Unhooked student: The anti social network effect of college seasonality
When we started StudyRoom the idea came down to provide the best community-curated academic resources to college students, because lack of academic help is the #2 reason why 30% of students drop out in their first year (and don’t even get me started with the 37% of students who are not college-ready by the time school starts). Students already collaborate and help each other, but in a very small scale. Our thesis was that we can tap into the sense of community and scale the collaboration efforts by 100x with students sharing resources accesible 24/7 to their classmates, easiness to find people to study with, and easiness to find help when what’s provided is not enough. The focus was mainly around courses and academics, but we quickly realized college students can go years without really having a strong academic network and they were hungry for making social connections (opportunity #1). Some students quickly became stars in their classes as they were the ones further explaining difficult concepts, sharing their notes, flashcards, helping their soon-to-be-friends. Recognition by their peers and the entire StudyRoom community came naturally (opportunity #2). Thousands of very useful resources (notes, Quizlets, collaborative study guides, etc.) were being shared on the course pages for everyone to use when it was time to study. Resources that were naturally shared between students in their real life classroom, but for some reason being sold online (opportunity #3).
Community-focused vs. resource-focused
All edtech startups share the same goal: To allow students achieve their maximum potential. Some companies do it by providing services (InstaEDU, WyzAnt, etc.) or resources (Chegg Study, StudySoup, etc.), paid or free. But the ones that are truly changing the face of the game are the ones that are community-focused, the ones that are directly or indirectly creating a sense of community and collaboration where learning is no longer a lonely interaction, but rather, a one-to-many or many-to-many interaction, and yet, they aim to make it feel like a truly personalized experience (Quizlet, Remind, Edmodo, etc). It also creates a whole new set of challenges, because you need to create a community and keep everyone hooked, and not just one person. The top down approach, where you convince an admin or instructor and they push it down to students, is the easiest one in the sense that you have a smaller customer base hooked. When you have to convince every single student that your platform is the one they can’t ignore anymore, it becomes a quite beautiful challenge.
Seasonality
After successfully launching StudyRoom in the Fall of 2014 with 400k sign ups and over 100k students weekly active throughout finals week, Spring 2015 came and hit us really hard. Due to bad decisions, lack of enough funding and many other reasons, our focus was not 110% on retention and growth where it should have been. StudyRoom had created an amazing positive habit where students would go into the platform multiple times a week to share their notes, flashcards, ask for homework help when they got stuck, form study groups and even just to chill and meet other college students. The success of a social network is strongly related to how much more and how much better value the individual gets as they grow their network, and the habits they build as they grow it. Twitter, with their chronological timeline, has a limit of people you can follow before it starts deteriorating your experience due to too much noise. Facebook is exceptionally good at this with their relevancy-based news feed and numerous internal triggers. On StudyRoom though, you have to reset your network every semester. Even if you’re a super pumped up student, who goes every day, multiple times a day on StudyRoom, and are super popular in most of your classes, once the new semester starts you have to join new classes, meet new people, invite people cuz not a lot of people from your new courses are on StudyRoom. Your previous network (classmates from last semester’s classes) is, for the most part, no longer connected to you, no longer there to help you, interact with you, share with you, thank you for your help, no longer creating internal triggers. Once internal triggers are gone there’s a high chance your habits will break. Imagine a world where every 4 months you’re automatically unfriended and unfollowed by all your FB friends, groups and pages except for 3 of them…ouch!
The ultimate hook: Data, data, data
The easiest a way to remedy the seasonality problem in edtech is to not have a hook for all your users and instead go after a much smaller user base, like administrators or professors, and do the work to convince them to adopt your product and push it down to students. Doing this is still not easy and it’s not a real solution to the problem of how to keep students hooked. So how are we planning on doing it? By making ourselves so obviously valuable that it would be dumb not to be on StudyRoom during your 6.5 years in college. To make us so obviously valuable we will need to combine our two most important hooks: community and content, and the glue connecting everything together will be data.
Our reach problem can be solved with community data: If a returning student joins new classes and they happen to be not so populated, when they need help they won’t get it and they will leave. But as I mentioned before, StudyRoom bring out the best in people and creates a beautiful community of students where they all help one another, it’s just a matter of making the connections. Maybe there’s only 5 people in their Physics class, but on StudyRoom there are over 50,000 other students that have taken that Physics class or a similar one who will gladly help them. We do the matching, they collaborate.
Our time problem can be solved with content data: If a returning student joins new classes and they happen to not be so populated, when they need notes, or want extra study guides or flashcards they won’t get it. Fortunately there has already been a couple of generations of students taking that class who shared a ton of amazing resources in previous semesters. All we need to do is classify EVERY SINGLE RESOURCE ever shared on SR and present them to our users in a very organize way.
Our re-engagement issue can be solved with content data: We can even go one step further and actually find the absolute best study guide for you based on your academic timeline and affinity to certain type of resource, and send it to you before your final, so that you’re extra ready to nail that exam. Here’s an example of an email fully personalized for the recipient with a study guide that has been downloaded 150 times by their peers:
There are many more things we can already do with the existing data we have where we mix community and content to tackle our seasonality problem, specially during the month leading to the beginning of the semester. Since we included data as part of our equations we have been able to be extremely targeted when providing tailored academic resources to our students, thus providing them with the best of StudyRoom and not letting them drown in a sea of loneliness and uselessness. We have put a handful of these experiments in place this semester so we’ll see where that goes.
Good luck with finals everyone! 🤓
