Founding Customers
Lyra is new, and the schools who join us in this earliest period will have an outsized influence on what Lyra becomes. We’ve set aside space for 6 of them. Lyra’s constellation has 6 principal stars, and we’re partnering with 6 founding schools to match.
This page explains what the Founding Customer arrangement is, what each side commits to, and how we decide who joins.
What founding customers receive
50% off your first term. Founding customers pay half the standard rate for their whole initial term, which is 2 or 3 years, your choice. This replaces our standard multi-year discount rather than stacking with it.
Founder-level support. No ticket queue, no support tier to escalate through. Every school gets an answer within a school day. Founding customers also get a direct line to the person building the product.
A real voice in the roadmap. Founding customers help us steer. Quarterly calls give us a forum to share what we’re working on, hear what’s working and what isn’t, and gather ideas for what to build next. Between those calls, your feedback is always welcome and always read.
We want to be honest about this last point: we treat founding customer input as signal, not instruction. We won’t build everything every founding customer asks for. Lyra has a specific shape and a specific audience, and part of our job is to hold that line. But you’ll always know where we landed on something and why.
What we ask in return
Permission to name you as a customer. At minimum, your school’s name and logo on our website. Anything beyond that (a quote, a case study, a reference call with a prospective customer) is a separate conversation, and always your call.
A reliable point of contact. Someone at your school, usually the librarian, who’s our person. They join the quarterly calls, they respond to surveys we send out, and they’re available for the occasional ad-hoc question when something specific comes up.
Engagement with surveys. When we send a survey to our customer base, we count on founding customers to respond. These aren’t constant, and they’re not long, but they’re how we make sure we’re hearing from the people closest to the work.
We want to be straightforward about what we’re not asking. Founding customers aren’t beta testers. Lyra is a working ILS your library runs on, not a science experiment. But you’ll also be among the first schools using it in production, and we won’t pretend that carries zero risk. Part of why this arrangement exists is to make that tradeoff worth it.
How founding customer status works
The 50% pricing and the founding customer designation last for the duration of your initial contract term. At renewal, the arrangement may continue, or it may not. That depends on where Lyra is at that point and on the partnership itself. We’ll have an honest conversation about it well before the term ends. The shorter your initial term, the sooner that conversation happens.
This structure is intentional. The founding customer program exists to help us build Lyra in its earliest days, and it makes sense for the arrangement to be tied to that period specifically.
Who this is for
Founding customer status isn’t something you sign up for. It’s a partnership we enter into one school at a time, after a real conversation, when it’s clear there’s mutual fit on both sides.
What mutual fit tends to look like:
- An active, working library program, the kind of library that actually uses its ILS daily
- A librarian who’s engaged with their work and willing to share what they’re learning
- A school that’s a good representative of the kind of school Lyra is built for: K–12 private, independent, parochial, diocesan
- A willingness to be patient with a young product, and to tell us when we’re getting it wrong
We’re partnering with 6 founding customers total, so we’re being deliberate about who joins. If we don’t think the fit is right, we’ll say so, and you’re still very welcome as a regular customer.
Talk to us
If this sounds like something you’d want to explore, get in touch. The right next step is usually a 30-minute conversation about your library, what you’re hoping for in an ILS, and whether the founding customer arrangement makes sense on both sides.