A Startup Making Transfer Credits Easy with Clearmaze | Episode 5
“Sometimes you got to do what you got to do. That’s the initiative that you take when you want your company to move forward” — Nadim, co-founder of Clearmaze
Yeah so Mustafa (another co-founder) and I are actually full time. I stopped going to school, he quit his job and we’re full time now on Clearmaze.
Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do right? That’s the initiative that you take when you want your company to move forward.
We wake up really early, around five or six, go to the gym, and then come back to work on Clearmaze until probably around 10 at night.
Matt: That’s how you do it! There you go!
Jamal (Clearmaze co-founder): Just in the month of January alone it’s like we’ve made more progress than we have within the months of July to December.
Nadim (Clearmaze co-founder): You learn a lot more too, we learn if the company needs to pivot or not, you learn what other extra things your company needs to do to get yourself to your goal or your mission.
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Founder 1: Hello, I’m Jamal of one of the co-founders here at Clearmaze technologies.
Founder 2: Hi, my name is Nadim and I’m one of the co-founders of Clearmaze technologies.
Founder 3: Hey, my name is Mustafa — I’m also one of the co-founders for Clearmaze.
Nadim: Clearmaze is an ed tech company. Basically we’ve developed a web application that helps streamline the process for community college students to find classes that would eventually transfer over to a four-year institution. Our mission is to help community college students graduate on time because the current national rate for the graduation tends to go around four to five years. We want to provide a platform and a resource to help those students transfer over all their courses successfully and be able to graduate within the four year time span.
Matt: Why is it difficult right now for students to transfer their credits from Community College to university?
Jamal: The number one thing is that not all credits are created equal. Sometimes the syllabus might defer and that’s one of the biggest pain points for many students around the nation is that they don’t know that information until it’s usually too late…
Nadim: Not only that but even if they did take the initiative to try to make sure those classes do transfer, it’s very tedious. A lot of these students end up going through a bunch of different PDFs, links, and solutions online, taking hours if not days.
Matt: What value did you see in providing a solution?
Jamal: It definitely started with a personal problem for me. I was a community college student and I ended up realizing that the university I wanted to go to wasn’t gonna take all my courses. All those times I spent studying for midterms and finals is gone down the drain, the money that I paid for those courses is… You know, gone down the drain…
Nadim: If you go on Twitter right now and just type in ‘transfer credits’ you’re gonna see thousands of tweets of students complaining about it! It’s like they essentially validated the need for a product such as ours just by its all the complaints.
Jamal: Now we’re just lining up students we have about hundred 50 people signed up ready to use our platform.
Matt: So how do you get people signed up?
Jamal: Yeah so very grassroots initiative last week we went to college of Dupage you got about a hundred people signed up.
Matt: So when you’re talking to the students what was the moment that they would sign up, how would you gauge that demand?
Mustafa: First of all, something I read that really stuck out to us that usually, when you have something in class like a sign-up sheet — people just pass it around. If someone did not get our Clearmaze signup sheet when it was being passed around — people would ask “let me get that signup sheet!” That’s how much they really were intrigued by the platform.
Nadim: We started off presenting in-front of the class and we got to understand the problems they faced, we gave the transfer student an opportunity to have a daiolouge and they just kept on telling us like “yo yo what’s going on? I want to better understand this!” Everybody signed up…
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When you’re creating new businesses, there are times you’d have to sacrifice what you love or what you’re comfortable with. Don’t ever expect that your life will stay the same, it wont.
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