Buying most things is simple.
The person paying is usually the person using it.
Education is different.
A parent pays. A school decides. A teacher delivers. A child lives with it.
In November and December 2025, we explored the education sector in India. Across what seems like hundreds of conversations, we spoke to parents, teachers, school leaders, homeschoolers and students. The conversations included CBSE, ICSE, IB and Cambridge contexts. We read policy documents, mapped existing products and made long lists of problems worth solving.
This was not a survey of India. It was a small, mostly urban and private-school sample. But the same tension kept returning.
The more people we spoke to, the less education looked like one market.
It looked like several people pulling on the same child from different directions.
The problem was not that nobody cared. Everyone cared. They just cared about different things.
What everyone wanted
Parents wanted their children to have a secure future. They wanted good marks, but not too much pressure. They wanted discipline, but also freedom. They wanted practical skills, confidence, good values, a good college and enough time for the child to still have a childhood.
That sounds contradictory because it is. A lot of parenting is managing contradictions.
Parents also had to make decisions with imperfect information. They chose schools based on boards, distance, fees, infrastructure, class size, other parents and what the school promised. Some paid for tuitions because they feared their child would fall behind without them. Some enrolled their children in courses they had asked for. The children still stopped going when the experience did not work for them.
Teachers wanted time.
One teacher told us that checking a single journal properly could take 15 to 20 minutes. Another described teaching a class of 40 where a few students matched her pace and the rest slowly got lost. She still had a syllabus to finish, exams to prepare for and results to deliver.
She did not need more content. There was already enough content. She needed enough attention for each child.
A new tool could save her work. It could also become one more login, one more system and one more thing to maintain.
Schools spoke about the child being at the centre. I think many of them meant it.
But a school also has a board, a timetable, parents, teachers, fees, safety, compliance and hundreds of students to manage. A product had to fit the curriculum. It had to be measurable. It had to be affordable. It had to work without disrupting everything already in motion.
Then we spoke to students.
One ninth grader told us she liked literature and history. She found a literature festival through Instagram, attended a poetry workshop, completed a hacking course after a show made her curious, and had already researched colleges, careers and scholarships.
She was not short of curiosity.
But when she spoke about several school subjects, her reason for studying them was simple: she needed to pass.
She also said that if she did not like a teacher, she would leave the class even when she liked the subject.
That one conversation explained more than many market reports did.
The missing customer
This was not about bad parents, careless teachers or schools that did not care. We met parents who refused to force classes, teachers who made time for individual children and schools that offered extra support without charging for it.
The mismatch survived good intentions.
At one point, an educator who had tried building in this space said it plainly: the person making the decision, the person paying and the person using the product are not the same.
We started calling it the buyer-user issue. But even that was too simple.
In education, the parent often pays. The school approves or buys. The teacher has to make the thing work. The student is expected to use it. And somewhere in the background, a board or an exam decides what counts as success.
Each one sees a different product.
The parent sees a promise about the future. The school sees cost, fit and outcomes. The teacher sees another part of the working day. The student sees something that will take their time.
When these definitions collide, the adult definition usually wins. Adults control the money, schedule and report card.
The child controls attention.
Parents can buy enrolment. They cannot buy engagement.
That is why an education product can sell well and still not be used well. It can be loved by a child and never purchased by a parent. It can make sense to a school and create more work for a teacher. It can improve marks while making the student dislike the subject.
Nobody has to be irrational for the whole thing to fail.
Tuition was often the receipt for this mismatch. Parents paid the school for the system, then paid someone else for the child.
Homeschooling changed the chain
I thought homeschooling might remove this problem. The parent takes on much of the school’s role. The feedback loop should become shorter.
In some ways, it did.
One parent told us that her son could explain exactly what worked for him. For music, he wanted a mentor who would let him explore. For academics, he wanted a conventional teacher who would explain things directly. She changed the plan when he told her the old one was not working.
Another parent pulled her child out of large online classes and began teaching through stories and visuals because that was how her child understood. A third kept an outside tutor but asked her to stop chasing marks and work on concepts instead.
These parents could observe the learner closely and change the pace, teacher or method.
But homeschooling did not make the other problems disappear. It required time, money, knowledge and access to good tutors or mentors. Standardised exams still waited at the end. Social life had to be built deliberately. One parent eventually sent her daughter back to school because learning at home could not replace growing up around other children.
The buyer-user gap became smaller. It did not vanish.
What homeschooling made obvious was not that schools were unnecessary. It was that learning improved when the person choosing could actually see the person using.
What this changed for me
We began with ideas: adaptive learning, grading tools, question banks, portfolios, practical learning and career guidance.
By the end, I was less interested in the size of an idea and more interested in the chain around it.
Who chooses it? Who pays? Who has to use it every day? Whose behaviour has to change? What does each person call success?
If the answer is “everyone”, the answer is probably nobody.
A product for students has to earn their attention and still give parents something they can trust. A product for teachers has to reduce work, fit the classroom and make sense to the school. A product sold to schools cannot quietly dump more work on teachers or more screen time on children.
This is harder than adding AI to a lesson plan. It is also why many obvious problems in education are difficult businesses.
We often say that the child is at the centre of education.
Our research taught me something less comfortable: the centre has the least formal control.
Everyone around a child can leave a meeting satisfied. The child still has to live with the timetable.
In education, the buyer pays the bill.
The learner pays with time.