Lead generation for edtech — schools and teachers

Two buyers, one sale

Selling an English-learning app into schools looks like one sale, but it's two buyers. The school leader holds the budget and signs. The teacher uses the product, tells other teachers about it, and pulls it up to the leader. Founders who pick only one of the two — spray teachers and hope, or cold-email principals and wait — usually stall.

The motion that works runs both at once: top-down to the decision-makers who can authorise adoption, and bottom-up to the teachers who create the internal demand that makes the top-down conversation easy.

The leader and the champion

Primary — the buyer. School decision-makers: principals, heads of school, directors of studies, heads of English. They hold the budget and authorise the rollout. The cleanest fit for an English-learning product is private English and language academies, where English is the point and the buying cycle is short.

Secondary — the champion. Teachers, especially English and ESL teachers. They're the natural users and the internal advocates. They rarely control budget on their own, so you don't close on them — you use them to generate demand and warm referrals that reach the buyer.

Sizing the audience, channel by channel

Before recommending a campaign, we size every channel with live data. For an English-learning app across the US, Canada, India and Europe, the reachable picture looks like this.

Email database — the anchor. In the US and Canada, verified databases carry roughly a hundred thousand school-leader contacts — the economic buyers — sitting on top of a much larger teacher layer, on the order of a million verified educator emails, for the champion motion. That's enough to run a full campaign on cold email alone.

LinkedIn — outreach and monitoring. A filtered search for "school principal" and equivalent leadership titles returns a deep, clean pool of real principals and heads of school for connection-based outreach. Exact audience size is a Sales Navigator figure, but the pool is unambiguously deep in the anchor markets.

Warm network — introductions. The highest-converting channel: ideal-fit buyers already one connection away — ed-tech evaluators who run pilots, heads of studies at language schools, leaders at international schools. A few warm doors open faster than any cold sequence.

Reddit — and here it's a real acquisition channel, not just monitoring. Teacher and language-learner communities are enormous and highly active — millions of members across the big education and English-learning subreddits — with a constant stream of "which English or vocabulary app should I use?" posts. This is where the bottom-up motion lives: win teachers and learners here, and they pull the app into schools.

One sale, two buyers: the leader holds the budget, the teacher is the champion. Run top-down and bottom-up at the same time.

The geography nuance

A single global list is a trap; the reachable audience behaves differently by market. The US anchors — deepest, cleanest data for both leaders and teachers, plus the strongest LinkedIn pool, so this is where a campaign starts. India goes teacher-led — the teacher pool is large and real, but the school-leader records in commercial databases are noisy, because the word "principal" there is heavily polluted by unrelated corporate titles (principal engineer, principal consultant); so you lead with teachers and hand-verify any leadership list rather than trusting the raw count. And niche European segments are built, not bought — a specific cut such as international or heritage-community schools isn't a filter in any database; it's assembled by hand from international-school directories. Knowing which segments are database-sizeable and which are directory-built is the difference between a realistic plan and a spreadsheet fantasy.

The sequence we'd run

Anchor in the US — ~100K leaders plus ~1M teachers and a deep LinkedIn pool make it campaign-ready on its own. Turn on Reddit from day one — millions of active teachers and learners make it a genuine acquisition channel here, a bottom-up motion that pulls the app into schools. Add the clean second market — Canada runs the same playbook at smaller scale. Run warm intros in parallel — they open doors at international schools and language academies while the cold channels ramp. And handle the tail deliberately — India teacher-led, niche European segments hand-built — planned, not pretended. That's the channels run together around one ICP, which is how we run it for the products we take on.