By way of background, I built the first website to be ever licensed by a ministry of education in *1996* and subsequently served as a VC associate for a five hundred million dollar fund focused almost exclusively on education investments.

Below, I've listed the most important factors in no particular order.

Money: Regardless of your product, you will need a team that investors are willing to bet big early money on. An ideal first raise is between two to four million dollars. You will need this because you need much longer runway and much more investment in sales efforts than almost any other type of web or mobile-based start-up before it's likely you will have meaningful revenue.

Distribution: How do you acquire new users? Do you require permission from an administrator to be deployed? A teacher? Both of these are challenging. If your product isn't relying heavily on students forcing adoption of the educators and/or administrators, your Company could die an early death, even with ample funding.

Team: Connected very much to the first two points, you must have a team capable of inspiring investor and educator confidence. It is easier to inspire investors than it is to educators. It takes a very special type of sales-person, one who is actually a great listener, shows genuine compassion for the customer, and ideally, has some credibility (if not personally, then behind them in the rest of the team) in the problem you're attempting to solve. Who is doing the selling matters most, and ultimately, if the CEO is ineffective at this role, they are likely not long for the CEO role during the startup phase at least.

Speed: Everything moves more slowly in this sector. It will take you at least twice as long as you reasonably forecast it will take to achieve your plan.

VC expectations: Read up about the "Series A" crunch taking it's toll on many teams and add extra crunch to education-related enterprises. The proof points are even higher and harder to hit in education, than they are in enterprise or consumer.

If you're not altogether discouraged and you think you have what it takes, or can assemble what it takes to win here, I'd be happy to do a call with you to discuss the particularities of your startup.

Best of luck!