Is there financial gain in the Socratic app?

Is the Socratic team's decision to focus exclusively on the app, truly because they believe it will help students more, or is there some financial gain in going down this path. Maybe I'm just being cynical, but a lot of apps start of free and then start limiting features unless you pay for premium use. Money is usually at the root of most things.

1 Answer
Jun 30, 2018

I would hope so, otherwise...

Explanation:

... this company wouldn't be very good at being a company.

Keep in mind that Socratic is a company with employees and bills to pay, so they must make sure that every decision that they make will help pay those bills in the long run.

The goal of the company has always been to provide free high-quality educational content and to help students from all over the world learn for free.

So what did they do? They went out and raised some funds because as we all know, you need money in order to be able to give people free content.

Was there a financial gain from giving people free access to high-quality educational content? Of course, otherwise they wouldn't have secured the funding in the first place. I mean, the website and the app had to be good enough projects to get people to invest in them, right?

At this point, the Socratic team decided to pursue its goals by focusing exclusively on the app. That means that they must make sure that the product that they put out is good enough to pay the bills.

Imagine for a second that instead of going 100% app, they would have ditched it completely and focused 100% on the website. In that case, they would have to make sure that the website is good enough to pay the bills.

So yes, money is usually at the root of most things, which should come as no surprise to anybody.

That being said, I don't know how they will go about securing a financial gain from the app. Maybe they'll monetize some features to secure a revenue stream, maybe they will keep it 100% free and seek funding somewhere else, I have no idea.

But I do know that they need to make sure that a financial gain is possible if they want to keep doing what they're doing.