As a startup not willing to waste time and money, Find Your Grind chose Edlink as an integration partner to enhance its go-to-market strategy by providing SSO.

Listen to the conversation with Dan Weidmann, Director of Partnerships at Find Your Grind as he talks about his experience with Edlink.

Jump in! We’ll cover:

  • Who is Find Your Grind
  • What issue Find Your Grind needed to solve with integrations
  • Why Edlink was able to solve this issue for Find Your Grind
  • What Find Your Grind gained from working with Edlink
  • Find Your Grind's future plans with integrations

Download a PDF version about Find Your Grind's experience partnering with Edlink here.

Enjoy:

S - 0:00 - Who is Find Your Grind, what is their product, and what’s your role?

D - My role at Find Your Grind is the Director of Partnerships on January 1. And Find Your Grind an innovative social-emotional career readiness solution. Designed to prepare studies for the future of work

S - 0:34 - In your role to you end up talking to a lot of school folks directly?

D - Yes. I work with all personas. From the implementing educators all the way through specific district administrators and buyers. So I have the fortunate job of working from the top down and bottom up at different stages at both the sales cycle and implementation cycle.

S - 1:06 - How long have your worked at Find Your Grind?

D - I’ve been at Find Your Grind for almost 3 years. Just been a little over 2 and a half now. So I’ve seen it transform from a series of google docs to an interactive personalized digital learning experience.

S - 1:23 - What got Find your Grind interested in integrations?

D - The conversation on integration really started when our solution started to scale across school districts in the country. And as we grew from a classroom product to a school-wide or district-wide type of learning solution. There was just a greater need to simplify the login process and there was a greater need to align with student privacy data and concerns of various states and districts. We knew we need to provide unblocked opportunities for partnerships to provide various logging options which include SSO.

S - 2:18 - From your perspective, why did Edlink win out over Find Your Grind by building its own integration to Google Classroom?

D - I think it is where we were as an organization. We’re obviously still in the startup phase with where our company is. And internally what we set out and do every single day is to build incredible learning experiences that drive learning for students and to increase the flexibility of how our content is delivered by educators. All of our day-to-day focus on that we had to make decisions on where we are going to prioritize the energy and time of our development team and backend engineers. Our engineers were working tirelessly at making amazing learning experiences. And our philosophy has always been to find the best person to do the best job. And if creating SSO solutions was something we needed to focus on, we just had the mindset of finding a partner that does it at the highest level that could do it for us in a collaborating way so that our engineers could stay focused on the amazing work they were doing every day.

S - 3:51 - Since leveraging Edlink, how have you noticed your users impacted by single sign-on?

D - Well I’ve seen our sales at FYG dramatically increase because we can offer SSO to potential partners. And where we were as a company was we were starting to become very attractive to a lot districts across the country, we knew by not having SSO it was going to be a blocker for purchase. So for us, by partnering with Edlink it sped up how quickly we were able to go to market with this type of offering, which allowed us to close deals at a much faster and quicker past. Cause of how easy it was for to turn around and offer SSO in so many options by having this partnership. Cause if we did it in-house internally, it would have taken us months and months to build it and we didn’t have the time to do that if we were going to meet the revenue goals we had.

S - 5:04 - When you started onboarding schools, how was that process?

D - For me, my favorite part of the process was that you guys have been there every step of the way. We knew that when we were going to onboard these new partners that we would have the backend support needed to serve them successfully. Every district is different. Everyone has different demands, everyone has different expectations. And it has been really awesome for us because we know we had the experts in our corner to leave the implementation of single sign-on integration. So for us, it's gone extremely well and smooth. Early on it was really important to us to make sure that FYG and Edlink and the district were all in the same room together. And now as we’ve really built our partnership and folks like myself have gotten a lot more comfortable with Edlink and the backend maybe we can step away from that a little bit. But it’s always amazing to know that Edlink is in our corner to solve any problem that we need depending on the needs of the district.

D - And I would also like to add that it's really added to our creditability as a young company knowing that we have a very sophisticated process in place that makes it really easy and simplifies the onboard process for districts. It’s incredible for the district to see how quick it is to integrate with FYG. We know IT departments in school districts are busy and they tend to be folks managing a lot of different fires at one time. And the fact that they can integrate with FYG in two clicks and really easily with two links is a benefit for them as well.

S - 7:13 - Out of curiosity have any admins commented on the speed of the onboarding process?

D - More often than not they really how quick and painless it was. And I think they’re always relieved to know that it's not something that’s going to take a ton of their time and effort. They can do it very quickly. And once it is set up it’s sent our way; it's off their plate. And we can now work directly on implementing with administrators and educators to get things set up and ready to go.

S - 7:50 - Now that you've onboarding a bunch of schools, how does the Find Your Grind team stay on top of managing its integrations?

D - We have a partnership team at FYG that focuses on all of the implementation support that’s required by our partners. But the best part for someone like myself who manages the majority of our customers is I have backend. Obviously, I can log into Edlink and I can see everything in realtime and how the data is coming in. I can support the management of that data with the district. So, it's easy for us to create rules about how the data is being shared and how it’s being pushed into FYG to make sure that it’s seamless integration on the front end. So that the users never see anything, feel anything; get disgruntled with anything. And will always be able to make sure everything is set up and ready to go ahead of time. And if there is ever a scenario where someone can’t get in for one reason or another, the fact that I can quickly go into the backend of Edlink and either add that user directly or create a new sharing rule that opens up more users to log in, and we can respond within seconds or minutes to the customer that it’s all fixed, that person can log in, it just helps show our credibility of support, and where we are as a company.

S - 9:25 - Do you see Find Your Grind continuing to work with Edlink going forward?

D - Yea, absolutely! Edlink has proven to be a strategic partner of FYG. And I think there has been a ton of trust built between our teams. And they’ve allowed us to bring a product to market quicker than we would have been able to do without Edlink’s partnership. And as we continue to face various demands of integration capabilities we know that we have a partner that’s already solved the problems that companies like us already have to solve. And could get us set up and integrating in various different ways quicker than we could have done on our own. For that alone I am 100% confident that as we continue to grow in scale and implementation across the country as we grow as an organization that Edlink will always be our single sign-on solution provider because they have already figured it out more than most people. And we’re not going to try and do something that they can do better than us.

S - 10:38 - Along your journey with Edlink, has anything surprised you?

D - I think the thing that has surprised me is how uncomplicated the complicated sometimes feels. If that makes sense. Single sign-on and integration can be scary conversations that don’t make sense for especially sales reps, who might not have the backend or technology lingo necessary. But I think Edlink has made it surprising to me how truly easy it is to serve customers in different stages and to serve them in different needs in what integration they are looking for. Whether it's through Clever or ClassLink, or Microsoft or Google, or whatever solution they’re looking for, it’s been surprisingly easy for us to meet that demand.

S - 11:35 - What's your favorite part about working with Edlink?

D - Sara of course! I would say it is two things. I really do say that seriously because I’m in a customer support role with my company, right? I know how important it is for my partners and my customers to have someone that they can trust or someone that they can rely on, someone that’s responsive to their needs and to their questions in a timely fashion. I think that’s so important in customer support, in general, is just being there. Half the battle in support is being present and being there for your partners. And Edlink has done that, time and time again for us. Whether I need support in a day, two days, or I just simply need or want to have a monthly cadence check-in, they been there. And I think that has been tremendous for us as we’ve navigated the changing landscape of integration and what’s needed from our customers. We really do love that part of our partnership. The other piece would be, I know I’ve talked about this already but, it’s one solution for all solutions. It’s not up to FYG to try and solve every integration capability. We’re lucky enough to have a strategic partner like Edlink that has built the connection through different various integration abilities, which allows our job to be so much easier in what we have to do.

S - Thanks for going into that. I’ll just say that it’s really great to work with a team like FYG that’s really communicative and I feel like you guys have a really great team. Internal communication-wise, I think speaking to your team it’s really clear yall are on the same page or communicating about initiatives. That actually really helps my job - to give some compliments back to you guys too!

If you’re interested to learn more about Edlink’s client resources,  here’re other articles we’ve written.

Edlink’s Client Stories - Our Collection of Client Articles

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