In response to one of our posts on Reddit about Coursicle (this was right after we launched Coursicle at our first school other than UNC, which was Notre Dame), a VC guy named Mike reached out and offered to do a call. This felt pretty promising, since it was someone with money reaching out to us rather than the other way around. But once it became clear on the call that all I was asking for was money so we could continue working on Coursicle after graduation, he and his partner gave a little lesson on how VC investing works: they want to fund specific "experiments", not just pay for the founders to keep working on their startup. Frankly, it still seems pretty myopic to me to only want to fund specific experiments. Creativity can't be rushed in the same way productivity can. It doesn't just happen when you want it to happen, so when you need money might not coincide with when you have a good idea for an experiment. Continuing business as usual and listening in wait until the idea strikes you with such force you simply can't ignore it, that's what we've found successful. Very sweet guys, though. We did a couple check-in calls with them after that up until we decided we didn't want to raise money.

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How's it going? Thanks for talking to me. So want me to get you up to speed on where we are with Coursicle and give a bit more background?

- started at UNC, we had a service that texts students when class has available seat. Then created service that makes scheduling classes really easy

- expanded scheduling site to 5 schools

- Matched our original adoption for UNC at 3 of those 4

- But from what we’ve seen at UNC widespread adoption can take a while at a school, because our product is seasonal

- So we decided to grow in a way we could control, which is by school count.

Some questions:

- What are your thoughts about the inherit seasonality of our product? Existing students only register twice a year, so students are heavily using both products for about 3 months out of the year, but are receiving notifications from us about 8 months out of the year.

- Do you recommend we start testing some possible monetization routes we’ve been considering? Or is this not too much of a concern?

- We're both graduating this May, and we want to continue work on Coursicle full time. Given our stage, what funding routes would you recommend?