Pathwright's primary users are the millions of learners who complete steps every day. But not one of these users pays us.

If they pay at all, they pay our customers — a much smaller group of educators and admins from organizations of all sizes. (In fact, we have several customers who make much more money than we do.)

So the conventional business wisdom would be to prioritize designing for the users who pay us first and then for the learners who don’t pay us, right?

And that’s exactly what many of our competitors do, and it works for them, at least on the business side of things. However, if you’ve ever used any of the more conventional LMSs (learning management systems) or marketing-oriented course platforms, you’ve probably seen how this plays out: eventually, the product becomes 90% administrative actions, content authoring, and/or marketing tools, which is what 90% of the paying customers say they want. That leaves perhaps a measly 10% of features and polish focused on the actual learner experience (LX), which, in contrast, is where 90% or more of the usage exists.

We take a different approach. When we develop a new feature for Pathwright, we start with the learner experience first and work our way back from there.

By starting with the learner experience, we can:

1. Make the teacher’s job easier. Most teachers' daily task list is full of things unrelated to teaching: reminding students about due dates, motivating them to catch up when they’re behind, and ensuring everyone has a clear next step. Pathwright handles all that for teachers out of the box. Once a curriculum is on Pathwright, a teacher can almost put it on “auto-pilot” and focus their efforts on more valuable things like one-on-one mentorship and feedback.

2. Reduce the support burden. We have schools with thousands of learners who have had single-digit support requests for an entire year. In fact, we’ve had customers cancel their support system integrations with Pathwright simply because there wasn’t enough support to worry about. The LX design we put into our product saves a whole lot of time and money for our customers.

3. Support our customer's brand. It’s bizarre to me that many prestigious institutions and brands will use learning tools that look like they were designed a decade ago. Worse, the poor design often creates a negative first impression and a lot of frustration that gets transferred to the institution or teacher, not the software itself. At Pathwright, we believe the learner experience should be clear, modern, and beautiful so that it reflects the quality of teaching and guidance that our customers offer.

While the above approach may not be the most obvious business strategy, our team has been happy to grow slowly and steadily for years by always putting the learner first.