My Big Idea: education brand EdShed

‍Hi Ed! What's your elevator pitch? 

EdShed helps children develop essential foundational skills through evidence-informed pedagogy, high-quality teaching resources and engaging educational technology. We strive to create products that deliver maximum impact with minimal hassle, while remaining affordable for schools and families.

I founded EdShed with Rob Smith in 2017 and the business now supports more than 170,000 teachers and 2.5 million children every month across over 12,000 schools worldwide. In a nutshell, EdShed is a self-funded education technology company that helps teachers teach and children learn through engaging digital platforms., The EdShed brand includes Spelling Shed, Phonics Shed and MathShed, with more applications in development. Each platform combines sound educational principles with carefully designed digital engagement to help children build confidence and fluency in essential skills.

Why does the market need it?‍

Teachers are under increasing pressure as each academic year rolls around. At the same time, many educational resources either create more work for staff or fail to engage the students, particularly any children who don’t respond well to traditional teaching methods. 

At EdShed, we’ve built something different. Our products are designed by educators and combine pedagogy with responsible gamification to motivate children without compromising on educational quality. By making repetitive practice enjoyable and giving teachers meaningful insight, EdShed has created tools that genuinely support both teaching and learning. 

The aim is not to keep children online for as long as possible; it’s to make the time they do spend online more focused, motivating and effective.

Where is the business today?

EdShed has grown from a summer side project into one of the UK’s best-known education technology businesses. Our platforms are used by more than 2.5 million children and 170,000 teachers every month and we’re proud of how our progress has taken us global. 

We now generate just under £4 million annually and employ 46 people. EdShed has a hybrid workforce across the UK as well as an international presence and we’ve achieved this growth without external investment. This independence has allowed us to grow organically, basing decisions on teacher feedback, educational impact and long-term sustainability rather than pressure to deliver rapid returns for investors.

What made you think there was money in this?

The idea for EdShed didn’t begin with identifying a lucrative market, it began with experiencing a genuine problem inside schools.

During my PhD I built websites to pay the bills, a side project which successfully grew into a web agency that I eventually sold. As part of the sale, I agreed to not undertake commercial work for a year. I was already a governor at a local primary school, so I began spending more time in education and eventually retrained as a primary teacher.

This gave me a front-row view of the real pressures that teachers face. It’s not just the pressure of creating resources but also the need to engage the children enough to make the efforts worthwhile, with teachers having to find ways to motivate children enough to complete the repetitive practice needed to make real progress. My background in startups and software development made me realise these weren’t unsolvable problems. 

In 2017, I spoke to Rob Smith, former teacher and creator of The Literacy Shed. We saw an opportunity to combine our expertise and experience to build something genuinely useful for teachers. 

The first product focussed on spelling. Designed to be simple, scalable and engaging, it focused on making repetitive practice motivating rather than frustrating. It was built around quick wins, confidence-building and a game-based approach to learning. That product became Spelling Shed. 

Early growth was driven almost entirely by teacher advocacy. Educators were given access, shared the platform through trusted networks and recommended it to peers. What began as a side project generating around £38,000 in its first year grew rapidly, reaching around £178,000 the following year and continuing to scale to be the successful, global edtech business it is today.

What's your biggest strength?

Our biggest strength is that EdShed has been shaped by lived experience rather than assumptions about what schools need.

Every product has started with a genuine classroom challenge. We listen closely to the teachers, pupils and educational experts and use that feedback to inform product development. For this sector, it’s vital that the technology responds to users rather than simply following market trends. 

My own experience of neurodivergence has also influenced how we design our products. Growing up with undiagnosed ADHD, I could concentrate very deeply on subjects that interested me and absorb information quickly, but my way of learning didn’t always fit conventional expectations.

That experience has encouraged us to design for a broad range of learners rather than for an imagined “typical” pupil. Features such as repetition without stigma, immediate feedback, predictable navigation, flexible pacing and a clear sense of progression can be particularly valuable for children who struggle with traditional classroom approaches.

We’re not trying to make learning easier by reducing its intellectual challenge. We’re trying to make success more accessible.

What is the secret to making the business work?

Listening properly to the people who use the product and taking that honest, raw information into product development is imperative, especially within the educator sector. Teachers are very clear about what works and what doesn’t and this feedback is too valuable for us to ignore. This insight is built directly into our product-development process. 

We also maintain a clear sense of purpose. Digital products can easily become focused on maximising engagement, but in education, time spent on a platform is not automatically a measure of success. The important outcomes are learning progress, increased confidence and appropriate practice.

The ethical line between motivation and manipulation is uppermost in our minds. Rewards, levels and progress indicators should reinforce learning rather than encourage endless use, with engagement acting as scaffolding, helping children access learning they might otherwise avoid, rather than becoming an end in itself.

Our approach to leadership is also a fundamental part of what makes the business work. Rather than following a formal leadership system, I start from a simple assumption: people generally want to succeed and enjoy the feeling of doing something well. My job as a leader is to make that success attainable, while also creating enough clarity that everyone understands what success looks like and is working towards broadly the same goals.

That naturally leads to a leadership style built around trust, compassion and support. If someone is struggling or performance dips, my instinct is not to assume laziness or a lack of commitment, but to understand what is getting in the way and how we can help them succeed. 

That doesn’t mean an absence of accountability. In fact, making success attainable also means being clear about expectations, responsibilities and shared goals. We combine that trust with structures and processes that support hybrid working, collaboration and individual responsibility without creating a culture of mistrust.

How do you market the company?

Our most effective marketing has always been teacher advocacy.

Schools are rightly cautious about adopting new technology. Teachers want to know that a product is educationally credible, straightforward to use and genuinely helpful, rather than something that will create more work. 

EdShed’s early growth was driven by giving educators access to the product and allowing them to experience the results for themselves. Teachers then shared it through professional networks and recommended it to peers and it’s that word-of-mouth momentum that remains central to our growth.

We support this through educational content, social media, events, partnerships and direct engagement with schools. We also use our own platform data to identify wider learning trends and contribute evidence to public discussions about literacy, numeracy and education.

The most important marketing lesson we’ve learned is that credibility can’t be manufactured. In education, a product earns attention by solving a real classroom problem and then gaining and retaining the trust of the people using it.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

EdShed has been entirely self-funded since launch. 

This has been a deliberate choice and has allowed us to grow sustainably, retain control over our direction and pursue ideas that we believe will deliver the greatest educational impact. 

Our financial independence means product decisions can be shaped by teachers and pupils rather than by pressure to pursue rapid growth, increase screen time or prioritise short-term investor returns.

The current model gives us the resources and freedom we need to continue growing. While we won’t rule out considering strategic investment in the future if it enables us to accelerate an important opportunity without compromising our values, any potential partner will need to understand that educational impact, responsible design and long-term sustainability are central to the business.

We’re not opposed to investment in principle; what we are opposed to is growth at any cost.

Tell us about the business model

EdShed operates a scalable subscription-based software model. The business benefits from the economics of software: once a platform and its educational content have been developed, it can support a growing number of schools and pupils internationally without costs increasing at the same rate as revenue.

However, edtech isn’t a low-maintenance sector. Significant ongoing investment is required in product development, curriculum content, accessibility, customer support, safeguarding, data security and the technical infrastructure needed to support millions of users.

From the outset, we’ve been very disciplined about growth. Spelling Shed has always at least broken even and we have never put money into the business that it hadn’t already earned. What we did invest heavily was our own time and expertise, particularly in technology and distribution.

The business has grown through recurring income, strong teacher recommendations and the expansion of the EdShed product family. The wider group now generates just under £4 million annually and employs 46 people.

Are there any technologies you've found useful?

A lot of our technology sits within Amazon Web Services, which provides the underlying platform for much of what we do, and we’ve also benefited from a good level of support from AWS as we’ve grown.

We’re starting to use generative AI in some areas, but at this stage we see it primarily as a productivity tool, useful for saving time rather than fundamentally changing how we operate.

Zoho has also been valuable for back-office functions. That said, our general approach is to build our own tools wherever it makes sense. We’re a technology business, so if we can create something that fits our needs better, we usually will. The exception is where there’s already a strong, cost-effective solution available, such as Google Analytics.

What is the future vision?

Our ambition is to build a family of trusted educational products to support teachers and enable more children to experience success.

That means continuing to develop Spelling Shed, Phonics Shed and MathShed, while introducing more products that address real classroom needs across the wider curriculum. We also see significant potential to expand internationally while retaining the educational credibility and willingness to adapt that drove our early growth.

Accessibility and inclusion will remain central. We want EdShed’s platforms to work for children with a broad range of abilities and needs, including pupils who may struggle with traditional classroom structures.

We also want to contribute to a more responsible model of educational technology. Children already live in a digital world designed to compete for their attention and edtech should offer something different: purposeful engagement, clear boundaries and measurable learning progress. At EdShed, we’re leading the way on this, building technology designed around what children need to learn, not how long we can keep them online.