Problem: About 2 years ago, Dongryul Kim posted on GitHub “a collection of notes for courses I took at Harvard, from 2015 to 2019.” He went on to say “all of them are live-TeXed, and please use at own risk.” Would people be willing to read the notes of others in lieu of (or in preparation for) college classes, exams, or essay writing?
As someone on HackerNews wrote, “it is interesting to see that such a large repository of notes of this form exists. The only other collection that is similar to this that I know of is https://dec41.user.srcf.net/notes/” from Cambridge (also available on GitHub here).
Solution: A platform that allows students to share notes, essays, videos, and other student-created content for free (or at a small fee) with other students at different schools who may be looking for a new way to learn the same content. To avoid plagiarism, the platform could ensure that it only allows graduate-level or PhD-level students to post on it.
Below are example screenshots of Daniel’s notes from Harvard:
One of the closest competitors in this market is Chegg. They are a publicly traded education technology company (founded in 2005 and IPOd in 2013) that has a market cap of over $9 billion (as of this morning). They’ve built a business off of textbook rentals, tutoring, and other student services. However, they do not offer note-exchanges or buying/selling notes for classes (even though some users have explicitly asked for this service). This feature (when paired with something like Chegg Study) could be extremely helpful for students to learn from.
The market of Education Technology (Ed Tech) is huge. As described in the annual Global Learning Landscape report, an open source taxonomy for the future of education, “education is poised for significant disruption; we just don’t know when. That’s what sparked Project Landscape. In higher education alone, UNESCO predicts a shortage of almost 100 million seats by 2025, creating enormous challenges and opportunities for governments and education institutions around the world.” Currently there are over 2,000 EdTech startups and 700 investors (according to AngelList) and I only anticipate this to grow as the market grows.
Broadly, “the global education technology market size was valued at USD 76.4 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.1% from 2020 to 2027.”
Monetization: Sales of notes or access to this platform.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)