I created a list of all the people who we knew who we thought would be good culture fits at Coursicle, then I reached out to all 70 of them to set up calls.

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  • How’s it going?/pleasantries.
  • Order food.
  • So how about we start by just giving you a history of Coursicle and then we can go from there?
    • First, how much do you know about Coursicle/what exactly we do?
    • Got it. So here’s the background:
      • When Joe was an incoming freshmen…
      • Notify feature…
      • Growing quickly (900, 1800, etc.)
      • Co-founder Tara solve other part of registration…
      • 3 years, just UNC
      • Try to sell to universities.
      • Expand without working with them.
      • Now we’re at yyy colleges and about xxx users, zzz revenue.
      • The team is x people, but only y are full-time. We’re all developers who wear a lot of hats.
    • Any questions about that?
  • Why don’t you tell us about your trajectory and why you’re looking to leave?
  • Current team
    • Joe and Kiran full-time
    • Two part-time student contractors
    • Tara joining full-time in Spring
  • So we’re looking to hire someone to help with:
    • Building out new features.
    • Scaling stuff.
  • Our current challenges are:
    • Scaling stuff. Overwhelmed with maintenance that we can't build.
  • Our roadmap is:
    • Below.
  • Benefits:
    • Stock
    • 401(k)
    • Unlimited PTO
    • (upcoming) Health insurance
  • How we get users
    • Used to do a lot of posts, Reddit, etc.
    • Now it’s very word of mouth and passive; course/professor pages.
  • Competitors
    • Basically none, lots of small ones.
  • Goals/Mission:
    • Improve graduation rates. Only 40% of college students graduate in 4 years. 60% in 6.
    • Become primary reputable B2C edtech company in higher ed (Chegg, Course Hero, etc do some morally questionable things).
    • Run only on revenue
    • Have full gender equality at Coursicle (50% women in engineering, managerial roles, etc.)
  • How we make money
    • Premium purchases.
    • Data sales.
    • Running entirely on revenue. Will do about $250,000 this year.
  • https://www.digitalocean.com/customers/coursicle
  • https://www.coursicle.com/blog/loginless-a-new-standard-for-user-identification.php
  • Stats:
    • Top schools:
      • UT Austin, UNC, UVA, Notre Dame, Smith, Wellesley, Harvard, NYU, W&M, GWU, Georgia Tech, Emory, UVA, Temple
      • UA, SC, Clemson, UNC, UIUC, ASU, UCLA, VT
  • Stats:
    • Unique visitors growing 400% YOY.
      • 83k in Spring 2017
      • 1.9m in Spring 2019
    • Revenue growth:
      • $16,000 in 2017.
      • $250,000 in 2019.