Differentiated value: what makes Alpaca...Alpaca?
Team Letter | February 26, 2024
February 26, 2024
Happy Monday, Alpaca!!!
It’s here – the last week of the month! WOW this has been a busy busy month, with a lot of great things happening. I’m so excited about the opportunities ahead with Alpaca’s products and offerings, and I want to focus a bit there today for our letter.
Last week, I got the chance to dive into a framework called… wait for it… Obviously Awesome, by April Dunford. She focuses on helping companies understand their “positioning.” So, what is positioning? It’s how you explain your company or product in the context of what your customer cares about. It can be pretty game-changing to be able to talk about your product in a way that resonates with your customers and presents them a solution to a problem they’re having.
The thing is, there is no one who tells you if your positioning is “right.” Except your customer! Who decides that they get it, they like it, and they want to buy it from you. So, is Alpaca…
A subscription box company for teachers?
A survey about teacher wellbeing?
A teacher celebration company?
A recognition program for educators?
A library of resources for principals?
An incentive program?
A rewards program?
A mental health program?
A social/emotional learning curriculum?
Wah! It can be overwhelming. Partly because all of these are at least a little bit right. But our job is to explain Alpaca in a way that the customers we care about (not all customers! Just the ones we really want) resonate with and care about too.
So how do you do that? How do we know? We start with understanding the customer we WANT to care about Alpaca. Here are the customers I want at Alpaca:
Alpaca is perfect for school leaders and district staff who…
Have a bias toward action: customers that really want to find ways to support teachers quickly and often with real solutions, not someone who is happy with a “box checker” kind of survey or check-in.
Are investing in wellbeing: we want customers who are directing budget/resources toward teacher wellbeing, mental health, retention, and support. These customers know that retention is the best form of recruitment, and that keeping the teachers they’ve got is key.
Values transparency: We want customers who want to understand how teachers are really doing and values the opportunity to make changes and hear it straight from the source!
Celebratory: We want customers who want to celebrate the profession and their teachers with incentives, recognition, and a focus on the good.
Okay, so now that we know that, What kind of stuff do we have to offer a customer like this? Here’s what I think we have:
Semantic-based surveys that use real words to describe the experience of teaching
Teachers’ voices, so that leaders are hearing from the people they’re trying to support
Frequent cadence, so you can act when it matters (true of both surveys and packs!)
Education-specific insights (not like surveymonkey or something built for general use)
Packs that create an incentive to participate and a sense of celebration and love
Now, we get into the fun part. It’s called Differentiated Value. That means – what does Alpaca have, that our ideal customer really cares about, that no one else has. To figure that out, we take each of those things above and ask: So what? Why does a customer care about this stuff? Let’s knock ‘em down, one by one:
Customers care about semantic-based surveys because it allows them to see the real words a teacher uses to describe work, right now. Instead of a blended score or scale, which might obscure the complexity of the job, we can see the good, the bad, and the ugly. And because it’s words, not scales, teachers feel safer participating.
Customers care that it’s the voice of the teacher, because it doesn’t get blended with student and family feedback, but allows principals and districts the ability to address needs of teachers directly in order to mitigate teacher attrition or teacher mental health issues more quickly.
Customers care about a frequent cadence so that they can act more quickly, rather than waiting until the end of a climate survey, when unhappy teachers may have already quit. It also allows school leaders to see how sentiment changes over time.
Customers care about education-specific insights because school principals often don’t have modern employee engagement tools or management training at their disposal. When they see insights on how teachers are doing, and then they can follow up with those insights with real tools and strategies, they feel a greater sense of confidence in having things they can really do about it.
Customers care about having an incentive to participate because it does double-duty of handling meaningful, regular teacher recognition AND driving a higher level of participation in the product.
Now, we boil that all down to clearly say who we are, and how we differentiate our value in the marketplace. Here’s our first go of it (don’t worry, this will almost certainly change!):
Alpaca is an employee engagement platform built for educators. With our unique program that includes pulse surveys, recognition packs, and insights & resources for school leaders, we have created a system that gives school leaders:
High Participation with incentives to participate, semantic-scale surveys with real words, and the ability to quickly see action
Immediately Actionable Information with surveys on a monthly cadence, simple data reporting, and real insights from teachers that say what they need right now
A System Built for Educators with a focus on teachers (not students); educator-built survey, educator-built resources, and a product specifically made to survey and support educators
Teacher Wellbeing that is Fun & Celebratory supported by packs for simple incentives, celebrations of of what’s going well, balanced reporting, and resources that help school leaders celebrate
Why do all this writing and positioning work?
For me, it’s helpful scaffolding for everything else we’re building. For emails to potential customers, messaging at conferences, blog posts about semantic surveys, and website revisions that make sense in our new context.
In the coming weeks, you’ll start to see our company’s messaging shift and change a little bit, and you’ll hear me speak differently about what we’re doing and who it’s for (you probably already have!). I wanted to give you the back story of how we’re arriving at that language, and hear from you too! If you have feedback on how this resonates, what makes sense, what doesn’t – I’d love to hear it from you!
In the meantime, we get an extra day of February this year - let’s use it well!!! Time to get out there with some great sales, marketing, operations, and customer success efforts this week. (Oh, and fundraising!)
Let’s go, Alpaca!
KB