Case Study: Adora Learned That Product-Market Fit Is Not Found, But Forged, Which Led To Their Acquisition
Many people talk about "finding" product-market fit. Adora's founding team forged their way to PMF, setting them up to be acquired by Full Measure Education.
Author’s Note: As promised, F2F is back! Thank you all for your patience. I also have a surprise for you all coming out later this week!
Introduction:
I got the chance to speak with Joseph Rubin, Raya Ward, and Ron Miasnik, co-founders of Adora, about what they are working on at their startup, and any advice they have for emerging entrepreneurs.
Adora is a digital campus visit platform that helps universities engage prospective students through personalized, digital experiences. The platform supports both virtual engagement and self-guided on-campus tours and is now being used by Princeton University, Washington University St. Louis, Pitzer College, North Dakota State, and others to engage students during these unprecedented times.
Joseph Rubin, Raya Ward, and Ron Miasnik are co-founders at Adora. They founded Adora as Princeton students and have grown the company while still in school. Joseph, Raya, and Ron's work experience spans design, software engineering, and product management at Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
Adora was recently acquired by Full Measure Education.
Executive Summary:
Problem: A Once-In-A-Lifetime Pandemic Forces A Pivot
Joseph, Raya, and Ron had their vision for Adora disrupted by COVID-19. But with every unpredictable event comes a hidden blessing, as the trio discovered a problem even more valuable to solve.Market: Universities Need A New Medium To Engage With Prospective Students
While working closely with Princeton to develop Adora into something that met their needs, the pivot the founders had to make revealed that universities were long overdue in transforming the way they engage with prospective students.Solution: User Research Was Fundamental In Building Adora
Raya said it best: “We spent months doing deep research into our users and customers; it completely upended how we understood the pain points we were trying to solve. We believe that PMF is forged, not found, and requires constant iteration and a deep understanding of users.”Team: It’s Important To Be Picky In Selecting New Hires
”We also were very picky: it took us dozens of candidates and almost two months to find the first non-founder to bring onto our team. We knew that these early hires were critical to building a successful company, so we looked hard for the best people we could find.”Takeaway: Product-Market Fit Is Forged, Not Found
”Product-market fit is not found; it is slowly, persistently forged. It’s critical to go take everything you have to customers: listen to their opinions, see them use it in action, brainstorm with them, and be open to revisiting any assumption you’ve made.”
Case Study: Adora
Problem: A Once-In-A-Lifetime Pandemic Forces A Pivot
Tell me about a problem or set of problems that you’ve had to solve on your journey to product-market fit.
Ron Miasnik: We had spent the first year of our company building a self-guided tour solution to enhance universities’ on-campus visit experience. We wanted to help universities engage on-campus visitors who couldn’t or didn’t want to attend a guided tour.
When the pandemic hit, visitors were no longer allowed on campuses, and our early product was immediately unviable. We were incredibly demotivated at first: we thought this meant the end of our company. However, when we talked to Princeton’s Admissions Office (our first and only customer at the time), their message was completely different. They were grateful they partnered with us. Whenever visitors were allowed back on campus, Princeton wanted Adora to be the on-campus tour guide that would support them until tour programs could resume (and afterward as well).
We learned from Princeton that the pandemic had totally upended the university admissions funnel that had been consistent and stagnant for decades. Campus tours, information sessions, and admitted student weekends -- schools’ most effective tools for convincing students to enroll -- were not going to happen again anytime soon. And when they returned, they’d inevitably look different.
Reflecting on that conversation, we realized we had a unique opportunity to build the future of higher education. Tried-and-true practices for recruitment and enrollment had been scrapped, and universities were eagerly looking for innovative ideas to deal with the unknown. It was now or never for the company. We now had the opportunity to completely redefine how prospective students engage with universities.
We quickly got to work and started rebuilding our product around this far more ambitious vision. We developed an at-home, virtual tour component, a content management system for universities to easily upload and maintain the content, started supporting multimedia content, and set the stage to be a web solution as well. While this more ambitious vision ended up working out, it was a huge, scary bet and pivot away from the product we had worked on for almost a year.
We have now supported schools like Stanford, Princeton, Arizona State, Pitzer, and others through all the twists and turns of the pandemic and will continue being their digital engagement platform into the future.
Why were these problems so critical to solve? What was it like personally struggling to overcome these challenges to achieving PMF?
Raya Ward: At the beginning of the pandemic, we were building into the unknown. No one knew how long the pandemic would last or how big it would be, and there was no playbook for how to run a startup during this time.
However, It was clear to us that we couldn’t miss this opportunity. Every university in the country was shopping around for a digital engagement platform, so there was a limited period of time to bring a product to market. Also, adding functionality and following a more ambitious vision immediately put us in competition with the market’s incumbents. We needed to move fast.
To be frank, we were overwhelmed. We were managing the transition to virtual school, figuring out where we were going to live once we were kicked off campus, and dealing with the stress of the early global pandemic. It was a time when everything was unknown, scary, and uncertain, and Adora was no safe haven. We dived into the uncertainty there as well.
We rebuilt our product technically, started learning how to make enterprise sales, and began building a remote team. And we were selling to an industry that was facing budget cuts, and freezes left and right.
It was a period of non-stop intensity, and we often felt like imposters. After meeting with universities, we’d sometimes take a step back and laugh at ourselves: “Why in the world are these universities listening to us?” But we didn’t let that take control: we strongly felt that there was an opportunity to define the future in a way that solved massive problems for both students and schools. So we chugged along and built the business nonetheless.
We believe in approaching customer conversations with curiosity and without assumptions. We would ask questions with the goal of diving into the root causes of their motivations, points of friction, and decision-making processes.
It was a time when everything was unknown, scary, and uncertain, and Adora was no safe haven. We dived into the uncertainty there as well.
Market: Universities Need A New Medium To Engage With Prospective Students
Let’s get deeper into the pain point or points you were trying to solve. Imagine I’m a customer thinking about using your product or service. How do you go about understanding my pain and creating a solution to address it?
Ron Miasnik: The initial motivation for Adora stemmed from a friend of mine who was a prospective physics major, visited Princeton’s campus, and was disappointed when he didn’t hear about the physics program. Our founding team then approached Princeton’s Admissions office and shared his experience. Princeton Admissions confirmed to us that he wasn’t the only one: they knew they weren’t addressing the unique interests, backgrounds, and passions of the students that came to campus. And based on our experience visiting colleges, we knew this to be true of almost every university in the country.
By talking to them further, we learned more about the challenges Princeton Admissions faced around yield, enrollment, and recruitment. And after looking into the market, we saw that the solutions most universities were using were bulky, expensive, poorly-designed products designed decades ago.
We identified the challenges that Princeton expressed to us: tours were generic, evening and weekend visitors couldn’t be accommodated, visitors wanted to continue exploring campus after their tours, Princeton often couldn’t accommodate groups that came to campus, and so on. We then sketched out a product that we felt could solve most of those challenges: a mobile-first, self-guided tour solution that utilized a personalization algorithm to create a unique tour for each visitor.
This solution would allow Princeton to engage students on campus any time, offer a personally curated tour to each visitor, and never have to turn anyone away from visiting campus. Princeton was excited about the idea immediately, so we got to work.
As we started working with Princeton as a design partner, we learned that they had even bigger challenges engaging students who didn’t come to campus. If campus visits weren’t even working for those who actually spent a day on campus, those who couldn’t visit (who were often low-income or international students) were totally screwed. Long term, we knew we needed to be a tool that helped universities engage any visitor (on campus or off) at any time, in a personalized manner. The pandemic pushed us to create a virtual offering much faster than we expected, but this work with Princeton informed the north stars for our business: to increase access to the college process and ensure each student has a personalized, engaging experience.
Assuming you’ve managed to address the pain points I face as a customer, what additional information did you discover in your journey to PMF that there’s a large market in need of a solution to the existing problem?
Ward: While we were building the product, we learned that schools were having trouble meaningfully reaching those who don’t come to campus. While we were initially primarily focused on personalization, we realized that the huge problem here was an issue of access. Universities were only reaching a tiny percentage of the students that are relevant for their university. And when they were reaching them, it was with a generic email or flier. Those who weren’t being reached were, more often than not, first-generation or low-income students.
Instead of defining ourselves as a tool to display information in a personalized way, we started seeing ourselves as the medium with which schools meaningfully access and communicate with students.
Put another way, we had found a market with massive inefficiencies. Schools were reaching a tiny percentage of prospective students, and when they did, they were giving all of them the same pitch. In any other context, this was a losing sales strategy. And students had no way of differentiating between the thousands of universities out there -- most of which they had never heard of, and those who did reach them sent them annoying, generic emails which they immediately deleted. This was a much larger, more impactful problem than we had initially set out to solve. And the pandemic only accelerated its need.
We had many conversations with our customers (admissions offices), users (prospective students), and industry veterans (higher ed administrators, EdTech executives, etc.). By talking to many different people, we picked up on the consensus opinions in the market and identified points of debate. We were able to use these analyses as a baseline to learn which assumptions we could challenge and disrupt.
How did you narrow your scope of what portion of the market you wanted to tackle first? Who did you decide would be your first beachhead customers and why?
Miasnik: We started with what we knew. Our founding team were all students at Princeton and knew the Princeton admissions process well (we had gone through it just a few years ago). At the time, we hadn’t done a wide analysis of the market. Instead, we started with what was familiar and built up from there.
We also were located on Princeton’s campus. The ability to test our app in real-time with prospective students who were coming to Princeton was critical. We were heavily integrated into the ecosystem there: we would test the app in the visit center with real prospective students, followed around tour guides to take notes, and run brainstorming sessions with the student guides. We were fortunate to have the perfect playground to build our product in, and we were able to use Princeton as a launchpad to expand to a diverse variety of other campuses.
Instead of defining ourselves as a tool to display information in a personalized way, we started seeing ourselves as the medium with which schools meaningfully access and communicate with students.
Solution: User Research Was Fundamental In Building Adora
How did you build your solution to maximize its relevance with the customer and ensure product-market fit? If you haven't found PMF yet, what have you learned? What are the blockers for getting to PMF?
Ward: User research. The first iteration of our product was built with imaginary user personas based on largely unvalidated assumptions. We spent months doing deep research into our users and customers; it completely upended how we understood the pain points we were trying to solve. We sometimes look back at our first iteration and laugh at how wrong we got it. We believe that PMF is forged, not found, and requires constant iteration and a deep understanding of users.
And at Adora, user research never stops; every major feature is tested against a group of high school students and their parents - the exact audience we expect to use our service. More often than not, we have to put away our pride and rework systems that simply aren’t working for our users.
We had four key principles when building our product:
UX Research: learn about users with an open mind and without assumptions. If a user tells you something that challenges a key element of your product, embrace that insight. If you don’t listen, you’ll pay for it later.
Iteration: execution is never perfect on the first run. Push something out and then iterate, iterate, iterate. A good product is never done and always improving.
Sprints: Because a good product is never done, it is important to build in sprints so that product development has a timeline and concrete milestones. This aligns the team around short-term goals and creates a feeling of accomplishment as the product tangibly progresses.
Cross-team Collaboration: We would often host strategy and brainstorming questions with people across teams. Engineers have different insights than designers, who have different insights than sales and growth people. Making sure the different opinions, incentives, and perspectives can interact (and sometimes clash) is important to building a great product.
What are some of the things you did that “didn’t scale” to shape your solution today?
Ward: One of our company’s challenges is scaling content creation. Every school we bring onto our platform needs to upload content about their campus. With Princeton, our first customer, we had no system for uploading content, so we did it all by hand. We, as founders, read through Princeton’s guidebooks and wrote all of their content on our own. This was a critically important process for us to go through. It helped us define the necessary data structures and workflows for content creation and proved instrumental when we built our content management system, which schools now use to upload and manage content.
Through this process, we realized that content is never “done.” Even after working for months on Princeton’s content, we kept wanting to go back to add more material and edit what we had previously written.
Our new content system allows schools to manage, add, and update content in real-time, on their own. This ended up being a huge selling point for schools: most solutions in the market curate one tour and then don’t allow schools to adjust their content. With Adora, students don’t have to settle for out-of-date information; they’ll always get the newest and most relevant content that the schools have curated themselves.
Our newest features have also empowered schools to bring student voices to the forefront. We want universities to see Adora as their digital engagement tool and have made it easier and easier to bring in multimedia content, information from other offices, and student-generated content. This means that we, as external voices, don’t shape the story that a school tells its visitors. We aim to empower universities to craft the experience on their own terms.
What did you learn to best engage with your customers? How did you build a tight feedback loop with your customers to rapidly improve your solution to their problems?
Ron Miasnik: We were open with early adopters that they were early adopters. We got to know them personally, talked to them regularly, and made it clear that we were on a combined mission to create the future of campus visits. They would come to us with product ideas, and we would run our roadmap by them. We believed that if our customers felt that they were building our company with us, they would push us to be the best we could be.
This turned out to be the right decision; universities that used our product were in the best position to give us nudges in the right direction. With their advice, we expanded our content to include audio and video, created a web app, expanded to virtual tours, and incorporated student testimonials into our platform. Almost every feature that we’ve launched since we started the company has come from our users.
Walk me through how you landed your first few customers as you were building your product or service.
Ron Miasnik: Princeton was our first customer and design partner. We’re actually the first student-owned company to become a Princeton vendor.
When the time came to reach out to other schools, we networked aggressively to score meetings with other admissions offices. What changed the game was when the Princeton Admissions office sent an email about us to a listserv of admissions officers. When demo requests started rolling in after that email, we all realized, “holy crap, people actually want this.”
We did dozens of demos only to get rejection after rejection. We heard every reason in the book: a feature was missing, they didn’t have the budget, the timing wasn’t right, etc. We were constantly iterating on our pitch and product, and it took 25 failed pitches before we closed our second customer.
These days, we are rarely dejected after a demo with a prospect. It is more common to hear that our product is a dream come true for a potential customer.
And at Adora, user research never stops; every major feature is tested against a group of high school students and their parents - the exact audience we expect to use our service. More often than not, we have to put away our pride and rework systems that simply aren’t working for our users.
Team: It’s Important To Be Picky In Selecting New Hires
If you have a cofounder, walk me through a time that you two had a conflict. What was it about? How did you handle the situation? What was the resolution, and how did it impact your working relationship with your cofounder?
Ward: Due to the pandemic, our team quickly transitioned from working together on campus to operating virtually. Entrepreneurship is already a lonely craft (our families and friends didn’t really understand what we were doing), and the fact that we weren’t together only made those feelings more extreme. This led to a decrease in motivation and feelings of lack of commitment among our founding team. We learned how to have regular, open communication in the virtual setting, and had to talk through what we were all feeling to get to a point where we felt supported.
What key qualities did you look for in key early hires to increase your chances of discovering product-market fit, and how did you prioritize what types of hires you needed to make first?
Miasnik: We knew that we wanted to be a fully student-run company. We not only believed in the potential of students to do great things but also were working in an industry where students would have a personal connection to the problem.
When interviewing candidates, we looked for self-learners and self-starters. We especially liked people who had built something before (a coding project, a student group, their own major, etc.). We wanted people who took ownership and constantly questioned and ideated.
We also were very picky: it took us dozens of candidates and almost two months to find the first non-founder to bring onto our team. We knew that these early hires were critical to building a successful company, so we looked hard for the best people we could find. We also know that building a team of ambitious, smart, hard-working people would make it easier to continue recruiting more A players.
We made sure that everyone was making an active choice to be there (not because they needed a paycheck or a resume line). Everyone on our team knew that working at Adora is an insane opportunity to grow, learn, and make an impact. Our responsibility was to give them the ownership and responsibility that allowed them to do exactly that.
As our team grew, we (as founders) needed to learn new skills and challenges. We were constantly relying on advisors to give us tips for managing and scaling a team, and would also have frequent 1o1s with our team to get feedback on how we were doing. Our whole team knew that we were all learning as we went and were all on a wild roller coaster ride together.
If there was a potential employee of your startup reading this Case Study right now, how would you convince them that joining your team is the next best step in their career?
Ward: Every member of our team is working on things for which they are in no way qualified. The best way to grow is to push your limits, and we think that people like working at organizations that push them to grow. None of us knew how to kick off a startup or launch a product when we started the company, but now that we’ve been through it we feel much more confident in our own abilities.
The main benefit of working at Adora is a huge feeling of personal growth and accomplishment. We’ve had team members take on entire aspects of our platform - leading growth marketing, designing or implementing new apps, and managing teams (all as students!). Because our vision knows no bounds, neither does the responsibility that we dole out to our teammates.
Every member of our team is working on things for which they are in no way qualified. The best way to grow is to push your limits, and we think that people like working at organizations that push them to grow.
Takeaway: Product-Market Fit Is Forged, Not Found
What are the key lessons have you learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?
Ward: Go to the market! If you’re not embarrassed about what you ship, you’ve shipped far too late. Product-market fit is not found; it is slowly, persistently forged. It’s critical to go take everything you have to customers: listen to their opinions, see them use it in action, brainstorm with them, and be open to revisiting any assumption you’ve made.
Often we’re faced with a problem we think is insurmountable. We’ve learned that there are always ways to get new ideas; whether from advisors, experts from your network, or simply a long brainstorming session to think things through. And, really, building out a company is a matter of overcoming a series of seemingly impossible challenges that have to be taken piece by piece.
What’s the hardest problem you’re facing now after solving the prior one(s)?
Miasnik: The acquisition is not a finish line: we’re just getting started. We plan to 10x our customer base in the coming months using Full Measure’s resources. We need to operationalize a sales team, stress tests our technical infrastructure, and push out new features at an accelerated pace. We’re excited for the new challenges on this next stage of growth.
We anticipate that there will be growing pains at this stage in our product’s life. We’re already taking our own advice - engaging advisors, rallying our team, and being proactive by aggressively anticipating issues and making plans to overcome them.
None of us have served software to 100 universities at once before, but like we’ve figured it out so far, we’re confident we can figure it out from here.
Go to the market! If you’re not embarrassed about what you ship, you’ve shipped far too late. Product-market fit is not found; it is slowly, persistently forged.
Adora’s Founder File:
Adora actively decided to build an all-student team because we believe in students’ potential to be fun, creative, and driven. However, organizing a large team of students to do something as complex as building a company is not easy. Here are our top tips for how to hire and manage students:
Two Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Nicholas Fotopoulos, Founder of 3Cor Bio: ??? (Stealth Startup)
Cindy Han, Angelo Ou, Amanda Vera, Founders of Junction: ??? (Stealth Startup)
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