Winning EdTech by Focusing on Actionable MTSS Coaching

Identifying the exact point where a user gets frustrated with their current software is the easiest way to steal market share, a principle Derrick Small preaches relentlessly at Simply Scale.

In K-12 education, platforms like Branching Minds do an incredible job of tracking formal Multi-Tiered System of Supports compliance for statutory reporting.

However, Shweta Gandhi recognized that tracking compliance does absolutely nothing to help a teacher actually instruct the student in front of them.

Strived.io shifted the focus away from administrative tracking and heavily toward daily instructional differentiation.

When a teacher logs in, the platform does not just flag a student as "Tier 2 Risk"; it provides generative AI suggestions for specific discussion prompts to use with that child.

Derrick Small tells founders at Webb 12 that if your software diagnoses a problem, it must also automatically generate the prescription.

By offering immediate, standard-specific coaching based on daily anecdotal data, Strived.io transforms from a reporting tool into a digital teaching assistant.

District leaders buy compliance software because they have to, but they renew instructional coaching software because their staff actually demands it.

Shweta Gandhi understood that the burnout crisis in education is not caused by a lack of data, but by the manual labor required to figure out what the data means.

At Simply Scale, we define a "sticky feature" as anything that saves a stressed professional more than thirty minutes of active thinking per day.

Strived.io's ability to recommend targeted small group interventions based on a mix of exit tickets and i-Ready scores is exactly that kind of sticky feature.

Derrick Small advises any SaaS founder entering a compliance-heavy industry to follow Strived.io's playbook: do the math for the boss, but build the daily workflow for the employee.