Coursicle Elevator Pitch

read more

	•	I’m Joe Puccio, co-founder of Coursicle.
	•	Across the US, the course registration software provided by the universities is notoriously terrible and despised by students, making it difficult for students to get into the courses they need to graduate [50% of students are unsatisfied??]. One of the symptoms of this problem: 40% percent of college students don’t finish their degree within 6-years of starting school. 
	•	We at Coursicle are addressing this by helping students plan their perfect class schedule and get into those classes. 
	•	We do so with two tools. 
	•	The first allows students to easily browse classes and plan out which ones they’re interested in visually. 
	•	The second allows students to get a text when a class they want to get into has an available seat. 
	•	We’ve already had over 16,000 students users across our first five universities. 
	•	And in February we expanded to over 100 schools. 
	•	Ask: we’re currently looking for marketing advisors to help put our product in front of the 1.1+ million students whose schools we already support. 


Revised Deck (Mara said very solid 30 second pitch)

	•	I’m Joe Puccio, co-founder of Coursicle. 
	•	We help college students with course registration by helping them plan out their course schedule as well as texting them when a class they want has an available seat.  
	•	So, when I was an incoming freshman at UNC, I spent 7 hours trying to plan my class schedule and then finally when I went to register for those classes, I got into only one of five I needed to take to graduate. 
	•	That night, I started working on a program that would text me when the classes I wanted had available seats. 
	•	We opened it up to other students and grew really quickly, without any advertising, we had 900 users first semester, 1800 users the next semester, and it just kept doubling. 
	•	Now we have over 16,000 users across our first five universities. 
	•	And in February we expanded to another 100 schools. 
	•	Right now we’re looking for marketing advice and strategies to help us further penetrate the college student market. 


Revised Deck (attempt at 60 seconds):

	•	I’m Joe Puccio, co-founder of Coursicle. 
	•	We help college students with course registration by helping them plan out their course schedule as well as texting them when a class they want has an available seat.  
	•	So, when I was an incoming freshman at UNC, I spent 7 hours trying to plan my class schedule, and the next day I was funneled into a room with 30 other students and when someone said “go!” we would frantically click on our computers, each of us trying to beat each other into getting a seat in our classes. I’m standing here because I, like many others in that room, got into only one of five I needed to take to graduate. 
	•	That night, I wrote a program that would text me when the classes I wanted had available seats. 
	•	We opened it up to other students at UNC and grew really quickly just by word of mouth, we had 900 users first semester, 1800 users the next semester, and it just kept doubling. 
	•	Now we also help students plan their schedule and have over 16,000 users across our first five universities. 
	•	And in February we expanded to another 100 schools. 
	•	Right now we’re looking for marketing advice to help us further penetrate the college student market. 


What I’ve found myself saying in conversation. 
- We make the course registration process significantly easier for college students. 

Give use cases, need to get classes with friends, get into classes to graduate. “Maybe you want to take a class with a friend”


Feedback from that pitch: include something more quantitative for the problem. How many students didn’t graduate because of the problem. 

He says that we should have these things: 

-Description: we provide a website that allows college students to easily plan their course schedule and signup to receive a text when a class they want to take has an available seat. 
-Customer + Problem: our primary customers are first and second year students at 4-year colleges. The problem is that universities provide terrible enterprise software for searching for classes and planning their schedule, and provide no recourse for students who want to get into classes that are full. 
-Example: when I was an incoming freshman at UNC, it took me over 9 hours to browse the course catalog and plan a class schedule. When I finally went to register for those classes, I was completely destroyed when I only managed to get a seat in 1 out of the 5 classes I wanted. 
-The Ask: we’re looking for advisors to assist us with marketing to hundreds of thousands of college students. 

Top three: Marketing advisors, funding for marketing, more customer interviews for getting perfect fit. Adwords assistance.