| Startup Name | BuddyUp Inc. |
| What problem are you solving? | Colleges and Universities are bleeding money from dropouts. Students are struggling and failing left and right. By giving universities an effective way to turn their students into collaborators BuddyUp can effectively address problems that have extremely painful social and economic consequences. |
| What is your solution? | BuddyUp is a cloud-based software that gives students an easy way to connect outside the classroom in ways that impact academic success and retention. Using the tool, students can search for study partners by course, availability, language and location. Likewise, students can organize study sessions outside of class and invite their classmates to attend. [We are in closed beta stage, launching this September]. |
| Why is this a great opportunity? | We’re gaining a great deal of traction and attention in Portland, Oregon USA and building an incredible team of investors and managers. The world of EdTech is HOT and the market is ripe. Our product and our vision is appealing to those who work in higher education as well as to students and we’re using Customer Validation and Lean Startup strategies. Finally, we are about to take the world of higher education by storm and are 3/4 of the way to closing our seed round. |
| Target Market | Higher Education. |
| How will you make money? | Annual Licensing Fees. Targeted Advertising. Referrals to tutors. Other avenues exist as well. |
| Founders Names | Brian Forrester |
| Website | http://www.buddyup.org |
| What type of funding has the company received | Angel |
This is interesting, my son is just going through his Senior year of High School and I am sure this would be useful, but I would think twice about calling it a Social Network, with the restricted rollout it sounds like the founders are trying to make a repeat of the Facebook story but I am not sure there is any gain in doing it this way.
I think the concept of a App/System/Tool to team students together for mutual success is essentially a good one, unfortunately I can’t test the tool as it is currently restricted to three US Universities.
Its not clear if there is University specific course details that need to be loaded for each course (which will make it tough to scale fast) or if they have simply restricted access to a few Universities where they have a presence for beta testing.
In my opinion they should consider opening it up to other students anywhere as long as they bring at least one friend (could be great for viral coefficient)
Also there is not really enough detail on the landing page or screenshots about the app, both of these would be helpful in converting more visitors.
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