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Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
The Secret Playbook to EdTech Sales with Starbridge CEO Justin Wenig
This is a very special episode featuring our sponsor, Starbridge. Justin Wenig, Founder and CEO of Starbridge, joins us to discuss how school spending creates barriers to EdTech innovation. Justin previously co-founded Coursedog, scaling it to over 300 institutions and a nine-figure exit. With Starbridge, he’s now helping EdTech businesses navigate public sector procurement using AI to identify and close their best-fit leads.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why broken procurement processes are blocking EdTech innovation.
- The “illusion of competition” in RFPs and how incumbents stay ahead.
- The hidden rules of public sector procurement.
- Practical go-to-market strategies for EdTech startups trying to break through.
- How AI is reshaping sales, procurement, and personalization in EdTech.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:05:16] The hidden “unwritten rules” of school purchasing that keep new companies out.
[00:13:17] Why most RFPs aren’t competitive and how this harms innovation.
[00:23:26] Justin’s blueprint for redesigning the school procurement system.
[00:29:50] How Starbridge uses AI to help EdTech companies find and close the right leads.
[00:34:48] The future of sales: AI-powered outreach vs. human relationship building.
[00:43:09] Can AI finally bring fairness and transparency to public sector purchasing?
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🎉 Presenting Sponsor/s:
This season of Edtech Insiders is brought to you by Starbridge. Every year, K-12 districts and higher ed institutions spend over half a trillion dollars—but most sales teams miss the signals. Starbridge tracks early signs like board minutes, budget drafts, and strategic plans, then helps you turn them into personalized outreach—fast. Win the deal before it hits the RFP stage. That’s how top edtech teams stay ahead.
This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
[00:00:00] Justin Wenig: At the root of an enormous number of problems, a number of societal problems, a very broken public procurement process. I think nothing less than educational attainment and chronic absenteeism and all these problems that affect schools live and die by basically the way that these schools spend money, right?
And the way that a business and a market that. Is really supposed to be transparent at its core.
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[00:01:12] Alex Sarlin: We are here with Justin Wenig. He's the Founder and CEO of Starbridge, an AI powered platform designed to help EdTech businesses identify and close their best fit leads. Previously he co-founded CourseDog the leading academic operations platform for higher education, which grew to serve over 300 institutions.
Recognizing the complexities of public sector procurement. Justin founded Starbridge. To simplify these challenges and provide businesses with the tools to succeed in public sector, go to market. Justin Linig, welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:01:44] Justin Wenig: Alex, thanks so much for having me. Really excited to be here.
[00:01:46] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. So first off, give us a little bit of a feeling of your background.
What brought you into education technology? What led you to found Course Dog in higher education and now what are you doing with Starbridge today?
[00:01:58] Justin Wenig: Yeah. Thanks again for having me Alex. So, you know, my background is I like almost every other university student on the planet about six and a half years ago, got super frustrated when trying to enroll in the computer science classes that I wanted to take and found the whole enrollment process really challenging and founded my first business called Course Dog, which was really just intended initially to solve a pain point that I had.
Around the student navigation process of. Classes and career planning and course dog over the span of about six and a half years evolved into a business now that employs 150 folks. We work with 300 universities and was really fortunate to grow the business and have a nine figure majority exit to a private equity firm.
JMI. I'm still very involved in the business on the board of directors, but really for me, what got me super excited about Starbridge is. I learned a lot about how difficult it is to navigate the school procurement process through my own journey. Of course, dog and I really developed a thesis, and I'm sure you'll see throughout the podcast some of my traumas and frustrations.
Perhaps will I. Play out any answers, but I really developed a strong thesis that at the root of an enormous number of problems, a number of societal problems, a very broken public procurement process, I think nothing less than educational attainment and chronic absenteeism and all these problems that affect schools live and die by basically the way that these schools spend money.
Right? And the way that a business and a market that. Is really supposed to be transparent at its core. By definition, being a public market is actually probably the most untransparent market on the planet where entrepreneurs and innovators fighting uphill battle from day one against the nuances of procurement and bids and FOIA and all of the challenges that are unique to this market.
And so. Starbridge really came out of, again, kind of a personal empathy point, which was, man, wouldn't we have a better and brighter world if this market was fully transparent where innovators and entrepreneurs could compete on their products merits rather than their ability to work a system or learn a playbook of how to basically hack at a broken pedagogy.
[00:04:30] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, strong feelings and I, I think I get where you're coming from. I mean, as somebody who consults with a lot of early stage ed tech companies, they almost universally say the hardest thing to do is break into this complex, opaque system where they actually get in front of the right type of decision makers where they get.
Noticed where they're able to engage in RFPs, but also just break through the noise and just be even noticed as a new competitor, a new entrant in the field. And it is surprising for, as you say, a public sector, how complex it is and how hard it is for them to sort of get meaningful insights into what works.
And I, I know you've been on both sides of that, as you mentioned, so I'm sure you have a ton of, of experience with it. So let's dive right in. What do you think are the pieces of it that are most broken?
[00:05:16] Justin Wenig: Yeah, it's funny sometimes when I start to talk about this, I joke with people I'm playing whistleblower.
I kind of have to like look around and I'm like, oh man, I hope that nobody listens to this. But I hope that we have a big audience for this one. But look, I think that there's a bunch of stuff. Let me talk through some of them. And the way that I think about, so first is, let's just talk about it, is what I'll call.
The illusion of competition. So a long, long time ago in the United States, and the United States has done a great job of rooting out corruption, and that's fantastic that we have a formal bid process and formal procurement processes that have done a good job of rooting out corruption. But what it's also meant is that a lot of these well-intentioned rules create enormous complexity.
And slow cycles of decision making within these bureaucracies, right? And so what ends up happening is that both companies. And schools want to basically do what they can within the letter of the law that makes the process more innovative. And what ends up happening is there's all these weird kind of unwritten rules.
For example, any vendor would go, you don't bid on cold RFPs. Well, if you went online and you said, what's an RFP? An RFP is intended to foster competition. No. 90% of RFPs are written for someone you have to get in before the RFP, right? And so this is just one example of which I'll talk about more, where there's this whole unwritten rules of procurement that just doesn't line up with what you would read online in a textbook, right?
A second one is what I'll call misaligned incentives and accountability. So. Look in most of education budgets are used or lose it. What that literally means is that you actually lose credibility and power within an organization when you choose to save money. And so a lot of the times purchase decisions and procurement decisions are around random events.
I got a giant pot of gold money at my doorstep and now I gotta spend it. Right? And additionally. You know what that means? On the flip side, and this is why it's so hard to unroot incumbents, there's no success that comes from saying something was a failure. Like in the private sector, you know, I tell my people, you gotta take risks, you gotta innovate.
Not everything's gonna go perfect, right? If in a school you say, yeah, I purchased this thing and it didn't work. The only thing that you get is you get a lot of skepticism the next time you come around to presenting an idea. And so the whole culture is around risk aversion and the incentives are that even if you're blowing a ton of money on something, that doesn't matter.
Even if you overhired, even if you did this or that, there's literally an anti incentive to raise your hand and say that something is going wrong. Okay. A third example is that. Literally the government, the schools don't make their purchases public. I mean, I just don't understand how people don't talk about this moral You read every week now it's like Doge found this contract and that contract, like at least at the federal level, the contracts are public.
It's not public at the education or state, local level. The only way you get this is you send 110,000 freedom of information, a request you have to pay in some schools and states to get the data. And it's like wrangling. It's just, it's crazy to me again, that a market that is a public market that's supposed to be transparent in the United States of America doesn't make its purchase data public.
Okay, A fourth thing. There are so many hacks and loopholes in this system that are built for big businesses and incumbents to work the system that small businesses can't even access. Okay, here's an example. If you are a big business, you oftentimes get access to what's called a cooperative vehicle, and what this means is that all of a sudden you have a haul pass to avoid a formal procurement or bid process.
You literally, it's like, Hey, I got my hall pass. Okay. You don't have to worry about procurement. And everyone's like, great. How did we create a country where the biggest, most incumbent businesses could effectively buy a hall pass out of a public procurement and formal bid process where small companies actually are discriminated against?
It's not only that they can't afford them. These cooperative processes are oftentimes created. It's basically like, you know, you're in there, you're a winner, you get the hall pass. The small business doesn't get anything. And this kinda leads into my final point. The whole system is built to make it hard for small businesses and minority women, MWBE businesses, the whole system is tipped against these businesses, right?
So some of you, you might say that. Every once in a while, certain states, like in New York or in California, they'll get all excited about it and they'll say, okay, we're gonna make it easy for you as a small business, or we're gonna create a highway for you. You're gonna be able to, if you have a certain status, we're gonna make you more likely to win.
And then what happens is on sometimes in these RFPs, again, RFPs being. Fake theater for procurement in these RFPs. They'll end up basically saying, oh, you know, we'll give you extra points if you're an MWBE or an s and b. Okay. And then on the ground, if you're an actual decision maker, your whole framework of evaluating stuff, if someone comes to you and is like, I'm some small business, I don't know what they're doing, you have no incentive to go and buy that product.
And so what happens is you have this weird tension between people on the ground. Don't really wanna buy products that the school down the road hasn't purchased. But then from a legislative perspective, there's oftentimes these weird loopholes where it's like if you're an MWBE or an SMB, you get credit.
And so what ends up happening is this weird thing where big businesses will start randomly calling up small businesses and MWBE businesses and being like, Hey, can we partner together on these bids? Or Can I make it look like you are the one that's selling the products? Right? Or, can you be the reseller of my product, or can I have you provide services in my contract?
Okay. And these businesses, it's like I'm a baseball guy. Imagine you've got a whole farm system of. Prospects of these MWBEs and these small businesses and whatever, and you got all these batters, they come into the league and they're top prospects and they're shortstops. Or they're outfielders or whatever.
It's, and imagine like all of a sudden you call 'em up and you say, all right, you're on the mound. It's not like these businesses are getting called for their services. They're getting called for their status, like they're being discriminated against for being small businesses or MWBEs for their services.
They're being called in as tokens for points on an RFP. And I just think that's a shame because prospects, if you think about what ideal procurement should look like, it actually should be the opposite. It should be if I'm the school that takes the bet. On the innovator and that innovator ends up transforming the market and being a very successful company.
That to me should actually, you should get money, you should get grants. You should be like you were the scout that created a whole new wave of innovation throughout the market, right? And instead what happens is you end up giving little cups of tea to the innovator in areas that they don't even want to help you in.
Because of some political hack, right? So all of these are ways in which this system is broken. It is unfair to small businesses. It is while not corrupt, it is entrenched and bureaucratic, and I really hope that companies and legislation changes in a way where these problems end up getting solved.
[00:13:17] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, so many of the points you're making, which I think are very valid, I believe they come from the sort of odd position of education in the social hierarchy in the us, right?
It's a public good. It's something that is well funded. I mean, we do put a lot of money into education, so there's a lot of money flowing around in there, but because there's a lot of money flowing around in there, there's lots of capitalist competitive incentives for companies and. Incumbents, as you mentioned, to sort of try to tilt the rules in their own favor.
And then there's lots of incentives throughout the system to not shake up what is quote unquote working. Even though I think working is a very relative term, because often nobody is admitting what's happening, the outcomes, they're often not very good, but this feeling of, oh, the system sort of feeds itself.
And then when new entrants try to come in, they just hit up this wall and all these unspoken rules. Let's dig into. If you are one of these, whether it's a minority or women owned business, whether it's a small medium business or whether it's just an innovative startup right now with any kind of founder, what is the experience of an innovative EdTech product for somebody who's coming into the market?
What would advice would you give them? Yeah. About what they're gonna hit in this process that sort of favors incumbents?
[00:14:31] Justin Wenig: Yeah, and the one thing I'd say is I use the incumbents term loosely. So to be clear, I think big businesses. If you think about, for example, generative ai, I mean generative AI only exists and all of this good that came from it came because Google had so much profit that they were able to research and tie this off.
So I wanna be clear, like. My point is not necessarily about a certain size of business, it's more about the idea that innovation and doing anything new in this market is so obscure and difficult regardless of the size of the business, right? And so that's where you can be the biggest business in the world.
And if you see a problem and you wanna solve it, it's like you're fighting this whole uphill battle again. Right. So that's the one nuance I would give. I think it's some of the things that I mentioned, right? One is that there's so much theater you need to learn in this market, right? Like you're kind of learning how to talk an unwritten language, that it's just really unfamiliar and that you can't read about on them.
The internet. Two is you're desperately stabbing. I mean, you look at. Every one of the companies that succeeds in this space, they start in small school in California, and then they get another small school in California. And then you're gonna have to be collect, you know, whatever scraps you get. It's like a one scrap at a time type of thing.
Right? And you gotta, these scraps are not relevant to these scraps. And so. Another is like you have to create localized and often hyper-specific to certain agencies or schools' momentum. Right, right. Look, another one is that these markets, unfortunately because of the way procurement works, the success of companies and innovators is so dependent on go-to market, and by the way, like being starbridge, being a go-to-market company, I wish it wasn't that way.
Seriously, it would be a better world if. Products were evaluated on their merits and other things like that. But truthfully, like what I've seen be most correlated for success for new innovators and companies is like, how many personalized emails and calls did you make in the last 10 days? And how good are you?
Let me see your sales deck and your hvat and your SOC two and your this and you're that. And did he get on Texas DIR and all these things, right? Become super important. And then a fourth thing that I think is unhelpful and is actually changing in this new AI world is I think that many founders get into this space because it's very mission driven, right?
But I think that a lot of VC hype. And general VC behavior is such that because these markets are slow to get off the ground, they're often looked down upon a little bit. And I think that's a shame because it just creates, I mean, a massive societal misallocation of resource toward people working on the boring.
Thing that has no impact on the world versus, Hey, let's actually like solve the most important problems for my kids, for my future kids, for the world. So a fourth one is I think that there's been a long history of you can't build a good education selling company. It doesn't get that big, it's this and that.
And I think that's changing, to be honest. I think that there's a lot of excitement right now. The most excitement I've seen throughout my life in terms of AI and all the changes that are happening. But it's certainly not a helpful base challenge to get over for folks that are innovating in the space.
[00:17:53] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I agree. Let's talk about the public purchases piece. 'cause I agree, this is really confusing. I, I wanna give a little pitch here to a small organization called the Center for Education. Marketplace Dynamics. Yeah, yeah. They're great. Is. Exactly, and they sort of realized how opaque this whole world was, how hard it was to even know who was using what curricula, who was purchasing what products, and they've been collecting a lot of data on it.
I think they're doing a great job, but the fact that they exist at all and that education really doesn't. Have the type of transparency that you have in many other parts of government, what do you attribute that to? I mean, I know it seems like just so strange. I don't know if you've looked into this. Why is it that the Tennessee State Department of Education just does not have to tell anybody what they're buying and how much they're paying for it?
[00:18:38] Justin Wenig: Yeah. Well, it's funny, I've gotten to know them and the folks who bill the gates very well, and it's unbelievable the work that folks are doing in this space to try to make these things more transparent. You think about math curriculum as an example, is. Gonna have a huge impact on the future of society, and the idea that it's literally impossible to understand what math curriculum schools use and what they spend on it is just, I think, a crazy, crazy thing that obviously needs to be solved and that companies like Starbridge and Folks Partners Center of Education Dynamics will solve.
But. Yeah, so let me tell you what the status quo is, and then how we got there. So the status quo is that in the United States, purchase information, contracts, et cetera, et cetera, the federal level, this information gets centralized via portals like sam.gov and fp ds. And it's funny, you read about this stuff with Doge and Doge talking about these things that it's still, nothing's ever perfect, but the data's actually there.
Okay? In educational institutions, you take the whatever, 20,000 K, 12 districts and the 2,500 public universities and whatever it is, and by law they have to give you this information. But for whatever reason, if you wanted to ask a simple question like. What are the math curriculum providers in California?
The only way that you could answer this is as follows. So one is you have to submit what are called Freedom of Information Act requests. So the way that this works is every school has a different process for requesting this data. Sometimes it's via web form, sometimes it's via a paper form. Sometimes via email, sometimes you have to send a fax.
Okay? And what happens is in some cases they might say, okay, you have to pay for this. And in other cases they'll say, okay, we'll give you the data, but it's gonna take a significant amount of time. And then when you get the data back, sometimes states have laws around, well, we don't want vendors to share their competitive advantage.
So there's certain information that's redacted and. Yada, yada. And sometimes you get the information back and it's in a flash drive and sometimes they won't give it to you at all because they're lazy and they don't want to do their job, is the honest answer. Right. And they're nervous because, by the way, I get it, like if I was a.
School official and all of a sudden someone's coming and breathing on my doorstep, like, let me get all your public safety contracts. It's not a nice feeling. Right. But what would've solved this in the first place is if it were just all public. Okay. Right. And it's interesting, like there is a lot of momentum toward making more of this information public.
You look at, not to get into politics, but like. But sounds kind of comedic, but you look at what Vik, Ramis Swami has said in Ohio, he is like, let's put all the public purchases on the blockchain. When I first heard that, I was like, I don't know what the blockchain has to do with it. But yeah, I mean, it's not a bad idea to be able to understand how purchases exist.
Right, and so what ends up happening is that companies solve this in one of two ways. They either go and they make these one-off requests themselves and they quickly learn how difficult the entire summit is, and they only make a few a year because it's difficult. Or they partner with a company like a Starbridge who goes and gets this data at scale for them and gets the contracts and has figured out how to.
Deal with all this nonsense and et cetera, et cetera, right? How did we get here? I mean, we got here because of a balance of private and public interests. That is understandable. So we got here because of, oftentimes private businesses didn't wanna share their competitive intelligence and advantage, and it seemed, I.
That this could be, and they argue that this would be nefariously exploited. And I can understand that coming from a business perspective, that having a market be totally transparent can hurt your competitive advantage. I think so in defense, there's a really good reason why some of this information should get redacted, right?
We shouldn't have on the internet, the US' missile strategy. Okay. But unfortunately at the education level, a lot of companies and states have ended up mis engineering these kinds of concerns. Like what happens if we accidentally publish the missile plan to just an overall opaque process that's protectionist in areas that it shouldn't be, right?
Where. I'm in Tennessee, a guy who has an ID in Tennessee needs to call and needs to sue some other company in order to get them to unlock their contract. And so I think that the tide is changing with public sentiment, moving toward enhanced government efficiency and more transparent procurement. But we're certainly not there yet at this point.
[00:23:01] Alex Sarlin: So there are so many things about this that don't make full sense, even if they are defensible, even if there's sort of reasons behind some of them, they don't make sense in practice. If you had the chance, you are obviously passionate about this. If you had a chance to redesign the school procurement process, what changes would you make to make sure that both vendors and schools are better supported to getting the outcomes they actually want with the money spent?
[00:23:26] Justin Wenig: Yeah, I mean, one picking up on our last topic, I think obviously sunlight's, the best disinfectant. This information should be public. Right, I agree. Two is the market legislation and legislation and dollars should be tied to innovation and outcomes, right? So I think there needs to be a total rethinking of the way that the budgeting, like use it or lose it dollars.
And what happens if I take a bet on a small business and I'm super successful and it, and it ends up scaling and creating my, you know, contributions as a school to getting a vendor off the ground. End up coordinating throughout the entire system. I think there needs to be positive incentives to that, right?
I think a lot of these hacks and loopholes have to get, you know, that enable incumbents to create moats. Whether it's things around certain bad actors and cooperative contracting or you know, whether it's in the use of lobbyists, whether it's in the use of piggybacking clauses, whether it's, you know, I think a lot of these could get closed.
And then, you know, last but not least, I think there's a cultural ethos that's starting to change. This is not about, you know, legislation, but a cultural ethos needs to change where again, you know, this innovation is rewarded and risk people are allowed to take risks and fail, and that, you know, failure can be celebrated rather than seen as a, uh, career, you know, setback.
[00:24:46] Alex Sarlin: An idea there that really jumps out to me is the concept of positive incentives for schools or districts, you know, that show particularly. Good results with outcomes-based contracting. I mean, what an amazing world that would be if you have a district who had a positive incentive to try something that they truly believe would work, and that if it does work, there's a huge upside to that because that is strangely not really part of the system.
Right, right now.
[00:25:08] Justin Wenig: Yeah. What an awesome world it would be if the legislation and procurement officials and policy makers could. Contribute positively to a new wave of public-private partnerships that would change the world where it's not just ai, but it's actually an ethos that is about, let's you know, innovate, baby.
Innovate, right? Yes. Like, let's see what we can do together. So.
[00:25:31] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. A lot of the people who listen to this podcast are ed tech founders, and we have people who've founded their own company. We certainly have operators at large ed tech incumbents. Some of the ones that probably know, know exactly how these processes look from the inside and maybe would defend them or say, I know it sucks, but it's good, you know, good for us.
Let's take the role of the smaller company just for now, because we have a lot of listeners like that. So, if an EdTech startup is starting to break into this complex system mm-hmm. And they need an outbound sales strategy, they need to be able to get noticed and get considered and get, you know, enclosed with different districts or school, individual schools at times, or even states at times.
What would you consider good go to market? What should they do? Given all of the sort of headwinds Yeah. That are baked into the process.
[00:26:16] Justin Wenig: Yeah, so I think it all starts from your unique value proposition and your product marketing, right? So my best advice for early stage companies is that people in this market are actually pretty transparent about how they feel about products.
And the first thing you gotta do is you just gotta cold the call and send emails like crazy and get in front of a bunch of folks and. You know, here, understand deeply what their challenge is and then figure out what your unique value proposition is. Right? Once you've kind of gotten a good sense of that, you're starting to get, you know, eyes be opened on demos, or you've got your first contracts or you know, whatever it is.
I think that there's some tactical stuff that's really important, so I. First off, like let's just talk about for the 80% of companies, what a go-to-market motion, even like what are the primary channels that are usually set up first? For most companies, it's gonna be outbound in conferences, right? Like you're gonna reach out to people and you're gonna meet them at conferences.
Right? And really for most companies, like for my company at course, dog, I mean in the early days, 90%. For the first four or five years, 90% of our pipeline was driven through outbound, and for the majority of successful companies that I've seen in the space, outbound becomes a major focus very quickly.
Right. So what does good outbound look like? Right? Well, what good outbound looks like is it's really about. How do you communicate your unique wedge? How do you show that you are someone who is going to build a tight relationship, right? So you're not just like spamming them with nonsense and how do you scale it?
Like literally volume like is really important here, right? And so I think that these are the main factors, right? Which are, you know, basically how do you communicate your unique value proposition. How do you show that you're gonna be a good relationship and bridge builder and how do you scale? And so these are the three kind of fundamental principles, right?
What we do at Starbridge is we really help in a lot of ways with all three of these, right? So we haven't really talked about that much, but you know, what we do at Starbridge is we're trying to solve this problem. Where businesses are kind of grasping in the dark, trying to figure out who are the best fit customers for their products and services.
And we solve this problem by aggregating all of this information from schools around what are they buying, what have they bought in the past, when do their contracts expire? What grants have they gotten? Have there been relevant news articles? What are they talking about in their council meeting minutes?
Hmm. And we turn this basically into a list of, Hey, here's the 70 folks last week that mentioned a topic that was super relevant to your product or service, or said they had a problem with a relevant problem or that have an upcoming contract expiration. And we literally help you not only to find, Hey, here's the warmest customers that might be a good fit for your product, but here's some suggested messaging and here's the contact information of that person.
Right. And the power of this is that rather than going, you know, in the early days and saying, you know, 'cause you do wanna end up scaling to everyone, but you can also burn out your market in one day. Right. And so really tailored messaging to your. Best fit customers is so important, and that's kind of where starbridge helps, if that makes sense.
[00:29:29] Alex Sarlin: I think the insights into what they're talking about, you know, you mentioned earlier getting ahead of an RFP because if the system, if the RFP is often written, you know, for a particular company or an incumbent, then understanding what people are about to start looking for where they're at before they actually finalize and put that out feels like the key.
I know that's part of your thinking.
[00:29:50] Justin Wenig: Exactly, and we're ourselves a startup. You know, we're a year and a half old company. We work with about 80 companies in the space. From, like I said, some of the largest companies can be very innovative, like in structure to some of the earliest stage startups like a housing cloud or cyber nut or awarded.
And you know, it's really the KPI that we're oftentimes driving for these businesses is just. Way better success at booking outbound, you know, meetings, saving time and navigating procurement processes. And also adopting, like oftentimes we're playing revenue strategists and really helping these businesses think through their business processes.
'cause like I said, you know, you really gotta get that messaging down. You have to understand the channel well, and, and that's something we, we really work closely with, with a lot of our businesses.
[00:30:32] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Are there any common stakes that you see some of that you work with 80 companies and you run your own company and breaking into public sectors.
What mistakes do people tend to make that you try to help them avoid?
[00:30:44] Justin Wenig: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I put it into, it was Passover a couple of weeks ago, and we, you know, they, they say there's like the wicked one, and then, so I, I think about it as like there's the one who's like really on their high horse. I'm an ed tech founder, and then there's the one that like doesn't understand, they're an ed tech founder.
So here's how I would. Categorize these two personas, and I hope listeners will bucket themselves however appropriately. So let's talk about the high horse ed tech founder. Mm-hmm. Tech founder is like. I've got a relationship with Sally, like I have to hand write every email. I only go to conferences. I'm too nervous to send outbound campaigns because I don't want to ruin a relationship.
I have to get warm intros from everyone. You're like, totally, I can't do marketing. I can't do any, I can't learn anything about 30 years of what it means to do good B2B SaaS. Like I don't wanna send outbound campaigns, I don't wanna do personalization. I just wanna. Build relationships and write emails by hand and show up at conferences.
That's like one mistake founders make, and the mistake is that volume is successful. And automation and AI obviously can be a tool to show you are not spam, right? It's actually, it's kind of a weird thought to have, but the way to think about it is that the way a buyer perceives what is spam has changed a lot throughout the years and you gotta stay ahead of that.
Right. You actually, like if you're handwriting emails saying, Hey Sally, like this is what we do. I saw this on your LinkedIn. I mean, AI could do that 500 times better. Like literally, AI is like arguably so good now that if you don't include some ai, it's gonna be seen as spam or the amount of time you're gonna be spending per interaction is so high that it's not scalable.
So this is like one mistake I see folks make, right? The other mistake I see is like they just don't understand the uniqueness of the market. So they're like, oh man, I'm just gonna start. Blasting. I need an ai, SDR, I'm gonna start blasting away emails and I'm not, you know, I'm just gonna go crazy and I'm not gonna put any thought into relationships and I'm just gonna not worry about that.
And that's also a mistake.
[00:32:40] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm.
[00:32:41] Justin Wenig: Honestly, the cost of sending a bad email as you scale is pretty high. I mean, you know, you, you, you don't wanna ruin your reputation. You gotta understand like. A lot of channel like calling is super effective in this industry. I mean a lot of buyers like actually prefer I talk to some of them.
Some of them like I prefer you call me to be honest, you know, like, which is really interesting. Again, conferences can be very effective. The way you message around ROI is very different in this industry. When you start to talk about dollars and cents and. Headcount. You know, people start to get really cagey and nervous about that.
So I think that the beautiful blend is about how do you take the best of breed of AI and B2B SaaS and also blend these unique market eccentricities, like in the Starbridge case, how do I get contract expirations and meeting minutes and purchases and grants and RFPs and things that are very market specific intelligence and that are really relevant.
But how do I now blend that with a degree of scaled AI personalization, if that makes sense.
[00:33:34] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And you know, I hear the two sides of the spectrum that you're mentioning. The one where it's, you know, entirely relationship driven, very white glove, you know, you're reaching out to people individually, one-on-one, really trying to build it and sort of ignoring marketing tactics.
And then the other is. All marketing tactics and not even understanding how marketing tactics have to be bent to the education market. And so if you're holding people's hands too much and you're writing every email by hand, you don't get to scale. If you're scaling and spamming people with these massive, like you say, AI, sales development reps, but don't understand what they're actually looking for, then you can quickly alienate them.
So you have to find somewhere in the. That resonates with some of the things that I've seen in the market as well. Okay, so let's talk about this ai. That was an interesting point, the idea that even acting very personal sometimes, even when you think you're being very, very personal, that might actually be seen as ai because I've never heard somebody say that, but that seems very true and it's something to see a lot more of in the future.
So. Let's talk about ai. You are starbridge AI after all right? What do you do with Starbridge and generally, what do you think are the main capabilities of AI that really can empower ed tech companies to get their message out to close leads, to find the right type of partners to do pilots?
[00:34:48] Justin Wenig: Yeah,
[00:34:48] Alex Sarlin: it's a great question.
[00:34:50] Justin Wenig: The way that we think about it is that. You've got probably in your head an idea of who would be the best possible customer to buy your product, right? Like this is my dream customer, ideal customer profile, right? Yeah. They've got, they're talking about this, they've got this problem, they use this product.
You know, you've got that dream customer, right? And you've also got some dream email. That you would wanna write them, Hey, I saw you do this and that, and this is a problem, and this is, we work with these three schools that look exactly like you, so you got a dream customer and you got a dream email, right?
We think about AI as like helping you to find those dream customers and write those dream emails so that you can be doing this at scale and in the reviewer seat and the creative iterator seat rather than the implementer seat, right? So in Starbridge world, it's like you tell me you're like. Man, I'm building an AI tutor.
I want, this is exactly, this is like an AI forward CIO and they've got, you know, this tool and they hate it and they've got an upcoming expiration and they this and that. And that's exactly what we do. Like we'd find that person, we draft the email, we get their name, we'd get their contact, we get a summary of why we thought it was relevant.
And it would be totally automated. I mean, now you'd review, you'd say, Hey, is this what I wanna send? Hey, I know I actually know this person. I'm gonna add this one extra line. Boom, send, you know, and scale it. Right? So every week, right, you've just got a new set of, oh, you know, 'cause we're scanning the market, you know, 360 purchases, RFPs, meetings, grants, strategic plans, legislative changes, news, and it's like, boom, here's the ones you should reach out to.
Here's what we know about, you know, blah, blah, blah. Right? So I think that's where we're seeing it be quite useful. There's a lot of other use cases like, you know, a lot of businesses that respond to RFPs. We help use AI to, you know, like I mentioned, railing about the RFP process. And you know, I think that RFPs are just a huge tax on small businesses.
I mean, I, I normally tell small businesses don't even deal with RFPs. Like, you don't want to deal with that until you really have to. Right. And we use AI to kind of help automate the drafting process of these RFPs, saving companies a lot of time. So that they can put more time back into their product and, and their customers.
Right. And then I guess, you know, a final way, I would just talk about the way when you, we think like, what is my vision for what AI is going to look like when it comes to a sales or revenue process five or 10 years from now? Okay. Mm-hmm. The way I would think about it is that every company five or 10 years from now is gonna have, you're gonna have.
Far fewer of what I'll call certain roles like an SDR that's writing campaigns all day. It's really just that specific part of that role is gonna get abstracted away. Okay. The implementation details of running a campaign or. Spinning up, you know, account-based marketing, all these website landing pages or creating the graphics for your conferences or whatever, those implementation details are gonna get abstracted away, right?
But in five, 10 years from now, you're still gonna be in the constant pursuit of better messaging and alpha is what I'll call it, right? You're always gonna wanna, 'cause for example, in in horizontal world. And for a long time, job changes were a great signal. It was like, man, like if you could find when someone changed the job, if you send an email, they're super likely to respond.
And the way that the market's gonna evolve is, is AI makes signals and AI makes certain campaigns more ubiquitous. The value of them will actually go to zero. And so if there's one thing that's certain. You're gonna constantly be refining your messaging and testing and being creative and human about your marketing and about your sales, right?
And what you're gonna have is you're gonna have AI be a thought partner with you on that, but also help to abstract away a lot of the implementation details. Right? And so the companies that I see being most. Now are, they're thinking about that in advance. They're not saying, I'm gonna go hire 50 people to go write campaigns all day, or I'm gonna go hire six people to go, you know, just implement RFPs.
They're thinking about it more from, okay, how do I get, and this is my recommendation to a lot of these companies, think a little bit more about like the concept of a go to market engineer. You know, someone who's actually gonna be. Orchestrating these AI systems and blending it with the human personal level.
Right? And I think the best companies are gonna be, not everything AI can, everything cannot be done by AI right now, but they're gonna be on that journey and on that, that's how we think about at Starbridge, we're providing this bridge to this AI go to market future, which is this beautiful world where you're a creative, you are a marketer, you're a, you know, you're really just, the limit is just your imagination, right?
Yeah. And that's where I think things are gonna get really special.
[00:39:35] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Yeah, that's a fantastic answer. I really appreciate the way you are sort of framing, you mentioned abstract in away that certain pieces of it, especially the implementation details, can be absorbed by an AI tool. But the ideation, the creativity, the actual, you know, understanding of the pain points of your users, understanding your own story, what your company does, what are the case studies you wanna feature.
Like there's a lot of very human. At least right now, there's a lot of very human pieces about if you're an EdTech founder about what you're doing, that you can be trying. You say, oh, I just talked to a, a current customer and they said something that really stuck with me about how much their life is better and how their students are so happy because of the tool I'm going to now, I.
Use the AI suite to craft a message around that, get that to the right type of people, get the, you know, figure out who's opening it and how to schedule calls and all those things that I love that sort of split between the ideation and the implementation. Yep. It feels like that's sort of true of a lot of different types of.
Work and in marketing and sales is, is no exception. And ed tech, marketing and sales, maybe even more specifically, because it's so hard to do the implementing, it's not easy to find the customers. If
[00:40:42] Justin Wenig: there's one thing I know, these customers are gonna wanna continue having deep human relationships. Sure.
And so it's not to mitigate the value of having human relationship builders on your team. It is to say that how do you create that ideal partnership between AI and humans, that humans can spend more time building relationships and being creative and less time in the implementation details. Right.
[00:41:02] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, you mentioned you starboard.
AI has been around about a year and a half. You have around 80 EdTech customers, people who are using the product to identify leads, find them, qualify, close them, you know, without, obviously we don't have to go into any specific customer, but I'd love to hear that. What that journey looks like a little bit for a company, how they move from what they were doing before, whether it was, you know, maybe to bespoke or just marketing tactics, you know, 1 0 1, what changes when they start moving to something like Starbridge and, and being able to get all sorts of data they haven't had.
Totally, totally.
[00:41:33] Justin Wenig: Well, what it looks like, and we're gonna have a bunch for those of you, I don't know when the podcast is coming out, but we're. Writing up a bunch of case studies right now. Right. I would honestly say right now we're in a great position where you could probably reach out to any of our customers and I think they'd be quite happy about the service at this stage.
But you know, I think that the way to think about it is Starbridge exists to help businesses like, you know, in ed tech businesses to solve a problem that they have, which is how do they find customers that would be good fits for their products and book meetings? Okay. And the way we do that is we'll hop on a call, we'll talk about how you're doing it today.
We'll really be a strategist with you of like, okay, what's your ICP? What's an ideal email look like? Let's reverse engineer it. Let's scale it. Let's personalize it. Let's have it be something you can do every week. You can iterate on. Let's get you out of the procurement nastiness of RFP drafting. Let's get you out of, you know, manual email research.
Right. I mean within three days. I mean, you can be launching, you know, some of our customers book seven, eight meetings, week one. I mean literally like they meet us on a Monday and like by Friday they booked like eight meetings. I mean, we have one case study we're coming out with right now on that. So I think that's the way that we think about it.
And then we continue to be your partner in building this AI go to market organization of your business, right? AI is gonna permeate through all these different workflows. You're gonna be in the future using AI to personalize your website, and you're gonna be using AI to. On your marketing campaigns and for so much more,
[00:43:01] Alex Sarlin: and we're gonna be your
[00:43:01] Justin Wenig: partner
[00:43:02] Alex Sarlin: in helping you to facilitate.
Yeah. Do you see a future where AI can help facilitate outcome-based contracting and sort of baking that into the process?
[00:43:09] Justin Wenig: It's a really
[00:43:09] Alex Sarlin: good question.
[00:43:10] Justin Wenig: You know, I think that the, we right now have been really focused, and I know some great companies that are working on the government and school side. You know, I know there will be a starbridge or companies that will be innovating on the side, but the position we're in right now is we're helping the innovators and the vendors to work within the constraints of a broken system and level the playing field, if that makes sense.
Yeah. And if there's more outcome-based ing, I'm sure it'll be successful for both sides. So I, again, I would, from a procurement perspective, I'd be a fan. Yeah. As long as it's executed well.
[00:43:41] Alex Sarlin: Right. That's key. One other thing that strikes me, I'd love to hear you comment on this, is you, you mentioned the sort of theater of a lot of this, the idea that RFPs sometimes are a little kabuki theater because they're, you know, you have to do the paperwork, you have to get a certain number of bids and people to write proposals, but the whole time you know where you were going if you're a particular district the whole time.
And it strikes me that theater and things that are very ritualized. Also very ripe for AI disruption. Yeah. So the idea of being able to do AI RFP submissions, do you see a future where schools are, Stu suddenly gonna see 10 times as many submissions to their RFPs because everybody's using AI to automate.
That's what we're
[00:44:18] Justin Wenig: seeing at Starbridge. A lot of companies come to us that we're never doing RFPs before because it was too expensive and now they're like, oh my gosh, I could five six X my RFP response rate. Right? Yeah. And by the way, some, that scares some people for me. I think that's a beautiful world.
Like I would love for there to be more. True fairness and competition in this RFP process where, you know, like I remember at Course Dog, you know, like there was one RFP that literally had Appendix A through P. I remember by the time I got to Appendix P, which was like the Iran divestment notarization form, I was like, I'm done.
I'm not doing this. Like I'm never gonna do this again. Right? And so I think it would be a great world, and that's the world that we're helping to facilitate at Starbridge, where you have the ability to scale and to compete and to be involved in the room and in the arena, because AI is helping to save you that time.
Right?
[00:45:16] Alex Sarlin: Because there's so much innovation happening in this space. There are so many ideas being blossoming everywhere in the ed tech space, partially 'cause of AI and other technologies and ideas. It's really exciting, this vision of one where I'm not anti incumbent either. I have interviewed many, many incumbent CEOs and and leaders, but I think the idea of it being much more based on outcomes on what the schools actually need rather than sort of business as usual autopilot.
We're gonna just renew with the same company because. Nobody wants to admit whether it's working or not. It feels like there is definitely some problems there. So as we go to, we're getting to the end of the hour, but this has been really, really interesting. We don't talk about procurement as much as we should.
Given how important it is for both for founders and for schools, what is the most exciting trend that you see coming in the ed tech landscape? You obviously built course dog into a huge business in the higher ed arena. You've been working very closely with. Dozens and dozens of EdTech companies. What do you see coming from your particular vantage point at Starbridge and OG that you think our listeners might wanna keep an eye on for the future?
[00:46:22] Justin Wenig: It might not be unique, but I think personalized learning's just gonna be incredible. I mean, and I think it's more than people give it credit for, like people have been trying to solve mental health in schools for forever. People have been trying to solve. Workforce challenges for forever. And I think at the crux of this is gonna be, you know, there's this beautiful vision that a lot of these companies have about, okay, what if like.
Your learning and your growth was just like really personalized from the get go, and I'm, I'm just excited about that trend overall with ai.
[00:46:52] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and it could be personalized to your needs or to your goals, or to your interests, or personalized learning as a term for me is a little bit of a loaded term because it just mean so many different things.
Right. But I very much agree with what you're saying. I think this has been the dream of educators forever is differentiation, individual needs, you know, however you wanna put it. Customization. So, yes, I hear you. And yeah, and that's I think, relevant to what you're doing with Starbridge as well because there's personalization.
You sort of have personalization baked into your product on both sides.
[00:47:23] Justin Wenig: And I'm lucky we get to work with a lot of these AI tutor and AI personalized.
[00:47:31] Alex Sarlin: I agree. We're getting there. I feel like we're heading fast towards a place where people can really visualize and really actually see the benefits of, of this personalized learning revolution. Yep. Thank you so much. This has been Justin Wenig. He is the founder and CEO of Starbridge AI and AI powered platform designed to help EdTech businesses identify and close their best fit leads.
Really interesting conversation. I learned a lot. Thank you so much for being here with us, Justin, on EdTech Insiders.
[00:47:57] Justin Wenig: Thanks Alex. Really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community.
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