“Our focus at StudySoup is building an academic service department online,” said Kozinsky. Participants in this round of funding were 1776 DC, Canyon Creek Capital, 500 Startups and a few angels such as John Katzman, Jake Gibson and Leonard Lodish. StudySoup is primarily used by undergrads, but 20 percent of users are graduate students pursuing medical or law school. “We wanted to make sure that students need this help everywhere.”Īccording to the company, 2,000 Elite Notetakers, 150 schools and more than 500,000 students are part of the StudySoup network. “We picked schools that were similar to UC Santa Barbara in size and demographics, but also that were across different state lines,” Kozinsky explained. The others were the University of Oregon and the University of Washington.
One was the campus where the co-founders were studying, UC Santa Barbara. StudySoup started on three campuses in 2014. Subscriptions cost from $11 to $30 a month. They can search notes by note taker, class or professor. On the other side of the business - the demand - there are students from a variety of backgrounds, from strugglers to top performers. And every time somebody uses your notes, you’re going to unlock new revenue.” If you just sign up and you go through the training, you are guaranteed to earn money. “But unlike Airbnb or Uber, we offer a guarantee for students. “We keep about 30 percent of the revenue they make,” Kozinsky said. The company shares revenue with the Elite Notetakers. StudySoup calls them “Elite Notetakers.” Students need to apply to become Elite Notetakers, and complete a training about what kind of materials they should post and how often.Īccording to Kozinsky, Elite Notetakers can earn from $400 to $500 per course by posting once a week, for a total of about 15 pieces of content. On one side of the marketplace - the supply - there are people who provide the content: excellent note takers who want to make some extra cash by selling their notes.
What can really help students, according to Kozinsky, is learning from their peers. This was the case for one of Kozinsky’s roommates, as well.Įven if several of the bigger universities offer academic support to their students, these services are not available everywhere. “One day, I looked over to the young lady who was sitting to my side, and she had perfectly structured notes in different colors, very nicely organized.”Īfter that, Kozinsky and fellow UCSB undergrad Jeff Silverman, co-founder of StudySoup, discovered that more than one in three students drop out college because of financial reasons or because they don’t get the support they need.
“Unfortunately, I was not able to listen and take notes at the same time,” Kozinsky recalled. Kozinsky said that the first spark for StudySoup was ignited when he was taking a Biology 1 class as a sophomore at UC Santa Barbara. According to him, there were 500 students in that class and the teacher would speak really fast. “We realized that a lot of students come to college on very different levels,” Sieva Kozinsky, 26, co-founder and CEO, said in a phone interview with TechCrunch. “They’re all expected to hit the ground running and to get on the same page, and unfortunately it leads to a lot of failures, because people are totally unprepared and there isn’t the right support there.” The company works as an online study group where students can sell or purchase class notes and study guides. San Francisco-based education startup StudySoup, which calls itself “a peer-to-peer learning marketplace,” announced it has raised $1.7 million in seed funding.
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