In EdTech, things can start moving quickly. A new idea gets attention. A stakeholder asks for leads. A competitor launches something similar. Before long, teams feel pressure to act fast and show progress.

The problem is that moving fast does not always mean moving in the right direction. When teams skip validation, meaning they have not yet confirmed that real educators or leaders truly need what they are building, speed can create more problems than momentum. Budgets get stretched, marketing efforts chase the wrong signals, and educators are asked to spend time on tools that do not actually solve a meaningful problem.

In this episode, Kate Busby joins our CEO, Elana Leoni, to talk about what validation really looks like in EdTech. We break down how to tell the difference between early interest and real demand, why this work is often messy, and how marketers can use AI to test ideas, messaging, and prototypes faster without losing sight of the people they are trying to serve.

What You’ll Learn

1. A simple four-stage way to think about validation, from idea to scaling
2. Why “friends, family, and fools” feedback is a signal, but not proof
3. How to spot when you are still in hustle mode, even if you call it traction
4. Where pivots are most realistic, and when they get expensive
5. How to use competitor reviews, sales transcripts, and lightweight surveys to speed up market research
6. A practical method for pairing real-world insights with synthetic personas to test positioning
7. Why prototyping is one of the most useful AI applications for marketers right now
8. The discovery question more founders should ask, and how it can shape your SEO, copy, and campaigns

For quick wins from the lightning round and details on resources mentioned, visit the episode show notes: https://www.leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcasts/is-your-edtech-product-is-ready-to-go-to-market

Mentioned in this episode:

EdTech Planner 2026

Planning a full year of education marketing takes time, and you need a clear path that helps you stay relevant, consistent, and aligned with the moments that matter. Ready to make 2026 your most intentional (and effective!) year yet in education marketing? What The EdTech Marketer’s 2026 Planner helps you do: Focus on what matters most to your brand and audience Plan campaigns around key education events Use proven strategies tailored to K–12 and higher ed Build a system that fuels visibility, engagement, and leads For six years, thousands of education and EdTech marketers have used this planner to guide their yearly campaigns and stay aligned with the school calendar. Download here: https://www.leoniconsultinggroup.com/edtech-marketers-planner

Well, hello, welcome to the show, Kate. I'm excited to dive deep on all the things marketing with you. When we had our last chat, I'm like, you have to come on the podcast. So here it is. Thank you for joining. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Alana, it's a delight to be here with you in this December evening over in Barcelona in Spain. It's incredibly cold here, not that anyone would believe me, but maybe I've also adjusted.

Hey, I'm Californian, so we don't really know cold and the littlest wind is freezing for us. So I will take your word for it. So I want to start out our conversation to frame your unique experience because we're going to jump into a little bit of what we're calling validation and we're going to explain for you the people that don't understand what that is and how that fits in with marketing and sales within EdTech.

Thank

But then we're gonna also talk about AI, go to market, some really fun things. And we're gonna end with a lightning round, which I know that you've kind of already prepared. So we might have the biggest lightning round ever, which I'm excited about. But to start out, tell our audience a bit about this through line of all of these things we're gonna be talking about. AI, go to market, validation, going international, coming international to go into.

K12 US, tell me a little bit about why we're talking about this medley.

So for the last 12 years, I've been working on and off in EdTech. It's not been the only sector I've worked in, but it's definitely been the one that I've come back to time and time again, and probably the one that's closest to my own personal sense of mission, if you like, that what I really care about.

We're talking about that in conjunction with AI and marketing, because I think that especially for early stage companies, there's a huge opportunity now with the tools that are on offer to go to market at a speed that has been unprecedented and with a smaller team and fewer, let's say, investments than ever before. So I guess that's the through line here. We're seeing a...

an evolution of go-to-market pacing and resource necessities that we have never seen before. It's a very exciting time. It's a time of massive discovery and exploration. And, you know, I've been...

privileged to be on some of the bandwagons in the ed tech world that are racing towards quite significant profitability in a short period of time. So super excited to unpack all that, share what I've learned and, you know, hopefully provide some actionable insights.

So do more with less, quick, quick, runway, uncertainty, how does AI come in and help? Wait, let's make sure we have a product marketing fit that our market really wants. So that is a really good through line. So let's start with validation first and foremost. And if you're in a bigger marketing team, a lot of this may have already been done, but.

For those of you that know what even validation is, and I'm gonna have Kate explain that and what she does in her, what we're gonna call a very messy process. But for those of you that have kind of dabbled in validation, you know that it's never fully done. It's not like, okay, product, market, done. Your market audience needs are always evolving. So I'm gonna have Kate talk a little bit about...

just what validation is, and then we're gonna get into how you can do it in a small scrappy team or maybe evolve what you already have going on. So I'll punt it to you there and I know we're gonna go in some kind of nooks and crannies within the validation world.

Yeah, I mean, there hasn't been a single marketing appointment I've had where, and I think a lot of marketers, if not all marketers can empathize with this, where all the information on all the customers, on all the processes was neatly wrapped up in a series of Notion files. I mean, it's just pure fiction. Normally you walk into a business that no matter whether it's Precede or Series B, there's a lot of chaos. There are a lot of spinning plates.

asked to kind of zoom into part of all of that chaos and try and make something of it. And within your little corner, you start building your kind of structure. But there's literally never been a time that everything has been presented to me in a neatly wrapped box where I can then say, right, let's get to work doing A, B, and C to validate this product. Never. So like you said, validation is messy inherently.

I think one of the anchors I've always used when I walk into an organization is I ask a series of questions, not necessarily of others, but just based on the observations of how folks are working and what the revenue is looking like and, a whole bunch of things. And then I'll almost create a diagnosis and say, right, this company appears to be at this particular stage, which is going to require me to then think about this process.

doing this activity. So what I'm trying to say is that I try and anchor myself somewhere so I can look around with an opinion. A lot of the times, you'll speak to a founder and they'll say, we're validated, we've got validation because I've tested this on my friends and family and the fools and they've all said it's awesome.

And then I'll pop the question, okay, so what's the funnel looking like? know, where's the drop off? What's, you know, what's the conversion looking like?

we're not there yet. I mean, we haven't really got a funnel. We've just got, you know, some, some inputs from some really key people who I consider to be ideal customer. So then you have to say, okay, so the language I get given by the folks around me may not actually accord to what I think is validation in terms of marketing. Right. So I kind of break it down this way into four main stages. So.

I look at the idea stage, which is stage number one, and I see the idea stage as, matter what anyone's telling me, that they're validated or not, I say, if your team is hustling.

to see if anyone beyond friends, family and fools actually cares about your product or service. You are at the idea stage. You are not validated. You're getting some signals. And I like the word signal because, you know, positive feedback is valid. We don't want to just dismiss it outright, but it's not the grounds to drop.

10,000, 100,000, a million dollars on a paid advertising bonanza because you feel that you're validated and now it's time to scale. Like this would be a costly and I would say costly error. So idea stages is that you're hustling, you're getting some signal, but you're not really at the stage to say that you've got a repeating

kind of flywheel of interest, conversion, advocacy, and then back to that acquisition again. So validation stage two is where hustle ends. There's a steady stream of interest beyond those three groups I talked about before, the famous friends, family and fools.

And you can definitely see that there's potential for, I would say, repeatable growth. So you're getting folks who are actually purchasing or taking up a subscription, they're not churning immediately, and they're also advocating you to their communities.

Attraction the third stage I think is where you're getting people paying again and again The latter group should be growing month-on-month not dying off

So kind of an extension of validation, but perhaps over longer time periods, larger amounts. So perhaps customer lifetime value is increased here and you're seeing it increase exponentially. then scaling is the fourth and final stage. And this is where you've got your marketing and sales folks in place. Those channels are now working to reach a key milestone without inflating operating costs, which could be that, you know, you're

break even, you're now self-sustaining or you're now profitable because you're actually making money and you're keeping those costs down. And, you know, if you're scaling, you know, costs are down, contribution margin growing, revenue growing, you know, you are...

heading towards, I don't know, I wouldn't say unicorn territory, but you know, this is a lot of the time when media will say, oh, it's a unicorn in waiting, or you know, this is a dekakorn. So.

All these fancy words, but you know, I think most of the early stage companies I've worked with are really still in idea stage. And yes, it's not as flashy to say that to investors. I mean, you should never say that to investors. You've got to say that you're validated or you've got validation signals. But I think sometimes you really do need to do the groundwork.

and actually have your acquisition funnel up and running and see that cycle of purchases and advocacy and people coming to you organically, direct search increasing organically so that you can say, no, there's definitely a fit for us here. And not only is it that there's a fit, but we're actually expanding already, even on a small scale. But month on month, we are seeing growth in numbers, growth in revenue.

Yeah, I love how you did the stages because as someone who likes frameworks, we teach community, we teach social, we teach all of these things. And each one, you have to identify what stage you're in and then your tactics and strategies should align with what stage you're in. So that is brilliant. What I will say is that we started this conversation saying it's messy and that's a linear path, right? And if you're lucky, you might go there.

But there are lots of disruptions in chaos in ed tech. You might all of a sudden have competitors enter in the market or complete audience shifts and needs or budgets being flat out eliminated, which we saw this year. Or maybe you're creating a whole new product line or you're pivoting. have a client once that was in reading and then decided to actually pivot entirely into math, right?

Tell me a little bit about how that messiness factors into the stages. Do we have multiple validation stages for product lines or do we start over when it's disrupted or I don't even know.

It's a great question with a lot of complexity, but let's unpack it. I mean, at the idea stage, you are testing for signal. This is probably the right time to make a major pivot, I would say, because if you...

And one thing that I've learned in these years in EdTech is there are so many competitors and you just keep finding out about them day after day, month after month, year after year. There are always more competitors to your product than you realize and more potential disruptors who could basically hijack the market that you've been so mindfully trying to warm up and convert. So there are a lot of sharks in the water to use a rather unfortunate metaphor, but

But I would say that it's at the idea stage where being humble, being aware, you know, being open to changing tact. If you realize you're hitting a brick wall with the initial idea that you had, I think it's probably the cheapest time to change and also the fastest, easiest time to change because at the idea stage, you're still building everything from your infrastructure, your funnels.

your rapport with the community that you're trying to serve. I think when it gets a little further down the line and you've already started spending and investing and potentially you have angels at this point who you now owe an answer to, it starts to get a little trickier. There are more cooks in the kitchen and you know have to as a leader really have solid arguments for wanting to drop something and do something really different. Now you mentioned like extension

of product and product lines. I think that that's an easier move when you're a bit further down the line. Maybe you've got some traction already and you've decided, hey, if I have a one trick pony product, this is maybe going to take me so far, but to be on the safe side, let's diversify. Let's think about what our brand stands for and what

natural, authentic extensions to this brand could exist. And let's maybe start testing new products back to the idea stage, because you're starting with something super brand new, but let's, you know, we've got one, one ship that's sailed and it's doing great. It's off to the Americas. Prosperity is in sight, but let's maybe, you know, set off a couple of smaller ships and see if they make it. But, but changing tack completely when you're a huge

critical stage in your company journey, I think is quite rare. Perhaps we saw major disruptions around Black Swan events like the pandemic where companies like Uber, for example, were forced to radically change their offering, right, in order to keep going. But it's, I would say, rarer to see a bigger company completely drop.

what they're doing and say, hey, we're going to reinvent ourselves. I think if you look back to how Jaguar, which didn't change its products, it just changed its brand, led to so much confusion. I mean, they were just literally rebranding their logo and their look and feel and their brand palette. They still had the cars. mean, they had obviously the electric car was launched in Miami at our Basel, but even just a big company like that changing their logo.

you know, people lost their minds, you know? So imagine if a company completely, know, Jaguar became like a toy shop. I mean, it just, it's just almost absurd. So I guess to clip what I was saying into something succinct, idea stage are probably, it's probably the best, cheapest, most logical place to completely change what you're doing before you get older and more mature and you are embedded in people's minds as a certain thing.

Yeah, and for those of you who are long-time listeners on the podcast, you might be saying, gosh, why are we talking about validation within marketing? And I hope that you're connecting the dots when Kate is talking because there are many companies that I work with and that Kate works with that we're like, whoa, slow down. Let's validate that this is actually a need in the marketplace.

because we get so excited about our ideas and we want to hire people and maybe a board members on TikTok and they want to do this or a sub stack or they want to get into paid ads because we want quick leads. But if it doesn't work, if there's not a direct need in the market, hold the phone, stop and do everything you can to validate it because you're just wasting time, you're wasting educators time, you're wasting money, all the things, right? So I want us to walk away from this discussion and this is a bigger discussion entirely around validation.

But I hope that those of you that are listening are understanding the importance and as marketing leaders jumping in to new products saying, wow, let's really validate this a little bit more. And sometimes it's you reorienting yourself and seeing what holes are missing so you can understand how to truly market it and understand the market need. That is always evolving too. Any last thoughts on validation before we jump into AI? Because I know we're out.

What's a podcast without talking about AI right now?

100%. Oh, you know, I think my final remarks on validation are simple. Um, there's nothing wrong with, uh, building the vehicle as you're driving it. In fact, we live in an age now where we have tools like AI, like automation, where we can literally build as we're moving, as we're marketing a product that may not be fully finished.

And I think that's very liberating actually. But what you said about going too fast, I think that's the key point. You can build as you go, but you should be building on some kind of solid foundation where you've understood the territory, you've got a wedge audience who are really in need of what you provide.

It's not a nice to have, you are actually solving a problem for them, a problem that has been broken for a while. It's not EdTech, but Bumble and Whitney Wolf, her CEO, founder, when she talks about how dating has just been in her eyes broken for a very long time, but we've just had to put up with the status quo. And she really wanted to go to market with a product that would solve that issue.

and serve people. Sounds a bit fluffy, right? Sounds like just a bit too mission driven, but it has an absolute commercial logic to it because you're serving a wedge audience. And in her situation, it was more than a small wedge. was a ginormous wedge, she managed to solve that problem for them. People were willing to put down the money for the subscription. And as a result, you know, she and her company, you know, became, you know,

pretty, pretty wealthy. I think that that's the point. You know, we are obviously chasing profitability. Let's not make any bones about that. But I think, and I would always advocate.

for a balance between profitability and commercial reality and solving a problem, like having a mission, really looking to serve communities and do better, not just because it's nice, but because you're genuinely solving something that has been broken for a very long time.

Yeah, and I've worked in this space around where it's like, if you're very small and you're like, wow, that sounds like a lot, try to think of it almost like a Venn diagram or think about like, I have a spreadsheet that I send people and it's a selector and I'm totally dumbing this down now, Kate. So you're like, no, but what you said I have in that spreadsheet and really I look at what's the market demand.

And the way you do that is the validation techniques that you were talking about and the stages to identify, do you have something or is it really just a hunch or a bias, right? So what's the market demand is one, but what is your expertise? Can you really solve it in a way that nobody else can? And you also were hinting at that too. And then I also put in from a founder perspective or if somebody is like, you know, a consultant like me or an agency is what's our passion?

Mm.

Can we see us doing this in a very long-term capacity? Do we have that fuel, that fire? Just because we can do it well and better than anyone else doesn't mean we should be doing it if I haven't got the right team on board with that fire in them. So that's the kind of criteria on a very simplistic way I look at trying to select your entry point. I might have butchered it. I was finding hints of it when you were talking.

No, think you're completely right. you know, when you were talking about like having the right team, having the passion, I would also say having the nerve because business is not easy. I mean, we do glamorize the life of an entrepreneur these days on podcasts and on social, but

You know, if you actually look at the day-to-day life of a CEO or a founder, or even anyone in the executive team, you'll see that literally their day-to-day is just one problem and challenge, call it challenge, right? After another. And if you don't have the passion, the team and the nerve,

to be able to walk through that and move through that and believe in what you're doing, it is an incredibly difficult existence. And the thing that unites all the founders that I've had the pleasure of working with is that they have conviction. I mean, they are brilliant individuals, but they, in addition to that, have this belief that what they're doing is actually solving the problem in that unique way that you talked about that no one else is doing.

Love it. And I was just, couldn't help but chuckle. Like I feel it, I know it. It's not the glamorous life. All right, let's jump into AI because you're doing some really cool stuff when it relates to AI and go to market. You are an adjunct faculty member. You've got an incubator class. I love that you're pushing them to use and you're probably learning so much alongside them as well too. But tell me a little bit about

Well...

how AI can help with go-to-market planning, and maybe just back up a little bit around defining what do you think that process entails and how AI can be a good companion. And again, for those of you that were like, well, we were just talking about validation, validation is that pre-step. Now it's like, okay, game on, go to market. All right, now let's put the pedal to the metal with some AI, right?

100%. Well, you know, we were talking earlier about validation and I will add to that that.

When it comes to validation, market research is such a key component of that. used to be a very slow, painful manual process, right? But when you've got AI and automation, suddenly it's somewhat of a game changer. You can now get insights in seconds. One of the go-to market tips I would basically advocate that any marketer tries out, download your sales team's transcripts you have a sales team or

you know, find insights from customer reviews of your competitors, just to understand what others are doing not so well, to put it bluntly, and where potentially your product could kind of triumph. Okay. And take these real world insights, feed them into an LLM of your choice. And then at the same time, build synthetic persona.

Okay. So you've got your real world insights, plus you're building some hypothetical persona asking chat GPT, for example, to create your customer's persona based on your product, what problem you're trying to solve, all that good stuff. And with the real world data, plus the synthetic, you can generate some extremely interesting go to market strategies. Now.

ChatGPT is not going to always give you the perfect output. Let's be honest. And there are hundreds of prompt engineering tactics you can use to refine your outputs and get high quality ones instead. But I think that that's one of the game changes that I would love to bring to the table today in the validation process. You do not have to send out surveys. You do not have to knock door to door asking people their opinion. You can if you want to, but that was the old...

paradigm. And now what we can do is gather data in real time, pair it with synthetic data and get really interesting positioning statements. can segment entire markets, find that top performing segment for what we're trying to do in terms of cost per click, cost per lead, customer acquisition costs. You know, we can do lots of forecasting based on asking ChatGPT for insights, but

giving it an idea of real world data, not just playing with questions and answers in a bubble. It's also, I think, really important when you're using LLMs to get these ideas in real time to also look at real world data that you produce. Example, I...

For my recent clients, I created a series of smoke tests where we were driving traffic to a waiting list to see if the product would have some kind of demand, some kind of pent up demand that we could then release when the product was released on the App Store and Play Store. And, you know, I did a whole simulation with synthetic data.

and customer reviews of competitive products to come up with a whole paid ads campaign that would drive traffic to this waiting list and get the signups. But then I also did some additional.

I mean, using SurveyMonkey, nothing particularly posh or flashy, to then get some real world insights based on what kind of visuals the target would respond to, what kind of messaging the target would respond to more than another option, and the parity between...

the outputs from the LLMs and the real world data was pretty impressive. Like, I mean, it was almost spot on in terms of being similar. And that gave me confidence that when you're using LLMs, you can see that there is quite a lot of accuracy.

with the insights they give you, the ideas it gives you. But I still don't believe that AI is, I think it's still in its ugly baby phase, meaning, you know, it does sometimes take you down the rabbit hole. It sometimes does hallucinate and lead you astray. So, you know, the benefit is you get insights fast. You can go to market with your scrappy tests on paid ads pretty fast, but...

you should always be backing up what you get from an LLM with some kind of real world data, be it two examples I gave, customer reviews of competitive products on TrustBiler or Common Sense Media, et cetera, or through doing your own survey through a medium like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey. There are billions of them.

Yeah, and that was my question is that when you were talking, I'm like, okay, how, where am I grabbing this data? And you're calling it synthetic data. So it's not real world data, but there's so much data at our fingertips. I'm like, okay, where do I start? And you just gave a couple of examples of like, if I go to Trustpilot or if I go to like reviews, if I, know, and it could be of my product, but also my competitors products to really help differentiate.

but garbage in, garbage out. So really making sure that you are creating. And for those of you that are like project users, custom GPT users, this is a perfect place for you to create your own project, depending on the LLM you use, and feed it what you want, that good data. And make sure it's only using that data, by the way, because I was making a funny face when you were like, just make sure it's on point, because sometimes LLMs, and for me, I'm a bigger chat GPT user,

is that it'll make assumptions. And if you say, please stick to just this data as much as possible. But are there any sources of data that you would recommend to pull from if I'm just feeling a little lost from this conversation? How do I set up my own project to start this persona to help validate a bit more?

Yeah. So, I would grab yourself a template, you know, a classic marketing template of what you should put in terms of data for a user persona.

So you're going to have your classic, you know, demographics, psychographics, all that good stuff, right? And, know, you can be as detailed as you want. Obviously the more detailed you get, the more specific the answer, which is great when you're pre-seed and you're trying to go to market. You do need a beachhead persona. You don't want to mass market because unless you've got a lot of capital to spend, you're going to need to go in narrow and specific and then build out from there.

right? So I would, you know, basically form and, you know, a persona based on those kind of markers. You're already going to know from your initial testing with, you know, friends and cousins and your other founder peers, you know, like what kind of person is going to take to this product a bit more than others. Obviously you've just got clues at this stage, but you know, you've probably got something to go on.

Build out your persona, copy and paste that those bullet points into chat GPT adds to that, you know, a whole bunch of copied and pasted customer reviews of competitive products. And I mentioned competitive products, Ilana, because before launch, a lot of companies don't have reviews, you know, like they don't have their own feedback on Reddit or.

Quora, you know, like they just, or even anywhere, right? So that's why I was saying, lean into your nearest and dearest competitor reviews and, and, and use that as a, as a, as a source of info. And then from there, you know, you can start, well, this is kind of cool. Actually, you don't have to ask chat GPT, give me.

Give me your go-to-market strategy now that you've got all this context. You can actually have a, I don't know if I should mention this, I'm going to sound completely crazy, but you can actually have a conversation with the persona that you create. I think this has been one of the most enriching experiences using AI. Some people call it prompt chaining because you're...

getting an output, you're asking a question, getting an answer. Then you're asking an additional question to narrow down and then getting a narrower answer and so on and so forth. But actually you can almost treat it like an interview, know, written interview where you'll say, okay, you're the persona, you've got all your data, you know who you are. This is what the competitors are doing. This is where they're not doing so well and this is where they're succeeding.

My product is this. What do you think about it? you know, the LLM will give you an answer as if it's talking to you from the perspective of this persona you've built, this Frankenstein that you've built. So it's actually, again, not necessarily something to completely rely on. I always like to back up what the outputs are telling me with, as I said, real world data that I source myself from a survey.

But prompt chaining has allowed me to create positioning statements extremely fast. It's allowed me to then put those positioning statements into a meta ad campaign and see the results after 10 or 14 days and go, we're totally on target for all our funnel metrics. So this must be telling us something. And then there's confidence then that we can start putting more money into these campaigns.

or taking these messages across other owned channels like websites or organic social media, because we see it's hitting the mark. yeah, I guess that's, that's probably one practical application of AI when it comes to validating a product with a, with a narrow, like a beachhead persona or a wedge market.

Yeah, and I love that you created a persona and you get to talk to it. Like I could see that almost being a custom project where like this is this persona and I can ask it whatever I want to. Like, hey, would this resonate with you or hey, where do you spend your time generally? And you know, if I'm doing this campaign, what are the key words? Like what's the priority here? I love that. And then once you start with personas being that foundation, it's really critical because in EdTech,

Thank

you

Mm.

a lot of times we get confused on who our primary audience is. So for example, I want my website just to talk to buyers. I want my demos just to talk to buyers. And maybe some influencers are along the way, but they all have to do with the purchasing process. But sometimes we get a little bit like, well, we help teachers. So we should talk about all the ways we help teachers, and we should talk to teachers, and we should have a blog. But let's talk to teachers in the blog. And then,

Hmm.

Well, we help students, let's talk there. And like, it just gets messy, right? So this really helps position and focus on who the buyer is and what do they really care about. Because at the ultimate day is, what is the marketing mechanism? Who is it talking to? And what's the ultimate goal of success? And we get muddied a little bit in education sometimes, and it's okay. But it's good to be able to have these resources that you can turn to, which I love.

Definitely. And you know, it's interesting what you say about EdTech. It's really easy for things to get like kind of crazy really fast because EdTech is not a very linear area in so far as your

really, it's almost like a web ecosystem because you're serving so many different communities, but nonetheless interlinked and helping one another. It's actually one of the reasons why I love the space. It's incredibly collaborative. And just because you're a teacher, it doesn't mean that you can't learn from a student or just because you're a parent doesn't mean that you're not allowed to, you know, talk to the teacher or somehow influence the teacher. it's, you know, there are certain trends.

that you see more often than not in terms of which way that the energy is flowing, you know, but I find that it's kind of the highlight of working in ed tech that you're working with so many different people who are helping one another. But in terms of marketing, you're right. It can get really complex really quickly. Who am I really speaking to? Who is the decision maker? Really? You know, is it the parents?

Is it the child? Is it the teacher? So yeah, I guess drawing that back to AI.

It's actually one of the questions you can ask. mean, you can build a persona that might be a parent and say, you know, now you've got all this context, you know, what, who's going to really help you make this decision? What's the buyer committee looking like in your world? You know, who do I need to convince other than you that this product is worth hanging onto?

So yeah, it's a complex world, but one that AI can help navigate.

Yeah, and we can dive into this topic for so many. Maybe we'll come on as your class starts evolving too, of all the cool things they're doing with AI. But any other kind of like, aha, or like, hey, if you're diving into AI, make sure you do this as a marketer. We have some lightning round questions around AI too. But any last thoughts around AI? Because we talked a little bit about parts of the go-to-market process. Obviously, that's a whole workshop in itself.

Thank

But is there any kind of last moments around, okay, here's what I've been, I don't know, this is such a big topic. I'll just pass it to you of like one final thought around AI. We'll have a lightning round too.

Okay.

Just one, are you sure, Alana? Okay. Okay. There is a lot of hype around AI, let's accept that. But one of the best use cases and one of the most prevalent use cases of AI in ed tech and beyond is drum roll prototyping. Meaning that anyone now...

from any team in a company can create stuff that normally they'd have to wait for their colleagues over in product or design or engineering to kind of cobble time together to actually deliver on their behalf. But the marketer these days can go, you know what? I'm gonna use Lovable and I'm gonna create an entire app and I'm gonna see if it actually works for my focus group.

And they can do that in literally five minutes. Whereas previous to platforms like Lovable existing, you would have to spend an inordinate amount of time and money from the engineering and IT and I don't know which team to build that. I was speaking to a friend who works over in Bangalore in India and he's an app developer. works on Unity.

And he was saying exactly the same thing. AI is not taking over our jobs. AI is allowing us to prototype at a speed that allows us to validate products with small groups much faster.

and much more cheaply than we would have ever been able to do. So I guess that's my final point. I don't think the robots, you know, da, da, da, da, da are here to take us and our jobs. I think that AI is proving to be the fastest way to prototype and get answers so we can get on with the business, the much more complicated business of going to market.

Yes. Like yes, yes, yes. And then personally, I'm excited to just, you've kind of inspired me to jump in and say, wow, what if I could create personas that are all my best friends and I can talk to them all the time as a marketer. my God. Game changer. All the other things you talked about with prototyping validation. Yes. But this will help center me always and have that as marketers, sometimes we feel alone. And even if you have a team.

you feel alone. You never, you're always second guessing because there is no right answer. There's a lot of signals. There's a lot of experience behind your belt, but things are shifting all the time. And so if you can have a buddy that is your audience and you have all other things too, but like that for me was a little bit of a light bulb moment, which I hope was for our audience. So let's jump into the lightning round. For those of you that don't know something that we've been introducing in our podcasts for the last couple of episodes, people have loved it and

There's so much to get wisdom out of our guests. I might ask them things that we didn't talk about, which is really nice. One word, one phrase, answers, we will go quick. Okay, one mistake you wish every marketer would stop making.

Not talking to customers on Zoom calls, like a lot. When I say that I do this, sorry, this is not very lightning of me, right? I'm going too deep. But like when I say to a founder or...

or someone that I do this, like I actually make a point of getting the customers emails, inviting them to a Zoom call, talking to them for 15 minutes. And I do it every single week with different people. I think they think that, know, no, why do you do that? Like that's kind of, that's kind of junior. Ew. You know, and I'm like, you don't understand. I was taught by Professor Mark Britson. He is a believer in actually talking to people to get those game changing gems that you value.

validate at scale and then you take to market. And that's exactly what I do. I live by that. So I wish that more marketers would stop thinking that it's the interns job. No disrespect to interns. I love them. I was one once upon a time, but talking to customers is something anyone at any level can do and should do.

Okay, favorite marketing tool you cannot stop using right now.

Lovable.

Okay, I will put a link to that in the show notes for those of you that have not heard about it. Your go-to AI prompt or custom GPT that you've made.

Niche Finder on ChatGPT, a game changer for people testing out business ideas and trying to get that really original, if we can say the word original idea for a business.

Okay, I'm gonna put that link in the show notes as well, because people are like, what, who, what, let's Google that. Okay, your one AI use case in marketing that you think is overhyped.

Well, the new chat GPT or Gemini release. I know some people are getting upset with me saying things like this, but it really got as boring as iPhones and the other half of the room is upset.

you

This is the holy grail question for marketers is the marketing channel you think provides the most leads if done well, obviously

I'm talking about EdTech, course. So short-term yield meta ads. Have to hand it to Zuck. For long-term, community events, if done well.

Yep. A simple question you wish more founders would ask their customers during discovery.

Okay, assuming they do the discovery themselves, what words did you type into Google or chat GPT when you were looking for a product like ours?

That is awesome. That is awesome because then you can reverse engineer that. One thing your students have taught you about AI and marketing that surprised you.

It shouldn't have surprised me, Alana, but the Gen Z master's students I teach are highly sensitive to data privacy over innovation. It left me pausing, like wondering what this new league of entrepreneurs are going to be doing because data is kind of our blood, our lifeblood, right?

as marketers to understand the world around us to better serve it. But yeah, that was something surprised me.

Yeah, all right, last question. The skill you most want early career education marketers to build in the next two years.

Hmm, building agentic workflows with confidence. So as soon as you do the same task twice, you can swiftly automate it. That would be my one.

Awesome, okay, well I hope all of you listening said, wow, you got a little bit of tidbits, a little bit of tip strategy, maybe even just a, oh, I didn't think of it that way. That's why we're here, that's why I have awesome people like Kate on the podcast. Thank you so much for your time, Kate. For those of you that want to follow along and learn from Kate, how can they do that, Kate?

So we can connect on LinkedIn. Annoyingly, my LinkedIn URL is Busby Kate instead of Kate Busby, but I'm sure you can find me. I'm based in Barcelona. And I also belong to a collective of fractionals called Quiet Edge at quietedge.io. You can follow us there on Substack. We've got our LinkedIn and plenty of insights and actionable tips over there as well.

Thank you so much, Kate. And for those of you saying, gosh, I don't know how to spell Kate's last name, it is B-U-S-B-Y. Follow her along. I will continue to learn alongside her. We will put all of the resources in these show notes as well. So thanks, everybody, for joining. We'll see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care, everyone.