Navigating a Business Model Pivot at Studyportals
As Director of Product at a leading EdTech marketplace, I led the transition from pay-per-click to enrollment-based revenue — while both models ran in parallel.
The situation
Studyportals is the world's leading higher education marketplace, connecting millions of students with universities globally. The company had built a successful business on a simple model: attract students through search, send them to university websites, get paid per click.
But the company was pivoting to an enrollment-based model — getting paid only when a student actually enrols at a university. This wasn't a small tweak. It meant fundamentally rethinking what the product did.
Under the old model, success meant sending traffic away as fast as possible. Under the new model, success meant keeping students on the platform — giving them enough value to register, helping them compare options, nudging them toward the right university, and then proving to the client that Studyportals actually influenced their decision.
I was brought in to lead the product organisation through this pivot.
The core tension
The hardest part wasn't building new features. It was running two conflicting business models at the same time.
90% of revenue still came from pay-per-click. Every page, every CTA, every design decision had to serve two masters: maximise clicks to university sites (old model) or maximise student registrations on the platform (new model). These goals directly competed with each other.
Teams were paralysed. Every prioritisation debate turned into a philosophical argument about which business model to optimise for. There was no shared framework for making these trade-offs, and no clear signal for what “winning” looked like during the transition.
How I approached it
Introduced a North Star to cut through the noise
The first thing I did was research how other companies had navigated similar transitions. I landed on the North Star metric framework — a single metric that the entire organisation could align around.
The insight: engaged registered students — students who registered AND actively explored university options — was the right North Star because it served both models. Engaged registered students generated richer data for enrollment attribution (new model) while not cannibalising the traffic we were monetising (old model). It bridged both worlds.
This gave every team — Product, Engineering, Marketing, Content — a shared reference point. When a trade-off arose, the question became: “Does this increase engaged registrations?” It didn't eliminate complexity, but it made the complexity manageable.
I complemented this with two other frameworks: a clear prioritisation model for deciding which experiments to ship, and a financial guardrail I developed with the CFO. We quantified how much pay-per-click revenue we were willing to trade for a given increase in enrollment-based revenue. When an experiment showed enrolments rising but clicks dropping, we had a pre-agreed threshold for what was acceptable. This removed emotion from the hardest decisions.
Built a cross-functional growth team
I established a dedicated growth team bridging Product, Marketing, and Engineering — focused specifically on the levers that mattered most: organic traffic (SEO) and visitor-to-registration conversion.
This team broke down departmental silos that had been slowing execution. Instead of Marketing doing SEO in isolation and Product optimising conversion separately, one team owned the full funnel from search to registration.
Transformed the product experience
The product itself had to change. We moved from a platform designed to get users off the site to one designed to help them decide. That meant building recommendation engines, matching tools, and strategic content gating — giving students enough value to register, while proving to universities that we were genuinely influencing enrollment decisions.
We also built the data infrastructure to track attribution: connecting a student's activity on our platform to their eventual enrolment at a university. This was a complex system — reconciling platform activity data with university enrolment data — and I drove the initial design personally before handing it to the team. Without this attribution layer, the new business model simply couldn't work.
The outcome
120%
revenue growth driven by the enrollment-based model during my tenure
5×
revenue growth continued after my departure, validating the strategic pivot
Aligned
org-wide on a single North Star, ending prioritisation paralysis
A foundation for what came next. The transition I led was the stepping stone for much larger growth. After my departure, the company continued on this trajectory and multiplied revenue roughly fivefold — validating that the strategic pivot, the frameworks, and the product infrastructure we built were sound.
Organisational alignment. The North Star framework and prioritisation models transformed how the company made decisions — teams stopped arguing about which model to optimise and started executing against shared goals.
What this story shows
Business model pivots are some of the hardest transformations a company can go through — especially when the old model is still paying the bills. The natural instinct is to protect what's working, which starves the new model of oxygen.
The key was building a system of frameworks — a North Star for alignment, prioritisation models for execution, and financial guardrails for the hard trade-offs — that let the organisation navigate the transition without paralysis. And then transforming the product itself from a traffic pass-through into something that genuinely helped students make better decisions.
Want to discuss how I approach business model transitions?
I share detailed case studies in direct conversations.
Get in touch