Kyle
We are finding more and more great educational, student facing startups, are coming from overseas. Take Prague startup MySchoolNotebook for instance. Their platform allows students to easily take notes, share notes, sync notes and reference notes on and offline, digitally, in a super easy to use platform and a graphically appealing UI.Today, we’ve got an interview with Swedish Startup Studemia which allows students to collaborate in a Google Wave/Asana type fashion with the focus being on students in either college or high school.
Now you can collaborate with friends and schoolmates in the same class or across the ocean. As they explain in the interview below it’s a seamless sharing platform for students to share resources and keep projects organized.
Studemia allows students to organize projects by project or by course. Also, just about any kind of media can be uploaded to the platform.
They’ve built the platform for students by students. Studemia’s co-founders; Vilhelm Josander, Per Almhorn and Markus Sackemark are all students themselves and realized the need for a platform like this, specifically geared towards students, quickly and have been working on it ever since.
Check out our interview below:
What is Studemia?
Studemia.com is the next generation collaboration platform for students across the world. Among other things, the three key features is that it will enable student to seamlessly share resources from courses with each other, create and organize project- and groupwork and easily take notes based on what courses you are taking.
Being students ourselves we know the pain of having to deal with the obsolete systems universities provided by the universities or to keep track of everything that’s happening in the project on your Facebook group so we decided to go and create something entirely new. We want students to take inspiration from methods such as KAMBAN and SCRUM which are widely adopted in various organizations already.
In layman’s terms, how does it work?
Basically, what you do when you first login is to choose the courses you are currently taking. When done, you get a university/course-specific feed where you can discuss, share and collaborate with people in that particular course. On the course-level you will be able to share thoughts, ask questions, share and download resources and get a calendar overview of all upcoming tasks and to-dos (read below).
Since each course has it’s own coursefeed it is easy to switch between your current courses and get an overview of each of them.One of the main features is that you can easily set up a new project with course members when you have a new project, lab, problem set, essay etc.. to do. In this project you will be able to upload resources (documents, images, links etc..) specific to that project. You will also be able to easily assign tasks and to-dos (inspired from the scrum-method) to project members to easily keep track of whom is responsible for what and when it is due.In addition we want to provide students with a good tool for creating and organizing simple notes. When you are attending a class you usually just want to write down a few notes. Studemia will allow you to do this and automatically sort them depending on what courses you are taking. You will also be able to share your notes with others and ask people in your course for a note for a certain class you missed.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
The founders are Vilhelm Josander, Per Almhorn and Markus Sackemark. Vilhelm is 23 years old, Markus and Per is both 22.
Vilhelm has studied economics at Lund University. In addition to this he has been working with front-end development for the last couples of years.Per Almhorn and Markus Sackemark started IVEO AB, a web development company focused on HTML5, responsive web and JavaScript-development while still in high school. The company has since moved on to partner with several big companies in Sweden.
Where are you based?
The company is based in Lund and Stockholm, Sweden.
What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?
The startup scene in Sweden is really hot right now. Wired UK chose to feature Stockholm as one of the hottest startup cities in Europe right now. The southern parts, where Lund is located, is growing immensely fast due to the presence of Lund University, Copenhagen, Malmö and a big local focus on R&D.
How did you come up with the idea for Studemia?
Since we are students ourselves we really saw the flaws in the way students plan and organize project/group work right now. After struggling with a few of our own project we decided we need to do something about it.
How did you come up with the name?
Coming with a relevant and appropriate name was something of a challenge. We had a really hard time finding something we were pleased with. We ended up making a presentation for a few close friends, telling them what the service was all about and naming a few keywords we associate the service with, suchs as students, school, academics, project etc.. After a brainstorming session we came up with the name Studemia, a combination of Student and Academia.
What problem does Studemia solve?
As a company we use services such as podio.com and basecamp.com all the time to plan projects, share resources with clients etc.. We wouldn’t make it a day without these tools. The problem is that all of these currently available services are aimed at companies, not students. We solve this by providing a similar service which is exclusively aimed at students and the way they handle resources, notes, projects, communication etc..
What’s your secret sauce?
The answer above pretty much sums it up. By providing students with really valuable tools for making their everyday communication and collaboration at university easier and more efficient we let sudents gather all of their stuff att Studemia.com, not shared across a multitude of services. Since we are students ourselves we can tell this is something that is needed.
What’s one dilemma you’ve encountered in the startup process?
A dilemma we’ve encountered is certainly how much of the development process (coding-wise) should be outsourced and how much should be worked on internally. You can benefit immensely if you find the right people/company to outsource to but there’s a thin line between a company being good and “almost good”. Another dilemma is deciding what the MVP (minimum viable product) should consist of. There is so much improvement to de bone in this particular area, but you have to keep the scope down if you ever want to ship.
What’s one challenge you’ve overcome in the startup process?
One of the biggest challenges I think most people with a good idea have to overcome is to actually go from just an idea to something tangible. Everybody has probably had a really good idea but transforming that idea into something other people can see and touch can be very hard. You need someone who pushes the whole thing forward.
What’s next for Studemia?
We’re currently working on getting our public beta ready and show the world (especially students) how much more effective their everyday work could be.
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