Through our year with Launch, the Mad Hatter Wellness team learned a lot and made significant forward momentum on our newest curriculum. 

Empowered Together is an innovative curriculum that uses a peer-to-peer model to deliver information about sexual health and consent to students in post-secondary special education classrooms. Prior to joining Launch, we did have other curriculums on the market—such as Sexuality for All Abilities, which is designed for middle and high schoolers. We’ve found that  Launch has helped us not only develop our new curriculum, but also given us ideas for how to improve the way we package, sell, and update all of our offerings.  

A New Financial Model

We began exploring new financial models during our journey with Launch. Part of this shift involved exploration of new digital platforms to house all of our content. Our vision is that moving our content to a digital platform will be beneficial for both our customers and our company. 

Importantly, a digital platform allows our customers to easily access all curriculum content in one place. They can be assured that they are accessing the newest, up-to-date versions—something that was not always possible in the early days when we were shipping physical curriculum booklets.

In addition to improving the customer experience with the product, this shift also makes good business sense. Moving to a platform enables us to charge users a one-time annual subscription fee, rather than having to re-sell new products every time we have updated materials. This also saves time for our internal team, as we can easily disseminate updated information without following up with each individual customer.

A Value-Add for Special Education Teachers

Teaching in special education can be really challenging. All teachers have limited time to prepare lessons, and on top of that, special ed teachers have to teach a little bit of everything—from literacy and math to behavior management. Many special ed teachers don’t have a background in sexual health education and need support to teach these topics.

On the platform, they will be able to find all of the slides and videos they need to teach lessons on consent and sexual health for special education students. And because we’ll keep all the content updated, they can be assured that the topics they are teaching are age-appropriate, or equivalent to what their peers are learning, and developmentally appropriate, or designed specifically for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. 

Buy a Feature Testing Reveals New Insights 

We are also considering potential additional features that we could include on our platform. To gauge interest from potential subscribers, we engaged in a “buy a feature” test while presenting at a recent conference for administrators of special education in California.

During the test, we told participants that they had $600 to spend on these hypothetical features. We wanted to see what these administrators, who were very similar to people who would eventually purchase the program, would be most excited to pay for.

From the test, we discovered that administrators were most likely to purchase access to the online portal, slide decks for all lessons, and virtual training. These results reinforced our decision to launch the platform and new financial model because they helped us to realize that administrators want easy access to information in one central place. 

This “buy a feature” test is one of the market testing methods we learned during our time in the Launch accelerator. We were inspired by one of the other teams from our Launch cohort who had used a similar test to better understand what their potential customers valued the most about their offering.

Moving forward, we will use these learnings to build out that central place and prioritize these offerings on our new platform. We are excited to begin to transition our new digital platform and then eventually to roll out our subscription model to schools!