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    * 10/15 years out of date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.