Reciprocity Case Study: Stanford Entrepreneurship Class

Stanford Graduate School of Business offers many experiential entrepreneurship classes, where student teams design and test new business concepts that address real-world needs. We worked with one of them, though we can’t share identifying details in this post.

By switching from spreadsheets to Reciprocity, students reported 4x more value from collaboration without additional teacher involvement. Here’s the story:

Students design, test, and launch a new venture during this class, which forces them to solve many entrepreneurial problems such as interviewing prospective users, settling on a business model, and getting industry feedback.

It’s no surprise that the qualified MBA candidates in the course are willing to help each other using their networks and experience from past careers. One can hardly imagine a more varied background than those shared by these students, whether defined by geography, network, culture, or industry.

The Associate Director for the course has always encouraged the classmates to collaborate with each other, both within their class section and across the 150 or so students in several other sections.

Before Reciprocity, they had used the below Google Spreadsheet to have students log asks for help, assigning as homework for all to input at least one thing they need help with. However, very few teams claimed that they got value from this sheet (roughly 10%).

Screenshot taken when our co-founder Amit took this class in 2018 and edited for anonymity

The Director suspected this was because the spreadsheet was hard to browse and navigate. Scrolling dozens of text-heavy student offers became laborious. Plus one had to state their name and contact info within the cells if they wanted to facilitate a response, which adds friction.

Like all MBA candidates, the students also have access to a class-wide email listserve where they can ask for help. However, this thread is noisy and crowded.

One student said “While the list is filled with tons of brilliant people, oftentimes, I’m extremely hesitant to post due to fear of spamming people’s inboxes.” There had to be a simpler way to match students willing to help!

Reciprocity founder and CEO Amit Kumar experienced these same problems himself when he took this class in 2018. When he showed how the nascent Reciprocity platform connected asks and offers using keyword matching, the Director was excited to try it in the Fall 2019 class.

He thought that the Ask tag function could help with the sheet’s navigation issues by highlighting Asks that matched a student user’s biography, while the Direct Message function made contacting each other much simpler.

We spun up a private Reciprocity instance for the class and had everyone sign in using their Stanford emails, with class homework again assigned to Ask for at least one thing, and Reply to at least one other Ask. Here were the results.

Of the 164 students that participated that quarter:

- 145 unique Asks were made, with 80 Asks coming from students Asking 2x+.
- 260 matches were made by the platform between relevant Asks and Offers
- 58 Asks got at least one reply, which means 87 Asks got zero replies.
- 92 students were able to answer one ask, and 47 students replied to more.
- 11 Asks got more than 5 replies, and these were the least specific, most accessible Asks ( general requests for personal views on skincare, gender, fitness, etc)
- 19 users made one Offer and 2 made two Offers for help.
- Almost all Asks were for Introductions, with only a few Asks for Advice and Recommendations, which you can see in this world cloud made up of the tags.

Since this homework was assigned early in the quarter, one can see that many students are Asking for access to individuals in their target market.

Midway through the course, teachers asked the students if they were able to get value from the Reciprocity tool. 38% said yes, and 45% wanted to keep using Reciprocity. Keep in mind that roughly 10% of students got value from the sheet — so that’s an improvement of almost 400%!

However, the fact that one in two students were not interested in continuing to use our tool gave us pause. So we went to campus and asked students more about their experience after class .

Here’s some insightful user quotes from our live feedback sessions:

- “I want to help when I can and your app told me how and where.”
- “It was interesting to see what others were asking for. I liked realizing that my expertise was valuable!”
- “I loved the tagging function — it would be nice to match to other team Asks that share keywords as they might work in adjacent spaces.”
- “I felt obligated to respond to all the Replies to my ask. How could I say no to a fellow student offering help?!’

Based on their constructive feedback, we increased app speed by 80%, added more information to the email notifications without requiring log-ins, and optimized the layout for mobile viewing. We also added a Thank You button that lets other users know a Reply was helpful and closed.

The Director was impressed with the pilot results and used Reciprocity again in Winter Quarter, albeit as an optional asset rather than required homework like last time. They also expressed interest in using it again next year.

Many other communities out there look like this class — with a large group of diverse members willing to help, and simply lacking the knowledge of how. Reciprocity facilitates new connections within the group, which solves their problems, increases member engagement, and strengthens their bond to the organization itself.

Are you part of a community that might benefit from Reciprocity? Sign up here to learn more, or click here to see the product’s features directly.