For my venture pitch, I have developed a concept for a web app called Maple Key. It is a tool that helps educators find the resources they need within seconds so they can spend their time planning great lessons and not sifting through expensive online marketplaces packed with poor quality materials.
Click here to watch the elevator pitch.
Please visit this website to view the full venture pitch.
I chose the maple key for a number of reasons. I love that it represents a simple yet powerful design that turns a light breeze into towering maple trees. This app would be designed in much the same way, requiring minimal time and effort from teachers while empowering them to build and deliver fantastic lessons. Maple trees are also a quintessentially Canadian symbol and if I ever built a company it would be fiercely proud of its Canadian origins.
Interesting idea Ken! You spotted one of the pain points for educators – teaching resources overload and how to pick the most suitable for different class. While market is focusing on building larger database, testbank and teaching material, your idea is to help educators trim, narrow down and pick the best.
The pitching is awesome. A few questions if i were investor:
1. any funding target you are aiming for?
2. how is the cost benefit analysis?
3. how much would you set the price tag and why this is reasonable
4. what is the specialty and beauty of your search engine that can be powered to generate most suitable teaching material?
Thanks for the great questions! It’s fun to think through all of the potentialities here but here is what I would say for each:
1) Initial funding would depend on the size of the team but I think it would have to be in the 500k range to allow for some runway due to a moderate burn rate while the tool is built and not yet saleable.
2) In a nutshell, I would want teachers to get better resources than they’re currently getting from sites like Teachers Pay Teachers, for considerably less than they’re currently spending.
3) 8.95/month or 79.95 annually per teacher. The MVP and early phase resource would not have enough student functionality for students to charge for access but once the diagnostic functionality and progress tracking features matured there would be a per-student cost. Probably something like $149.95 per classroom per year per subject area to be competitive and profitable. There are too many variables in that equation to know for sure where we’d land but it’s important for this tool to have a competitive price point because network effects will be crucial in the early going.
4) The carefully curated materials and the “by teachers for teachers” mission will be fundamental to building trust in the recommendation engine. We would also carefully monitor the usage metrics to see exactly which resources were chosen or not chosen the most and then look for usage patterns through Sequential Pattern Mining analysis techniques to find the combinations that appear to lead to high usage and student success.
FEEDBACK:
Thank you, Ken for a succinct and interesting elevator pitch. As a classroom teacher who is constantly overwhelmed, feeling more like I “survive” a day at school, rather than “thrive” — the means to quickly access quality resources is invaluable.
My concern with your venture is related to sustainability and perhaps a missed opportunity in its affordances to increase its marketability. My fear is that remaining current with educational resources and content — while keeping the navigation of your platform succinct and accessible — would likely be tricky and perhaps costly.
What would make me more excited about this venture is if it were a planning tool as well for teachers — almost like a “planning” take on an LMS…a collaborative planning management system if you will.
As a teacher, If I had access to a slick web-based tool that could visually help me lay out my year (selecting and attaching prescribed learning outcomes and my own digital resources), while selecting and customizing suggested relevant resources and assessments from your database (whether they be digital or physical) would be a game changer. The platform could also offer a day or week planning feature, where each day/week’s lessons could be planned, documented, and accessed with all resources attached. Each day/week plan could be linked back to the unit, and then subject/year. I am envisioning a super slick navigation system, navigating visually like a Prezi presentation where you could “zoom” in or out of your plans. Teacher’s plans could be accessed and shared within your database as well, and perhaps create a system to promote teacher users that have plans that are popular and selected frequently. 🙂
Hey Patrick – I love that planning browser concept. It’s highly visual and accessible while making a lot of important information available in a small space and with minimal effort to browse through. I usually imagine something like a technology/skill tree in a video game when I think of this kind of thing but the Prezi-style zoom in/out feature is really intriguing!
I think that idea would work really well hand in hand with the one I’m envisioning but you’d need a pretty large dev team to pull both ideas off at once so if you build that, I’ll build this, and we’ll be a great 1-2 punch for Teachers out there 🙂
The point about teacher input on popularity/utility is a great one and with enough network effects it would be great to use the Expedia model I’ve tried to emulate to let teachers have a say in which resources are the best for certain types of students and lessons.
Hello, Ken! I enjoyed reading about Maple Key. I like your venture idea and how simply you explained it. It was clear and well-focused. The thoughtful idea to help educators quickly locate resources without having to wade through cluttered marketplaces is brilliant considering how time-consuming and overwhelming it can be.
Going through your pitch, I think that clarifying how Maple Key ensures the quality and relevance of its resources over time could make your pitch stronger. How frequently will the resources and materials be updated? Is there a technology for this? Thinking about it, maintaining an up-to-date and reliable content library may become challenging. I think that you can also consider a collaborative aspect of the venture such that teachers can exchange ideas, share materials, or plan together.
Great question! Once we have a database of materials, which would all be freely available online, we could set up a daily scrape to validate that nothing has changed on a given resource in the past 24 hours. If this automation detected a variance, it would be flagged to the curation team for manual review. Minor changes that don’t undermine the quality or value of the resource would be cleared but major revisions or deletions would have to be put back into the database review cycle. Not necessarily easy or simple, but nothing worth doing is 🙂
REVIEW:
Thanks for sharing a really great idea Ken. I really appreciate how you’ve tried to make this tool streamlined for educators. When you pointed out that educators can spend up to 12 hours per week looking for resources, that resonated with me, especially when I think back to when I was a new teacher. I really like that Maple Key takes other metrics into account when curating material other than just whether teachers liked the resource or not. I think that differentiation is an important component to making Maple Key stand out from the competition, which is something an investor would be looking closely at. I also like how it matches resources to individual student’s abilities. Overall, I think this would be a great investment opportunity. The only thing that is keeping me from being fully on board with an investment is that I wonder whether the quality can be good enough without forming partnerships with publishers or paying teachers to create high quality resources. If needed, that might be an important consideration to balance out with the price of a subscription. I think there is potential for something really great here though and I do not think it would be an impossible problem to solve.
Hi Mark,
Good question about the quality/cost relationship. No plan survives contact with reality but the initial push would involve working with educators to build a starting point of resources – maybe a few dozen at first – for the MVP. But to really build this we would require a lot of help from AI agents and scraping tools to aggregate and sort/categorize a large number of potentially great resources. The ones with the strongest potential would then be screened, vetted and validated by some more real educators for inclusion in the database. This would be a big initial outlay but the nice thing about math is that it crosses provincial borders so once we had a nice little database of math resources, it could then be adapted to other curricula. It certainly wouldn’t be easy to get right, but those are the processes and teams that would be built along the way and would act as a strategic moat around this concept and dissuade potential competitors from trying to copy the model.
Feedback
Hey Ken, I like the down-to-earth presentation with finding resources and preparation of content and wanting to streamline it to feel like planning a trip (taking us a to a pleasant experience). I also think that this venture recognizes a key time-consuming issue with teaching, and you’ve created a response to an all too common issue.
I’d definitely invest in the venture, I just need a few questions regarding growth. While it’s focus is with the Gr.9 student, is there the possibility at all of expanding it to teachers for up to Gr.12, I do see an avenue where they would be included with them. The other thing is that while it sounds like this venture gathers and consolidates resources, is there a path to create your own resourcing to maximize potential for revenue (like Netflix releasing its own shows).
Absolutely Rico! G9 Math is just the proving ground for the concept and to build the teams and processes necessary to build and maintain a database while keeping it hooked up to curriculum frameworks that are often changed when provincial governments come and go. Eventually, it would be a tool for all subjects and all grade levels but that is an incredibly ambitious goal. It would likely take years to reach so I think if we got to grades 4-10 in Math and/or Science across multiple Canadian provinces by the end of year 3, that would be a pretty impressive feat.
I do also envision something of a “netflix” approach where we have a database with free and paid content from other publishers but use our own team to potentially create resources to plug obvious holes in the resource landscape. Another ambitious next step but absolutely on the roadmap 🙂
FEEDBACK:
Hi Ken,
Great work on your venture and elevator pitch! As a teacher, I fully understand the struggles of preparing for lessons and finding suitable worksheets or projects for certain lessons or concepts. Your product provides a smart AI-integrated tool that can help streamline workflow for teachers. I think the line you included near the end, “planning tomorrow’s math lesson shouldn’t feel like filing taxes”, really captured my attention and explained why your product was necessary. One possible improvement would be to include subtitles or text along with your elevator pitch to make it accessible to a wider audience. Otherwise, awesome venture and I would be interested in learning more and possibly investing in this!
Hi Ken, Very interesting idea! and I love the visual element – truly captures my eyes as an investor. I see many teachers utilizing this as a resource to prepare and curate best practices to enhance their teaching and education design experience.
However, I think it would be a region-specific resources? Would be great if I could see a projection on how you plan on scaling it. But other than that, I think this is a super helpful product to have for education. Great job.
(Btw, if you have time would you mind checking out my venture as well? Would appreciate any comments and suggestions – https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec522/2025/08/04/creaba-studio-building-the-future-of-education-content-creation/)
REVIEW
Hi Ken! How I wish something like Maple Key existed right now! While other teaching material databases do exist, I think the AI-integration that Maple Key includes could really ensure that teachers get access to quality materials that really meet their needs. Also, the aesthetic and detailed pitch as well as Maple Key’s logo and your explanation behind it really convinced me to choose your venture. I really think that an app like Maple Key could change the lives of many teachers; however, what would the pricing look like for an app like this? I could imagine that it might cost quite a bit to consistently ensure that the resources provided are up-to-date and of high quality.
FEEDBACK
Hi Ken,
This sounds like a terrific idea that I would personally be interested in using! I appreciate that you identified a specific key entry point with the revised grade 9 math curriculum. I also think you provided a clear value proposition for teachers, students, and districts. As a potential investor, I would be curious about how MapleKey plans to generate revenue, so I think including a pricing model would be helpful.
FEEDBACK: Really strong elevator pitch and a cohesive product presentation. I’m not familiar with teacher pain-points and you do a really effective job of highlighting the immense amount of overhead and preparation expected of them. You also present a well thought out development road map and risk assessment, which as an “investor” I would love to see. What remains unclear though is how the venture intends to generate revenue. The foundation you’ve laid could go down a number of different paths, from individual teacher subscriptions to partnerships with districts or schools. Once these pricing models are defined, a few projections demonstrating the venture’s path to profitability would strengthen a really solid venture pitch.
Thank you for the feedback! I will add more details about pricing because you aren’t the only one to ask.