Chicago Bears, Cheat Notes & How to Solve Gaps in Benefit Value

Tyler, how are you doing?

Good. How are you?

Great. You're in Illinois?

Yep, I'm in Gurney, Illinois right now.

Bears fan?

Yes. Die Hard.

It's looking pretty good for you this year.

I know the. The NFL, they didn't. They didn't hear us coming.

That's the best. It's way better to be underestimated than be the one everybody's gunning for.

Yeah, exactly. Someone's always trying to get to the top. And if you're up there, you can only go down, right?

Seems like that, yeah. So what kind of. Tell me about your business.

So my business is studytank.com and what it is is it's an online community that aims to increase student retention by identifying what the student does not know and then provides the student with tailored learning material before it's too late in a class. And our system is mainly driven by the fact that we have high, credible, high credibility on the content that is posted on our learning community. And the number one question I guess I'm calling in for is what is the best way to make a sale at the enterprise level, especially to a university where the CIOs and the provost and computer users committees and there's really large network of people that need to be influenced in order to make that decision happen, especially with technology.

I guess my question is, what is the strategy to do that efficiently?

Okay, let me ask a couple questions. First, how do you curate the content?

So what we do is we go to university to university and we partner with professors individually. And what they do is they then send us a list of the learning outcomes associated with their course, and then all of the notes for the course. And the study tank onboarding team will then associate each note with a learning outcome. And then the student has the ability to see all the learning outcomes in a list view. And by selecting different learning outcomes, they're able to filter out the notes and only see what they're trying to learn. So if you're in a calculus class, you see a list of learning outcomes, and maybe one of those learning outcomes is how to take the derivative. You know, you can select that, and then the notes directly on how to take the derivative will be broadcasted to the student without all the other excess content involved in the class. And so we onboard the credible content by directly going to the source and getting it from the professors.

So how are you like, let's say like you charge somebody $10, how much of that are you paying to the professors?

So right now we have no business model that Brings in money, like through the students, to the professors per se. The business model is ch to outline how the university can come on and from the university paying. That way we don't have to charge the students or the professors. Kind of like blackboard, D2L canvas. All these learning management systems are bringing on enterprises and they don't charge anyone except for the enterprise.

Yeah, but what you're providing is a little bit different. Right, so those other ones are learning platforms, aren't they? Aren't you providing us basically a condensed cheat notes?

Not cheat notes directly, but why don't.

Don't take the word cheat out of context, but cut right to the chase.

Yeah, I don't think they're cheat notes. Not only are you getting the notes from the professor, him or herself, but you can also see notes uploaded by other students and or other faculty members in your university or other universities across the country. So we're not only creating an academia for the student online, but we're giving them a social platform to do that as well.

Right, but at the end of the day, what you're providing and the reason why they want to be on your social media platform is different than, than those other ones, isn't it?

Because you're.

Yeah, they want to be on our platform because it expedites the learning process by eliminating notes that you don't have or that you don't want to study. And it connects you with notes that are also in the realm of what you are studying, but maybe not from the source that you're getting it from currently.

Okay, Tyler, So the benefit to me as a student is dramatic. It's huge. Right.

What's the benefit to me as a school?

The benefit to you as a school is we're going to help you improve student retention by identifying to the student what they don't know before it's too late. So on day one on Study Tank, we're going to assess what the student doesn't know by giving them a kind of a final exam on day one through the Study Tank platform. And then based on the questions that are associated with learning outcomes, we provide to the student what they don't know. And then from there we can link that at the end of the course when they take another, you know, repetition or another cut of a final exam, and you can see the difference in the learning outcome. So to the university, we're going to help the students get through the low retention courses such as calculus 1, chemistry 1 and biology 1. From our surveys through students and faculty, those are the classes that we have identified as low retention.

Okay, and so who do you think it's worth more to? Because I'm kind of familiar with some universities and their efforts to increase retention. And.

That.

Isn'T, to me, I don't know, from the outside looking in, it's a harder sell to the university than it is to the student.

I would disagree, because students, they don't have money, first off. And secondly, I think that there's a lot of different online resources of like, learning material that you can find for free out there. So I think any, any time that you try to get a. Get a fiscal value out of a student, they're going to be holding on more tightly. And big ticket items, I think are easier to sell. So if you have, you know, a thousand hot dogs, how many hot dogs do you have to sell to sell one equivalent to one car? And I think that's the same kind of approach that I'm taking with Study Tank is how many students do I have to get to pay me 10 or 5 or whatever dollars a month versus if I can talk to one person at the enterprise level, can I bring a group of 20,000 students on board by that one person? And maybe I'm wrong. I just.

That's my huge problem with your analogy of hot dogs and cars. If you have 1100 hot dogs, you can't turn that into a car.

And so I'm talking about sales revenue. How many hot dogs do you have to sell to get an equivalent net revenue for selling one vehicle?

If you're selling hot dogs, you're selling hot dogs. And so what you're selling is what you're selling. And the benefit is bigger to the student than it is to the college. And usually when there's a gap in benefit value.

The money usually is in who has the most benefit. So I believe you could, you could get colleges to participate with you and give you access and help you, but your revenue is probably better. And students do have money that you charge students a login and access, you have the social part and you tease them with some of them and up front. But to have full access there, it's more important to them to get good grades than it is for the college to have retention through you and then sell advertising on there too, and sponsorships and things like that. But that would be, that would be the easiest way to monetize. You're gonna have a harder time getting colleges to pay for that.

Yeah, I agree. I think that having the college come on board is going to be A massive task. And it has been. But we've seen a lot of, a lot of professors at the, at the entry level for like Calc for freshmen, for Calc one, this one, you know, entry level courses. They, they like, they like the fact that, you know, it's, it's learning outcome centered rather than just content centered, and that's what a lot of learning management systems do. But I do agree that, you know, students have some money, but it's tight and I think that to get them to spend it, you know, you have to make it worthwhile. And yeah, I think, Tyler, the way.

You'Re going about it sounds like it's very worthwhile. You're going right to the source. Nobody else goes right to the source. So don't discredit the fact that you're doing something really, really well. Your leverage is in, you're going right to the, to the source. And there, there are plenty of, you know, companies out there that are selling notes that are, that are charging and making money and students will buy it. And. But yeah, you're, your, your positioning is very strong. So don't, don't. I, I would stop saying that students don't have money because they do have money and they buy all kinds of crazy crap.

Yeah.

And your, your crazy crap just happens to be more valuable than most crazy crap. So I, I wouldn't think, you know, it's that old saying, if you think you can or you think you can't, either way, you're right. But you have a great idea and I would just rethink that. If you were giving it to the college and helping with retention.

You maybe later on can charge them, but you're going to have a hard time scaling really fast by asking them for money because if they say no, you're stuck. If students are paying for it, you'll scale really fast. You'll have bandwidth, you can sell advertising, you can, you can sell all kinds of stuff and charge levels of membership and people will pay for it because you're giving, you're basically taking them right to exactly what they need and you're saving them tons of time. And so I don't know, there's plenty of students out there that would pay for that so they can spend more time drinking beer.

Awesome. Yeah, no, I agree. And maybe you're right. Maybe I do have to start analyzing a little bit more from a value proposition on who my buyer is.

Because, yeah, I think that if I can sign up students as recurring members and, you know, provide them with content that's actually going to make them successful in the course. Yeah, I mean, I think that has a lot of value. Like.

I agree.

Yeah, I got a guy here that says that he skipped all eight of his classes and bought notes from classmates and passed. So that's the kind of talent I'm dealing with here.

Yeah, I feel you. I feel you. Well, you know, that. And that's the beauty of study tank is that search engine. Right. So, I mean, if the professor comes on board and you're lucky to have a study tank class associated with the course notes. You know, I was in a course called Database Systems. There was a midterm and one of the people in my class, they uploaded a note to stichting of their midterm review. And I saw that on the, on the website. And like 75% of the stuff that they wrote on their personal midterm review by just going through the content was course material that was on the exam. So, you know, someone that can offer, you know, if one person who's at the top of the class uploads notes to study tank for the rest of the class, you know, not only can that benefit that person by just taking the notes and guaranteeing that they're taking them, but you're actually helping the whole course get every student in the course get through. And overall increasing retention, which I think is a. Is a big, is a big thing to colleges these days.

Yep. You'll scale a lot quicker going that way and selling advertising and then having the students pay. Because the colleges, if you, you're. You want to give them the value of increasing retention without any cost to them. Because so many people are trying to do things with colleges, your added value to them is free.

And then you could have some sort of system in there where there's, you know, a financial incentive for the professors and students to upload their stuff too. Kind of like a Motown model on downloads where you share, you know, 5% or something.

To.

Yeah, absolutely. We were thinking about going towards a model to, you know, help incentivize the. Put like the posting of content by the student. You know, whether we sign up, you know, a student ambassador in some classes or we, you know, have like a TA be putting on supplemental material onto the study tank courses. And really, you know, from the research that we've done, we've established that two major things that are needed for student retention is the academia itself, but also the seamless social experience around learning that material. So what that means is, you know, if someone sits in a classroom and Gets delivered, hand delivered the academic material on how to, I don't know, bake a cake.

That's one way of learning, but another way of learning that's even better that social interaction when you and a friend actually bake the cake together. And the studies on retention for knowledge show that, you know, if you have both an academic and a social exposure that you're going to retain that information a lot better. So that's what we aim to do on Study tank is give that outside interaction about the content to the student.

Yeah, I, I agree and I, you know, I wrote a book on gamification which is the same thing that gamification and interaction increase cognitive learning, they increase performance, all kinds of things. So. No, you're right on. Well, I think, I think you got a really good idea there and model and I, you know, I know it's hard to swallow but I think you're better monetizing the other way. It'll move quicker.

Oh no, I appreciate it. I'm willing to pivot the whole concept at any moment to make the company successful. I'm not set in stone on any design that StudyTink has. We're definitely a very open minded company in that way and we want to take the best approach that makes it the best for our users but also our customers if those are two different roles.

How old are you, Tyler?

23.

Awesome. Well man, you're off to a great start. I just.

All right, well Chris, it was pleasure.

Talking with you and how you talk. You, you're going to do big things. I'm excited for you.

Well, thank you, thank you so much. Well, you know, anytime that you are interested in learning more about the tank or have any, any other, you know, needs talk or anything like that, I would love to further conversation about anything.

Awesome. Thanks Tyler. Have a great week.