How to sell to Founders at Education companies
Founders in the education sector prioritize student engagement metrics as their primary measure of success. They respond positively to outreach that demonstrates a clear understanding of their unique challenges, such as scaling online course offerings while maintaining quality. Addressing their pain points directly with tailored solutions will capture their interest and prompt a response.
Written and maintained by the SoloRiff team, who build outbound software and run outbound with it. The figures below are our own: we measured 554 education company domains over public DNS on 2026-09-03. Last updated 2026-09-03.
What actually hurts
- low student engagement
- high dropout rates
- limited course scalability
- ineffective marketing strategies
The playbook
- 01
Identify recent funding rounds
Search for education startups that recently secured funding. Platforms like Crunchbase or PitchBook can help you filter for companies that raised over $1 million in the last six months. Founders are often eager to discuss growth strategies after receiving new capital.
- 02
Analyze course completion rates
Investigate companies with reported low course completion rates, which can be found in their user feedback or reviews. Highlighting how your solution can improve these metrics will resonate with founders focused on enhancing student outcomes.
- 03
Connect through industry events
Identify upcoming edtech conferences or webinars where founders will be speaking or attending. Use these events to reach out with tailored messages that reference their participation and the specific topics they are discussing, making your outreach timely and relevant.
- 04
Address scalability concerns
Prepare to respond to common objections about scalability, particularly around technology integration. Founders may worry about the complexity of implementing new solutions; be ready to share how your approach simplifies the process without disrupting current operations.
- 05
Follow up after initial outreach
If you don’t receive a response within five days, send a follow-up email that includes an insightful article or resource related to their recent funding news or industry trends. This shows you are engaged with their challenges and can provide value beyond a sales pitch.
Can education companies even receive your mail?
We measured the DNS of 554 education companies, sampled evenly across company sizes, to see how many authenticate their own email. It matters in both directions: a domain that does not authenticate is a domain whose team is used to mail going missing — and if your own domain is in the gap, yours is the mail going missing.
Publishes a DMARC policy of quarantine or reject — the domain actually asks receivers to act on failures.
The gap is the finding: 16.3% of 1–10-person companies against 80.2% of the largest — 64 points apart. Small companies are where the unauthenticated domains are, and small companies are who most cold outreach is aimed at.
Where does your domain sit?
Same three lookups, run live against your domain. Nothing is stored and nothing is emailed to you.
How this was measured
Company domains were sampled within employee-count bands, then queried over public DNS for SPF (TXT at the apex), DMARC (TXT at _dmarc.) and MX. One domain per company, deduplicated. Anyone can reproduce any single row of this with dig.
DKIM is deliberately absent. A DKIM key lives under a selector that cannot be enumerated from outside the domain, so a company with flawless DKIM under a name we did not guess would be counted as having none. That would measure our guess list, not the industry.
Domains with no MX record are excluded rather than counted as failures — parked and redirect-only domains would otherwise drag every figure down and make the result an artefact of the sample.
Sampled within bands, so this describes the population of companies, not of employees: a 10-person company counts once, as does a 10,000-person one. Each band is at least 60 domains; bands below that are not published. Figures are percentages of the sample, not of the whole industry, and we publish no company names — only counts.
Measured 2026-09-03. Re-measured monthly.
The full census across every industry — sortable, with sample sizes, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.
Subject lines that fit
- Boost your course completion rates
- Scaling your edtech offerings
- Insights for your next funding round
Questions
- Why do founders in education ignore cold outreach?
- Founders often receive a high volume of unsolicited messages, making it easy to overlook them. Many prioritize connections that demonstrate a clear understanding of their specific challenges or provide immediate value, such as insights on improving student engagement.
- What common challenges do education founders face?
- Education founders frequently struggle with balancing quality and growth. They must ensure that their online courses are engaging while also expanding their offerings to attract more students, which can lead to operational strain and resource allocation issues.
- How can I effectively engage education founders?
- To effectively engage education founders, tailor your messaging to address their specific pain points, such as low student retention or scalability issues. Providing insights or solutions that resonate with their current challenges can help you stand out in a crowded field.
- What motivates education founders to respond to outreach?
- Education founders are motivated to respond to outreach that offers actionable insights or solutions to their pressing challenges. Demonstrating an understanding of their goals, such as improving student outcomes or increasing course enrollment, can significantly increase your chances of receiving a reply.
Or have it run itself
SoloRiff does every step above on its own — finds the companies, finds the people, writes each of them individually, and handles the replies. Drop your URL and watch it work before you sign up for anything.
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