbridge, founder and CEO of BoClips, is recalling the opening line of his key stakeholder, Dickson Musselwhite, on a call two months after he had signed Pearson, the world’s biggest educational publisher.
“I was physically trembling,” he remembers. “I thought, I've got 25 minutes to save this business. The thing I've been doing for the last three years of my life and everything that I've bet on it. His problem was that the platform just didn't work. It didn’t map to his team’s workflow.”
BoClips is an EdTech marketplace that helps education providers find and licence short form video content to enhance their courses and online textbooks. They now partner with over 650 content providers including TED, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, PBS and The National Theatre.
David founded the company in 2013 and by 2016, had managed to sign up an impressive range of big brands including The BBC, The Wall Street Journal and Getty and to supply their content to his unproven startup. Pearson was the brand that would unlock the demand side. And they had just asked to pull out.
“I said, ‘Dickson, give me eight weeks. I will rebuild the platform from the ground up to your team's requirements.’” It was a gamble, but one he had to take.
“I had one frontend developer, one backend developer and a CTO. We had eight weeks to rebuild a platform that could hold the thick end of a million videos, and create a workflow to find and licence a video clip that matched with the processes of a large publisher. And we did it. We saved the deal.”
He reflects on the key lesson from the experience. “Building a marketplace is really hard because there are three massive nuts to crack,” he says. “We were good on the supply-side. Good on the demand-side. We just missed the time and attention that the product needed.”
“We spent two years getting the media owners on board and getting Pearson ready to sign. We should have put the same amount of time and effort into really understanding what product-market fit looked like and understanding Pearson’s workflows. Fortunately, we managed to salvage it in eight weeks. Which is another lesson: keep it simple.”
This is just one of the pivotal moments in BoClips’ decade-long journey that David has taken the time to reflect on with me today.
We’ll explore the key decision early on to focus on business-to-business, rather than go direct-to-consumer, being well positioned to capitalise on the opportunity a global pandemic created and how he is considering the potentially dramatic implications of AI.
Inspiration
The initial impetus for BoClips’ came from observing his eldest son’s educational journey. “We were late in realising he was dyslexic,” says David ruefully. “He left primary school and he couldn’t read or write. But he was engaged in learning by watching videos. And that’s how he got himself through GCSEs. He watched documentaries, he went on YouTube.”
David had begun his career in advertising before leading marketing for the launch of the UK’s final terrestrial TV channel, Channel Five. He left to build his first start up that enabled people to text along to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Then he joined “another startup within a corporate”, BBC iPlayer, where he built the original brand, working closely with product and engineering. By 2013 he was in Silicon Valley.
“I'd seen that experience of my son,” he says. “I strongly believed that a combination of moving image and sound was so much more powerful for learning than audio and text. My question was, why wasn't more video content being used in education?”
“That was really where my personal and professional worlds came together. And naively, I jumped into the world of entrepreneurship with a wife that didn't work, four young children and no backing. I was terrified for the subsequent five or six years.”
The consumer press release
So where did he start? “I remember it was around the London Olympics in 2012. I wrote a press release, because that was my background. Building brands and taking brands to market,” he recalls. “The press release was titled ‘Beat the System’. The notion was that video content was a way to beat the lethargy and the lack of innovation in education.”
The press release outlined a subscription service for parents, a safe, creative and educational alternative to YouTube that would cater for learners of different kinds of abilities. It would take inspiring content that was gathering dust on broadcaster shelves and align it with what was being taught in schools and universities.
“It was ridiculous and overly ambitious,” he says smiling. “I spent the remainder of 2012 and early 2013 coming back from that big, hairy, audacious idea and reframing the opportunity, not as a consumer business, not even schools and districts but instead as B2B where the ‘B’ was educational providers.”
David found a cofounder who had worked in education. He understood the landscape and had seen ITN sell clips to educational businesses, in the much narrower category of news. This helped to validate that there might be an opportunity…
Starting with supply: ‘anchor tenants’
Looking back, David can recognise some of the smart decisions they made early on. Their biggest problem was how to get brands to put their trusted IP into a startup they had never heard of and persuade them that there was money to be made in education. They needed to create some social proof.
“We raised money to be able to sign cheques to big, globally recognised brands that would make people sit up and take notice,” he says. “We use the analogy of creating a shopping mall. We need to have ‘anchor tenants’ that people recognise.”
They managed to spark interest with The BBC, Wall Street Journal and, somewhat surprisingly, Getty and doubled down on getting them over the line. Once that started to look promising, they began to have conversations with publishers on the demand side, “maybe suggesting that those deals had already been done,” grins David.
He reflects on the power of brands. “We had the BBC and David Attenborough. At the time, it was 80 clips from 1963, not Planet Earth, but once we had him, we were motoring!”
Meanwhile, they started to build a platform to house their prospective library and help instructional designers find, licence and use videos in their courseware.
Understanding the pain
In exploring the idea with publishers like Pearson and McGraw Hill, they gained key insights into the potential pain pointes they could solve. At the time, a relatively small but growing percentage of publishers' revenue came from online.
“There was an editorial desire to enrich textbooks as they transitioned from print to digital and make them more engaging,” remembers David. “Video was an obvious ingredient but not something that they had the understanding or capability to deliver.”
The real insight was hearing how they were approaching licensing. “It just seemed very complicated to them,” he remembers. “It was very unclear to them where the rights sat. Did they sit with the broadcast or the production company, the talent, the music publishers? It just seemed to be a hornet's nest for them. And they didn't want to have to do deals with 30 different IP holders to create one textbook.”
They realised that if they could aggregate multiple rights and offer volume discounts they could save publishers a lot of time and money.
Alongside the growing adoption of YouTube, these conversations also highlighted that short form video was the place to focus. “In the context of a textbook, if a student is struggling with a concept, they don't want to have to watch a half an hour of the video. They want the three minute video that really hammers home the learning outcome.”
This helped them focus on the right suppliers. They needed to be ready with trimmed content, tagged with the right metadata. He notes that if they had started a couple of years earlier, the suppliers wouldn’t have been ready but that there was a growing trend they could leverage. “BBC iPlayer back in 2007 had woken everyone up to the possibilities.”
Getting the platform right
So after their initial misstep with the platform, how did they get things back on track?
“We were trying to do something too complicated out the gate,” reflects David. “What the editorial teams actually needed was just to input a keyword and get some reasonably decent results back from a library that was education focused. But we were trying to tag content to the curriculum, link it to Wikipedia, do some Natural Language Processing… we were too ambitious.”
I ask why this was. Was it because they felt it had to be better than what Getty and others offered?
“When you're building a business, you think that in order for it to succeed, it's got to be better than what someone else is doing,” he says. “But looking back it was already better because we didn’t just have stock content. We had news, current affairs, documentaries, instructional content from great brands. But we still felt we needed to have an even better platform. But it's not just about the platform, you need to think holistically.”
The tight deadline to rebuild the platform forced them to keep things simple and by this point they had a much better understanding of the workflow of their target audience.
To reinforce the idea that they were rebuilding the platform just for Pearson, they also branded the Peason instance of the new platform ‘Pearson Clips’. “It was just a different logo but it felt like we’d built it entirely for them and they felt real ownership over it. We kept the business and they are still a key partner eight years on.”
Once they had their anchor tenants supplying content, Pearson as their first customer and a platform that worked, the flywheel started to spin.
“You get, you get to a certain size and peoples’ past reservations go away,” David says. “They say, ‘If x or y is doing it, we should be doing it as well.’ We really don't do any sort of proactive outreach now, and we're probably signing on about 100 new content partners a year. They just come to us, which is a nice position to be in.”
So what significant moments happened next?
On-demand and the pandemic
“I had always presumed that the education industry would move at the same pace as the media industry,” David reflects. “And if the media had moved from the physical delivery of DVDs to streaming on-demand through Netflix, then surely that was the inexorable direction of education.”
His assumption was that being able to deliver their content on-demand would be key. Surely, he reasoned, providers would want to be able to update content when significant things changed. For example, a new president of the USA. And so they invested in being able to deliver content dynamically via an API.
“We were lucky, because the pandemic happened,” he reckons. “I actually don't think publishers would have changed had it not been for the pandemic. They would have been very happy to sit with the existing mode of relying on rights, editorial being in charge and product sitting in the weeds somewhere. They probably wouldn’t have wanted our API.”
However, the closure of schools and universities suddenly created the catalyst to change. “Brilliant students were sitting at home and people needed ways to engage them when there weren't teachers in front of them in the classroom,” he says.
“We were the only people globally sitting on an amazing asset base with the ability to put this content into different educational environments super fast. And with the foresight and belief that education would change. That was lucky.” This, he says, pushed them from being a static, video rights business into becoming a true tech business.
They signed lots of new significant deals including the US textbook giant, Chegg. “We made hay,” he says. “The pandemic was extremely positive for the business and forced educational publishers to change. We travelled a long way and it enabled us to get into that hockey stick trajectory.”
But then the EdTech bubble burst. Demand dried up. Not overnight, but quickly.
“Some of the deals that we hoped would renew, like Chegg, didn't,” he says. “We are still quite small - less than 100 customers - so we were over reliant on a small number of businesses. They paid us good money, but it did leave us strategically exposed.”
He says that switching from handling rapid growth to needing to deal with a sudden drop in demand has been hard but that they’ve now recalibrated the business. And they are now embracing the new opportunities of generative AI.
Existential threats and the opportunity of gen AI
He reckons as a founder, there’s often new existential threads that you’re prone to worry about. But as you get older and wiser you become more rational about them.
“YouTube made a big announcement back at the end of 2022. They said, ‘We're creating YouTube.EDU, no ads, no recommendations and we're going to sell it to EdTech providers.’” He swears and then apologises for his rich language. “But that's our traditional business, right? So that happens. But then you start to realise that it was just a blog post. And YouTube is not really going to double down into education.”
So how does navigating these shocks and shifts relate to how he and BoClips are thinking about the potentially more significant impact of generative AI on what they do?
“If you’re a teacher, the promise of AI is, you can upload a lesson plan and you'll get a three minute on-the-fly produced video back. It'll just be in any animation style or any video style that you ever possibly want,” he says. “The reality, of course, is far different from that. Teachers are incredibly time starved and don’t want a video that might be wrong because their favourite LLM is hallucinating. So I think there's a long way to go before we reach that point…”
He contrasts this potential future threat with the opportunities gen AI presents right now to an English language educational video library.
“Delivering to non-English speaking markets was tricky,” he says. “Now we can dub. We can subtitle in every language under the sun for pennies. This makes our potential addressable market much bigger.”
“We can also use machine learning to match our content to curriculum frameworks in a way that would have taken a subject matter expert hours and hours,” he says. “I can put in ‘terminal velocity’, and that I'm teaching it to 11 year olds in Wisconsin, and I'll get the right video back for that particular standard. I also get AI generated learning outcomes and formative assessment questions based on that transcript.”
He goes on: “Or I can take a lesson plan, upload it and get recommended videos back that go with that lesson plan. In fact, I don't get the videos. I get snippets of the video for that lesson plan. Plus, information about the pedagogy, so they denote whether the snippet is an explainer or a context builder.”
“Gen AI massively enhances our product proposition and our reach into the market,” he concludes. “As well as potentially being a significant threat.”
All of the things he lists, BoClips are already delivering. They invested in a Data Science team that has been atomising 2 million videos down to individual learning outcomes. They’re also working on a tutor bot with one partner that delivers short contextual video content as part of the tutoring.
Same strategy?
So does gen AI and the other significant shifts that have happened since they began change the original strategy to captivate learners by going via third party courseware providers - whether those are education publishers, EdTech companies or Ministries of Education?
“We want to extend our reach into schools,” he says, reflecting that the drying up of demand from EdTech companies means they need to consider alternative routes to market. And they have spotted another trend to potentially ride.
“In the US, charter schools and some of the big public school districts are cutting the cord with publishers and building curriculum and courseware themselves,” he says. “That’s a double-sided opportunity for us. We can licence our content into their curriculum as well as provide them with a safe curriculum-curated alternative to YouTube.”
This potential unbundling and new opportunities on the demand side to go direct to schools and districts is the biggest change to their original approach. Longer term, he believes that AI will also change things but that this may in fact be a different version of the same underlying principles.
“The notion of us being the middleman between rich media in all its different guises, wherever it comes from and being able to deliver it into different learning pathways in real time and contextually feels valuable,” he says. “I don't know quite what I mean by all of that at the moment, but it seems to me that it is a very valuable service, whatever part of education provision you're in.”
Summary
We reflect on the conversation and the takeaways that would be useful for others.
Think practically about your route to market. What unmet needs and trends in the current landscape will help you deliver your audacious vision to learners?
Make sure you deliver on all three pillars of an education marketplace: the supply-side (educators), the demand-side (learners) and how your platform delivers the value to them.
To do this, make sure you understand all parts of the business. Don’t delegate or outsource crucial elements because you’re not an expert.
Embrace existential threats. Most things that look like they will kill your business rarely will if you think about things differently and keep moving quickly.
Anticipate trends. But don’t get too far ahead and recognise what is valuable now.
“There's always going to be market movements and new tech saying stuff that you think are going to be the death knell for your business,” he says. “They rarely are. Humans and businesses are very resilient. There's always different ways to think about things if you are ready to move quickly.”
After 10 years of BoClips, David is keen to support others going on a similar journey and is looking for opportunities to do this in 2025. If you think there could be a good fit, drop him a line at david@boclips.com!
This case study will feature in the next run of Finding Product-Market Fit in EdTech. I’m recruiting a cohort for early 2025. Get in touch if you’re interested in joining!