A Marketer in the Classroom
It turns out this combination is exactly what the EdTech world has been missing
Last week I recorded a conversation I didn’t expect to hit me as hard as it did.
The guest was Paulina Krukowska — a senior digital marketing strategist who spent 15 years building campaigns for brands like H&M and Allegro. She still works full-time in advertising. That’s her world.
But there’s a second Paulina — the one who teaches kids economics in a public school, lectures at a university, and tries to smuggle modern thinking into a system that still runs on 1990s paperwork.
It’s a strange combination: a marketer in the classroom.
And it turns out this combination is exactly what the EdTech world has been missing.
Because once you hear Paulina talk about education, you can’t un-hear it:
the clarity, the practicality, the “no more bullshit” honesty.
This episode is for anyone building products for teachers, scaling EdTech, or trying to understand why adoption is so damn hard.
🎥 Watch on YouTube
🎧 Listen on Spotify →
Why EdTech keeps failing (and why marketing can fix it)
Here’s a painful truth Paulina lays out in the first 10 minutes:
Most EdTech tools solve imaginary problems.
Not real, Tuesday-morning-in-a-school problems.
Not the frustration teachers feel when they spend two hours entering grades into a system built in 1998.
Not the exhaustion that comes from constant documentation, communication, and admin.
Instead, most companies build for pitch decks.
Paulina’s antidote?
Talk to teachers.
Watch their workflow.
Find the pain points no one else sees — and fix the boring stuff.
It sounds simple, but almost no one does it.
Curiosity: the missing skill
Paulina teaches kids every week.
And she says the one thing EdTech rarely thinks about is the thing learning depends on:
Curiosity.
You can push content.
You can add features.
You can use AI.
But if the student isn’t curious, it’s dead before it starts.
That’s where her marketing brain kicks in.
Marketing is the art of getting someone to care.
Education needs more of that energy — not to manipulate, but to create the conditions where learning actually happens.
Teacher burnout is a systems problem
Another moment that stayed with me:
Paulina said teachers don’t burn out because of students.
They burn out because of systems.
Admin.
Paperwork.
Manual processes.
Tools that create work instead of reducing it.
And here’s the part that hit me personally:
AI can solve 30% of this instantly — today — without changing pedagogy at all.
If founders truly understood the daily reality inside schools, EdTech would look completely different.
“Build the 1% that matters.”
For me, this was the sharpest line in the entire episode.
Paulina:
“Don’t build the 99% future-looking platform. Build the 1% that saves time tomorrow.”
Teachers aren’t overwhelmed by lack of tools.
They’re overwhelmed by tools they don’t have the energy to use.
Simple beats sophisticated.
Immediate value beats theoretical innovation.
This is the part every EdTech founder should tattoo on their MacBooks.
The unexpected twist: ESG
Midway through the conversation, Paulina pivoted into ESG — something she works with in her other professional world, the circular economy and sustainability sector.
She believes ESG is going to hit education the same way it hit manufacturing:
quietly at first, then all at once.
reporting
transparency
impact tracking
sustainability education
staff training
EdTech that aligns with ESG will have a structural advantage.
Not because it’s trendy — but because institutions will need it.
It’s a point I hadn’t considered before the conversation.
Why you should watch
If you work in EdTech, teach in a school, run a startup, or pitch to investors, this episode will challenge how you think.
Paulina understands something rare: the intersection of strategy, communication, user behavior, and real classroom conditions.
It’s the kind of perspective founders usually don’t get — unless they’ve lived two careers at once.
🎥 Watch on YouTube →
🎧 Listen on Spotify →