My notes from presenting Coursicle at the innovation showcase.

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  • Hi, I’m Joe.
    • I’m a senior, math and computer science double major at UNC.
    • Today I’m going to tell you about a company I co-founded called Coursicle.
  • Coursicle sets out to solve two major problems at colleges.
    • The enterprise software colleges buy is notoriously terrible to use for students
    • 10/15 years out of date
    • Makes it very hard to plan course schedule
    • Students especially at public universities can’t get into classes
  • We solve both.
    • We’ve made a beautiful course search engine and course scheduler.
    • We text students when a class they want has an available seat.
    • Both completely free to use for students.
  • We’ve had a decent amount of success so far.
    • 70% of UNC undergrads use our services.
    • When students are using our site to plan, they spend on average 28 minutes on the site.
  • We’re going after the higher education market, which is anticipated to double by 2025.
    • Also, the nature of campuses as we’ve seen at UNC is that upperclassman very effectively pass on the knowledge of our products to incoming students, which means once we hit a certain fraction of users, we don’t have to do any marketing.
    • We haven’t marketed at UNC for 2 years.
  • Now onto our model, which we’ll be testing out this summer.
    • A natural thing to put on the site is textbooks for each class, which we have the data for. We could make money through affiliate programs.
    • Advertising is another possibility. The college demographic is very valuable to advertisers, and we could be a way to get their message out.
    • We also send a lot of texts, 260k at UNC in January alone, which means we could be a new way of getting the message out.
    • Licensing, we’ve partnered with UNC Registrar, ITS, and Academic Advising and the Registrar and Academic Advising have requested numerous reports of our data to help them plan.
  • Quick overview of our timeline
    • Launched at UNC in 2013
    • Added scheduling ability and better browsing ability in summer 2014
    • We expanded to 4 additional schools in November 2015
    • Added feature which allows students to see what classes their Facebook friends are considering in real time in January
    • Expanded to a little over 100 schools in February, which took about 3 weeks of work.
    • Full list of schools is on Coursicle.com
  • We do have some competitors
    • These are all for our course schedule planner. We currently have no cross-school competitors for our course notification service.
    • Our largest competitor, myEdu, has out of date data, hasn’t developed product in 3+ years, very poor UX on Chrome, which 50% of students use, etc.
    • Courseoff indie developer, but somewhat abandoned, 8/30 schools listed actually work, etc.
  • As for our team
    • As I mentioned, I’ve a senior studying Math and Computer Science
    • I’ve worked at some local tech companies, like Cisco and Shoeboxed
    • I focus on the backend stuff.
    • My co-founder Tara is a senior studying Math and Physics at Harvard
    • She’s done a lot of research computing in the area, at UNC and NC State.
    • She handles all of our front-end web dev, and design.
  • Here are some testimonials from our users.
  • So where we’re looking to go now is start planting the seed at as many schools as possible, just like we did at UNC 3 years ago, which is why we expanded so rapidly to those 100 schools. We’ve gotten a lot better at marketing, so that our user adoption at those first 4 schools we expanded to was about 80% better than UNC initial adoption.
  • Please feel free to come by our booth if you have any questions, advice, or would just like to chat.