StuDocu
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StuDocu
Education/IT
Limited Liability Company
Netherlands
Transparent, checked content
Jacques Huppes, Wessel Boekschooten
Benoit van der Maas
Jacques Huppes, Marnix Broer, Sander Kuijk and Lucas van den Houten
Summary
StuDocu is an online platform where students can share their knowledge. StuDocu started in the Netherlands but is now active across the globe.
Background
Jacques played a game with some friends, the game was that everyone should come up with a few good ideas every day for a month long. Every day they discussed their ideas but nobody of Jacques’ friends saw potential in his idea about an online platform for sharing documents between students. When Jacques came home he discussed this idea with his housemate Marnix, Marnix was very interested in this idea and at that point it all started.
Scholieren.com is a well-known online platform among high-school students, students can find and share summaries, reports and assignments. Jacques also was familiar with this platform but noticed there wasn’t any similar platform for high school and university students. To solve this problem they started six years ago with studeersnel.nl, this name was a combination of study and fast and it also rhymed with .nl perfectly. After 4 years they wanted to go international so they needed an international name, they searched for available domains but almost every name they had in mind already existed. Eventually they came up with StuDocu, a combination of study, documents and Sudoku.
Because the founders were still studying they didn’t have huge amounts of capital to start the company. They started everything very cheap, the programmers were rewarded with shares of the company and the founders didn’t pay themselves. The only thing they had to pay was the website and the servers but that was a relatively small cost.
Mission
Sharing of knowledge of all students and universities around the world in an easy accessible online platform.
Vision
To make the all the knowledge of students and universities accessible for everyone around the world.
Values
Transparency, accessibility, affordability and openness.
Business Model
StuDocu started from the idea of scholieren.com but improved this for more efficient use for university and college students. The concept of sharing documents between students already existed in different forms but StuDocu approached it on a very large scale. Unlike many other similar platforms, StuDocu checks all the incoming content to guarantee the quality of the documents. Another thing that makes StuDocu unique is the amount of free documents, around 80% of all the documents are free for everyone. To gain access to the other 20% there are three possibilities:
- Invite friends to create an account on StuDocu to get free access for 14 days.
- Upload one document to get free access for 3 months.
- Pay €4 each month.
All the documents that aren’t free can be seen partially so you’ll know what you pay for. When creating an account on StuDocu you first have to select your university and then you can search your courses and ‘follow’ them, you can see all the documents for your courses and you’ll get a notification when there are new documents available.
Growth
Currently StuDocu almost has 650.000 users and that number is still growing with 10% a month. Currently one out of two students in the Netherlands has an account on StuDocu.
Customers
The users of StuDocu are high school and university students aged between 18 and 23.
Competitors
Because StuDocu isn’t the only platform that offers students to share their documents they have some direct competition in different countries: Stuvia.com in the Netherlands, Studydrive in Germany and Oneclass in Canada. Indirect competitors are online learning platforms as Coursera and Khan Academy.
Coclusion
The founders see some threads in the future but by constantly developing new features they try to overcome those threads. A good example is Facebook, students share a lot of documents on Facebook but there is no good structure for these documents. With a few adjustments Facebook could make this way more efficient. StuDocu sees a lot of opportunities in sharing old exams, StuDocu is the only platform that keeps these exams online despite the many requests of universities to delete these exams. Another opportunity for StuDocu is introducing their concept in countries where this is completely new.
Starting StuDocu wasn’t that easy, the main difficulty was making the platform profitable, when they didn’t earn money with StuDocu it was difficult to put much time in the project. The best advice Jacques Huppes could give to starting entrepreneurs is the following;
- Try to do everything in small steps; don’t try to do too much in one step.
- Don’t worry too much about future problems, try to solve those problems when they occur and not in advance.
StuDocu’s ambition is to become a well known platform for students around the world, they are currently growing fast in Spain, Australia, Germany and Italy. After these countries they are aiming to spread their wings in the United States and South-America.
Posted on 21/04/2016