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.
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