What is the story behind your company?
It is a funny story. The four founders met randomly in the business incubator “Business Lab”, which is connected to the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden. We are all passionate about competing and found that there were no one good website for Student Competitions on the market. However, we did neither have the programming, nor the design skills to get a service up and running. So we created a crappy beta-version in Drupal and went to the Swedish version of Dragon’s Den, pitched the idea, and won our investment! Now, we are backed by a Swedish IT tycoon and billionaire, who was among the first to sell microcomputers to companies and had a license to sell MS Windows.
What makes your company unique in its industry?
We are currently the world’s only website for global student competitions. At www.studentcompetitions.com , students can subscribe to competitions within their field of study and find opportunities from all over the world, that helps to take them forward in their careers or personal development. On another note, we help companies and organizations to get the most out of their competitions and maximize the impact and spread of the competitions, by offering a great platform for marketing to highly targeted groups of students.
How do you make money?
The service is completely free for students. However, we sell marketing packages to competition organizers and universities that wants to reach a global crowd of highly talented students.
Future plans for the company?
Conquer the world! Over the next couple of months, we will continue our expansion into the Indian and Chinese markets and also begin looking at the North Americas. We will continuously develop our offering towards students, universities, companies and organizations, and tie many global partnerships, to cement our place as the world’s undisputed no. 1 website for student competitions.
What was the start-up budget?
We got roughly $100k in seed funding through participating in Dragon’s Den. This has been enough money to build the website and market it properly.
Founders Names and Ages
Gustav Borgefalk 26, Niklas Jungegard 27, Robert Lyngman, 26, Zhu Chu 26
Where can people find the company?
Web: www.studentcompetitions.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/studentcomp
Help Student Competitions Out By Answering Their Questions!
The main challenge right now is to answer the question “what are we selling, to whom and at what price”. We are trying to define our product offering and are trying to benchmark against similar services. However, there are not many similar services around, so we experiment a bit with our business model to see what works. Secondly, we ask ourselves how we can reach out to the largest number of students, at a minimal cost. The third thing is a luxury problem, but we need to learn what problems we will bump into, now that we are growing so fast. The organizational capabilities needs to keep up with our pace, and we are all very reluctant to slow down to manage the “boring” things.
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