What Happens When a Tech Company Needs an Education Story?

Labster came to LXD Research to help make sense of a new market segment: high school students. The company had anecdotal evidence that the platform was a good fit for that age group, but anecdotes aren’t a sales strategy, and Labster needed to understand the “why” behind them. The timing complicated things further — this was in the years just after the pandemic, when educators were stretched thin and had little bandwidth for research conversations. Labster initially wanted something modest: a simple voice-of-the-customer study to fill in the gaps.

What it got instead was a shift in how the company thought about evidence altogether.

Why Did ESSA Evidence Change Labster’s Whole Strategy?

April Ondis remembers reaching out to Dr. Rachel Schechter specifically because of her background with Lexia and other companies in the high school space. That conversation ended up reframing the whole engagement. “She explained the ESSA evidence in our meeting, which crystallized our opportunity,” April recalls. “She introduced us to the need for evidence-based research claims for our whole company. I knew that pursuing ESSA was very important.”

The market Labster was chasing shifted, too. “As Labster progressed, we transitioned away from the high school segment, and she transitioned very neatly with us to higher education,” April says. “And that’s where we focus today: higher education in the US.” ESSA isn’t a formal requirement in higher ed the way it is for K-12 districts, but the underlying evidence still matters — arguably more, since so few competitors have it. As April puts it, it’s “a critical gap that our customers tell us that other edtech companies can’t fill, because they’re primarily unsupported claims.”

How Did a Digital Promise Certification Open the Door?

Digital Promise was Labster’s first gateway into being recognized as a research-based company. The platform’s founder had been generating research since 2014, and over the following eleven years, educators around the world had built on that base. What Labster didn’t have was a coherent way to tell that story. LXD Research took the scattered body of prior research and organized it into a single, credible impact narrative — proof that the platform’s design decisions were informed by evidence, not just intuition.

The payoff was immediate and, by April’s account, a genuine differentiator. “We were the first in our category to have that certification, which turned heads in the marketplace,” she says. “For our outbound sales, we would reference it and begin to get more responses. We were a tech company trying to understand education, and Dr. Rachel had the education-related experience and knowledge to connect to our software. We only knew about Digital Promise after meeting Dr. Schechter.”

What Does an Unplanned Equity Finding Mean for a University Partner?

The partner institution behind the second study happened to be a Hispanic-serving institution, and the students who benefited most from improved retention were disproportionately female and Hispanic. April calls this “huge” — not a strategy Labster set out to pursue, but one that let the company connect its outcomes data to a university’s own mission. Higher-ed institutions are under constant pressure to retain students and protect tuition revenue lost to attrition in STEM courses during the second and third year. A platform that measurably reduces that attrition speaks directly to that pressure.

Dr. Schechter’s role didn’t stop at the numbers. She wrote a leading commentary explaining the results and, per April, “shaped our messaging because she’s so familiar with the challenges that face modern education, whether it’s high school or higher education, from pre-K through 12 through university.” That included building an initial infographic that Labster has since adapted, rebranded, and continued to iterate on.

Has the Evidence Actually Changed How Labster Sells and Retains Customers?

By April’s account, yes — concretely. Labster now brings this data directly into university conversations, and it has changed both the tone and the outcome of outreach. “We’ll send an email saying, did you know that your peer at a highly regarded university in Texas has discovered these findings? And then they often say, tell me more,” April explains. Even when a prospect’s own institution isn’t the one in the data, buyers want confirmation they’re choosing a top-performing product — and that curiosity is turning into more meetings.

Retention has followed the same pattern. Customers six, nine, or twelve months in are renewing because the outcomes data keeps making its case for them. “Before, we needed help even to get a conversation going,” April says. “Our evidence from LXD Research has helped us become stickier.”

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