Mystery Science

Mystery Science: best-in-class STEM curriculum as a service to schools

Sam describes Mystery Science, founded by ex-Google/teacher operators, which delivers ready-made science video lessons that pause to pose curiosity-driven questions, sparing elementary teachers the hard work of prepping experiments. It raised ~$3-6M, is profitable doing over $10M/year, and claims 50% of US elementary schools use it.

“And so they're like, look, we're gonna be science education as a service to elementary schools. Raised a little bit of money, like maybe $3 million, $6 million, something like that. Profitable company, they're doing millions of— I believe over $10 million a year in business. 50% of elementary schools, they say, use them. So they have like massive penetration just with elementary school science education.”

Steal thisSell a done-for-you curriculum that removes the hardest prep work from teachers, then let it spread teacher-by-teacher like Slack.

Selling to schools: enterprise sales cycle without the enterprise price tag

Sam shares the Mystery Science founders' warning about edtech: schools force you through a slow, bureaucratic enterprise sales cycle but won't pay enterprise prices. The mitigation is designing for teacher-led, bottom-up adoption (like Slack) rather than top-down CIO/district decisions.

“It's an enterprise sales cycle without the enterprise price tag. So you got to go through the slow bureaucracy, but you don't get to charge $100 grand or a million dollars a year.”