Colleen Hroncich
James Bisenius knows the value of personalized education. He and his four sisters were homeschooled and then homeschooled their own children. Early on, they realized homeschooling was challenging, so they decided to hire some teachers and partner with other families to create “a hybrid pod school” in two converted barns on family property. “We basically have four or five pods now on our property and have been running those for 15 years,” James says.
During this period, James also worked with an investment partnership that supported private schools overseas. He realized the outcomes at their pod schools were as good as or better than those of these private schools, which got him thinking and researching. He concluded that educational outcomes came down to two key factors: the ability of a teacher to invest personally in a child and not having the experience derailed by negative peer interactions. His family’s pod schools succeeded because they fulfilled those conditions.
James returned from Africa just before the pandemic. He was thinking about what to work on next. Suddenly, he thought about what could happen if someone could figure out a way to “positively disrupt” education like Uber did for transportation and Airbnb did for hospitality. He’d seen studies showing the cost of facilities and administration skyrocketing while teacher salaries were relatively flat when adjusted for inflation. “I just knew an efficient marketplace could really get rid of tons of these costs going to administration overheads and facilities costs—kind of combining the power of the sharing economy,” he says.
From that brainstorm came Edefy. “Basically, Edefy is Airbnb for education space, combined with Uber to connect families directly to educators. So it’s really the first three-sided marketplace that we know of,” James explains. While the Edefy app just launched last week, he began creating these connections in 2021.
“I started manually running pods out of the pandemic, just connecting families and teachers and spaces in the community,” he says. “The first year, halfway through the year, I was like, this doesn’t work. This isn’t going to scale. Just because of the logistics of it all. It was so chaotic.” At the end of that year, he was supporting seven pods, and the teachers and families begged him not to give up. The teachers told him, “This is why we got into education in the first place. You restored our love for teaching.” The parents pointed to how their children were thriving with the personal attention and ability to work at their own pace in different subjects and asked, “Where are we going to send them?”
He agreed to continue to help them with the connections, but took a step back. “I told the teachers, ‘Look, this second year you are running your own little 8–12 student school. I’ll do the work to arrange everything and get you going. But from now on, you’re communicating with your families directly. You’re essentially working directly for them. You’re not working for me anymore,’” James says, although he included some feedback and oversight mechanisms to ensure quality. “A few months into that school year, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this actually works.’ It turns out if you give teachers a small enough number of families, they can actually administrate and teach their kids.”
Seeing that success persuaded him to commit to a massive software development process. “I was basically taking everything that we were learning from these pods and using that to inform the design of this three-sided marketplace to allow any host site in the community—it could be a business, it could be a church, it could be a private residence with some basement space or barns or whatever. They could just put all that infrastructure on the platform and then choose which teachers they want to give their spaces to,” says James. “Once you’ve got teachers and families interested in a site, those teachers and families can just interact directly to enroll and launch their pods.”
It took more than two years to develop the app because three-sided marketplaces are very complex. With Uber, you just need a driver who has their own car and a rider. With Airbnb, you just need a location and a renter. But Edefy is connecting three separate entities: the site, the teacher, and the families. After downloading the app and creating a profile, users select their roles (family, teacher, host). A user can select a combination of roles; for example, a parent may also be a teacher, or a teacher may also be a host if they already have a location. They can then search by location to see what sites, teachers, or families are registered near them.
Much of James’s initial motivation was student-focused because he’d seen how successful kids could be in small, positive learning environments with personal attention from a dedicated teacher. But he soon realized the benefits went beyond students. “This really changes the teaching career path, too. Because when you free teachers from these arbitrary pay scales and now as they really build demand and you see their outcomes and their results, gifted teachers are going to be in really high demand from families,” he says. “If you think about, say, a teacher teaching at a $30,000-a-year private school. She could leave that and teach 10–12 kids at $8–10,000 per kid instead of $30,000. And that teacher can make quite a bit more than she was getting paid at that private school. So there’s some pretty amazing value unlock that this can create.”
As the Friday Feature shows each week, the possibilities are almost limitless when it comes to education today. For education entrepreneurs, finding a suitable and available location is often the biggest challenge. Finding interested families is also near the top of the list. Edefy can help solve both challenges. “This can really break that monopoly on infrastructure and logistics that government education has right now,” James points out.
Given his embrace of educational freedom, it’s not surprising that James is interested in participating in school choice programs where possible. Since Edefy students are considered homeschoolers, he’s looking into states that have the most flexible funding. “We actually just got approved on the Arizona platform,” he says, adding that he hopes that if Edefy catches on and policymakers see how it benefits students and teachers, it will help “drive more homeschool-friendly school choice funding.”