Karen Lien is an Edtech Principal at Y Combinator.

At YC / Imagine K12, we work with an educator advisory board that guides our work with edtech companies. Over the past year, the advisory board has helped us compile a collection of guidelines for edtech products. The guidelines touch on everything from data format, to account setup, to customer support, and they focus on things that might not seem very significant to edtech founders, but can make a big difference to teachers, schools, and districts.

We created this resource to help YC / Imagine K12 edtech founders better understand how to meet the needs of education customers. We’re sharing it here in hopes that it will be a useful reference for other edtech companies as well.

We did our best to include a diversity of perspectives in creating these guidelines. We also invite your comments (karen@ycombinator.com) to continue improving this resource.

Read the guidelines.