"Does anyone have any experiences with overcoming this hurdle?"
Ask them if they can hold some of the money in escrow ... or go with a different underwriter that will allow yearly subscription (but at a higher rate).
You could also just do one-time payment for the year and require them to re-purchase.
Might even look into accepting POs from schools. If you're into cashing checks :)
I'll talk to them further about the possibility of escrow - that sounds like a potentially reasonable solution. I asked previously about one-time payments, and they said that doing so does not negate the issue, which is interesting.
Also, if a school wants to pay the good ol' fashioned way, I'm more than happy to oblige.
It's going to be really difficult to get schools to pay for anything in this environment. Definitely a worthy goal. I'd have a school administrator page or portal or something target at people who purchase 30 accounts at once.
But you need an entry point. Cold calling schools is likely ineffective. Try seeing which schools use Blackboard and then see if you can convince someone to try it out Eduset. Administrators are definitely looking to cut costs where they can. If you can provide their current LMS functionality for cheaper, there might be a play there.
Another thing to try is once you have users, suggest that they tell their friends about it. Maybe suggest it on a newsletter? Make it easy for them to share it with their peers and even their administrator.
This is probably a revenue model decision for you. The way I see it, 60 bucks a year is not much. If the teacher cares enough, then they should be willing to spend it. 60 bucks is not painful enough for them to push the school to pay for it. If it were more money, you'd lose teachers because they weren't willing to try it but you may net a whole school. A way you maybe able to solve this is offer some really expensive but cool tool at a higher pricing point. Base is 60 bucks but if you want to be able to track how students/classes/races are doing it's going to be 800 (maybe more?) bucks a class. Okay that idea was from a quick brainstorm, administrators love numbers... especially ones they can show accountability to parents with.
Yes, for the foreseeable future I will very much keep the focus on getting teachers to sign up for accounts. A teacher using Eduset inside a school can be a far better advocate for an institutional purchase than I could ever be by cold calling.
As for Blackboard, Eduset certainly was not designed to directly compete with them. Blackboard is a vast and complex piece of software that teachers often require courses to learn how to use. Our aim with Eduset is to make it as easy as possible for even non-tech-savvy teachers to jump right in. This means that we will never have the range of features a solution like Blackboard provides.
Ask them if they can hold some of the money in escrow ... or go with a different underwriter that will allow yearly subscription (but at a higher rate).
You could also just do one-time payment for the year and require them to re-purchase.
Might even look into accepting POs from schools. If you're into cashing checks :)