Building an AI EdTech Company: College Guidance Network CEO Jon Carson (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double click down on pricing in all these different products. How has your pricing evolved? What was the pricing on the first version, which was just masterclass style?

Jon Carson: For the K-12 schools, the pricing has been $5 a student. We’re selling it by the seat. And it stayed there.

The colleges are different now. I’m framing it as a pilot year. I can’t show results yet. They all want to improve their yield, and I can’t show that yet. What I can show is data.

The pilot is being priced at $1,000 a month with a limit to the number of seats they can get into the system.

What I now understand, from talking to folks in college enrollment—a big industry—is that I’ll be able to charge a lot for that data once I get to critical mass. I think there’s going to be a secondary revenue stream around data packages. Not just my data, but also data from schools that look like mine, or are competitors. That data gets sold in different ways in that market.

Sramana Mitra: Speaking of competitors, who do you consider as competitors?

Jon Carson: I haven’t yet seen anybody who looks like us. So, it’s mostly indirect competition.

For K-12 schools, they have software systems. Do you know Naviance? It’s the dominant software system in high schools. The founder is on our board. Those systems are for workflow management between counselors and students. They could offer a solution for parents—they don’t, but they could. That’s one class of competitor.

Another class is independent consultants. For more affluent families, they’re the ones who take on the project. The parents don’t need help then.

Sramana Mitra: One I know is Empowerly. I’ve done their case study recently.

Jon Carson: Yes. It’s a business that sells to very rich families to give them an edge. That market has a number of players.

Sramana Mitra: We’ve done two of those case studies. Empowerly is one. The other is Prepory.

Jon Carson: I’ve not heard of Prepory.

Sramana Mitra: Same business, more or less.

Jon Carson: That’s what I did at CollegeVine. We had 600 advisors. We were the largest in the country. The Empowerly folks asked me to join their board afterward, but I didn’t want to be in that business. I’m trying to solve the guidance system problem in the U.S.

Sramana Mitra: What else are you seeing in the market?

Jon Carson: In the college market, CollegeVine is already in there and doing well. Another big player is EAB.

This reminds me of the dot-com boom. In the early days, the internet was just a “shiny penny.” By 1998-1999, companies like mine were far along, and big players realized they might not be able to catch up if they started from scratch. That’s when acquisitions began.

I’m seeing that dynamic now. I have three CEO-level players at the table. They’ve got AI labs but no product yet. They’re looking at our IP, our team, and asking about partnering. I’m looking for distribution. We’ll see where that goes. They could be competitors, but they’re also way behind.

So we’re at that stage: do they partner, buy, or build?

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building an AI EdTech Company: College Guidance Network CEO Jon Carson
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