Call with Jonathan Shieber at TechCrunch. Met him at a conference that Start Co. forced us to go to, called 36/86. It was stupid, we told them we didn't want to spend all this money to go, that the money would be better spent on the business, but they insisted we were stupid and should go. In the end, they ended up paying us to go. Nothing really came of this conference in the end, a couple of connections that fizzled out (a company that offered to buy us for a whopping $50,000, and meeting this TechCrunch guy). He was nice, but the fact is: TechCrunch only fucking cares about companies who raise a bunch of money. It's like people have forgotten what companies even exist to do: generate fucking revenue. He didn't end up writing an article, which I was pretty bummed about, but it helped me realize: the game is fucking rigged, the only winning move is not to play.
read moreUsers: 19,000 users so far. (number of students who have planned their schedule or tracked classes on Coursicle Notify). Monthly active users: 8621 Monthly sessions: 26023 Monthly notifications: 129,000 Average session duration: 28 minutes. Schools supported: 200 with scheduling feature, more than 60 with notification feature. Now that MyEdu is closing shop, planning to expand to many more schools. Ways we’re better than MyEdu: We also help with every step of registration. First: Better browsing. Essentially MyEdu you have to know which classes you want to add, which is the problem with university searches too. We can filter by time, day, by title, by what classes fit your schedule. Have gen eds and can filter by gen eds. Can see what classes your friends are considering in real-time by logging in with Facebook. Second: We offer a notification feature that will text students when a class they want has an available seat, called Coursicle Notify. This was our first service which we launched at UNC 4 years ago. Students can login with Facebook too (3,200 logins). Ways we’re worse: They have grade data, which we found students were interested with but it’s not easily scrapable. We think they got it via formal requests to the universities. Autoscheduler. More info about MyEdu: The University of Texas system controversially invested $10 million back in 2011. Then they raised $20 million from Bain and the UT system. Blackboard bought them in January 2014 I believe. Seems like they’ve shut them down really to pursue a new product which is similar, but appears to be sold to the universities (the typical Blackboard business model). This is called BB Planner. What we know is that these enterprise software systems are almost never good for the students. This issue exists in the first place because the software students are using is made my enterprises whose interest is in pleasing the desires of the purchaser, not the end user. Over 1 million users in 2013. #probably active? on a PDF we found online 5.3 million users in 2011 #techcrunch Shifted to being more of a portal for jobs and internships. Students could create profiles and connect with potential employers through the site.