No hope for funding
I launched a web and mobile app called skoolar.com but so far we have not gotten any funding . I really hope to find investors in Seattle or DC area and pitch this idea to them why is it so hard
Can you self fund enough to demonstrate that the business model works and that people like the product?
How many users do you have? Number of users is the best way to start your pitch.
A few hundred users. We launched a year ago
I don’t understand the problem you’re trying to solve with Skoolar. And outside of the managing class schedules, this felt like it was trying to be a LinkedIn.
Same feeling I got. An old school FB with its calendar feature + LinkedIn slant. So a school work portfolio for employers.
Yeah. Another way to put it, employers are already on LinkedIn. They are spending tons of money on enterprise accounts for general recruiting, and even the small folks are there doing university recruiting. So how does a student benefit from creating a profile on Skoolar when the other side of the market is elsewhere? How are you bringing the companies to Skoolar? And on the flip side why as a company would I want to invest my time looking at Skoolar student profiles vs LinkedIn? And you can say the platform isn’t a social network all you want, but your users will decide how they will use it.
Are you Matt, Kirk or Lily ? Couldn't you have used reddit if you didn't care to remain anonymous ?
What do you need funding for if you already launched? Why would you dilute your shares?
Tbh this looks like a shitty form of piazza which is well funded and established. Going to be very hard competing in this space
Your target audience is college students who are dumb, broke and don't give a fuck about anything but getting laid, let alone real school stuff. You'll have better luck targeting engineers.
I disagree with Nvidia — that’s referring to many college males, but these days young women are more serious about school and their careers. Anyways, unless you’ve had a successful talent acquisition startup already, you need to show traction and results before pitching. Work with 1-2 universities and have some successful case studies.
Just from a quick look: - No clear idea or mission statement. This is very common issue. You might have a golden idea and talk hours about what problems and how you're trying to solve, but reflecting that in a few sentences on your front page might require some additional brainstorming. Especially in your case, where you need to convince how your "another social network" is better than what user already has. - some UI/UX things make first impression a bit cheap: not enough examples and explanation of what you do, but a bright login button. Team part takes half of the content. Now, they might be all bright and good people, but for the first time user they're just faces. Left menu in Mobile view doesn't have anything (pic attached) I'd suggest to hire a professional, who'd help you with filling up the content. Or have a brainstorming session first with your team and maybe this would be enough.
You need to talk to the government. I didn’t see any decent engineers who were able to pitch their ideas. You need a great entrepreneur.
Wrong. Decent engineers simply need to learn how to pitch ideas and communicate better. They are in fact the best ones to run their business. Don’t hire some shiny nontechnical “business guy” with a Harvard MBA or whatever. He’ll run your company into the ground. They tend to make emotional, ego-driven decisions and have unscientific reasoning. Above all they are not trustworthy. (I’ve worked with several Harvard/Berkeley MBAs, sales people, or “serial entrepreneurs” on startups, this is my consistent experience. YMMV.)