What do we learn from winning?

Team Letter | January 20, 2025

January 20, 2025

WOW, Alpaca — talk about a big week!

Last week at the Future of Education Technology Conference (the first time we’ve attended this one), Alpaca took home some BIG honors. We competed in both the Top Edtech Products and Pitchfest competitions at the conference, and came home with top honors.

Alpaca was the 2025 Pitchfest Overall Winner and the Top Edtech Product winner at FETC this year. It’s a hell of a way to kick off the year to have a conference as respected as FETC honor our work in these ways.

Huge kudos to the FETC travel team, and to Kimberly for bringing home the Pitchfest win — I absolutely love seeing our whole team on stage and at the booth, representing our work in pitches, demos, and sales meetings. It shows so much shared ownership and such a willingness to be in the market, with customers, every week.

Winning is amazing — but it’s not enough to receive the accolades and celebrate. Winning is an opportunity to learn, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how we learn from the wins last week. Here are three things I think we learned as a company last week:

1. Alpaca is not pure EdTech — we’re also Future of Work.

Alpaca remains an incredibly unique type of “edtech product” in the market, which I think came through in these wins and on the FETC show floor. We often remark at conferences that we’re one of the only products there NOT connected directly to students, and fully in service to educators and school leaders.

Most of the world hasn’t viewed schools as workplaces — places where professionals come each day to build careers, get feedback and support from their manager, and level up their life’s work.

As we continue to learn about our customer, understanding our unique place at the intersection of education technology and workplace technology is critical. We occupy a special place, and now we get to leverage that!

2. There’s more room for simplification.

When you have to boil your value proposition down to a 3 minute pitch, you learn quickly to shake out the stuff that feels important, but in fact, is not critical to telling our story.

Our pitch at FETC was constructed to get across three things:

Teachers love taking our surveys.

Principals love the insights they get.

Districts love keeping their teachers.

I really love the simplicity here. It makes me ask — where else can we simplify? Pricing? Product offerings? Packs? I want to urge you this week to look for opportunities to reduce complexity in your work, so that ONLY the best and most important thing comes through. It’s hard (believe me!), but it’s how we win.

3. Focus is key.

I am so excited, honored, and energized by our showing at FETC last week. And also, it’s important to remind ourselves that gaining awards is different than gaining customers.

I’ve watched many a startup get on the “pitch competition circuit,” racking up awards and accolades by entering every business plan competition, pitchfest, accelerator, and showcase, only to look back a year later and realize their focus has been diverted to being a cool startup, instead of building customers and revenue.

This week and every week, our focus will be on growing Alpaca by gaining the trust of new customers and delighting our current ones. We know the big goals we’ve set out, and those goals are fed by focused sales and marketing activity, a stellar product offering, and customers who LOVE us.

We did BIG work last week to gain some brand recognition and endorsement! This week, we need to use that to help us have more conversations with schools and districts. The honors make that easier — but we have to stay focused on the activity.

Alpaca, we are on to something. I’m so energized by our future, I can hardly contain it. CONGRATULATIONS on winning BIG last week.

This week, we turn it into opportunity.

THINK BIG, Alpaca!

KB