Back in February we interviewed a scrappy group of Emory sophomores hell-bent on creating a q&a platform to blow Ask Jeeves out of the water. By March they were moving into our coworking space (back when Hype was in the space game), built a giant shared desk (really a picnic table) from Ikea, pulled up a few folding chairs, and threw themselves into making StudyPool a success. After an invitation to Ebootcamp at Stanford University and gaining acceptance into 500 Startups, Atlanta lost them to California where they have been refining their product and gaining traction.
Read our coverage on their first iteration and the inspiration behind the company & then catch up their coverage on Dec 17th in TechCrunch:
StudyPool, a 500 Startups batch company that connects students and tutors, is yet another company that takes the template for building a marketplace from Uber and Airbnb and applies it to another area where there’s usually a lot of friction involved in each transaction.
StudyPool co-founders Richard Werbe and Jimmy Zhong have built their startup around some of the key lessons from other successful marketplace services — specifically, working to bolster both the demand and supply sides of transactions.
For instance, there’s no landing page hyping the service before you get to see what it’s actually like — the home page starts with a text box for asking a question you’d like to see answered quickly, then summarizes how the site works, and concludes by showing examples of the kinds of in-depth questions people are willing to pay for answers to. Aesthetically it looks a bit rough (Werbe says it’s the same design the pair launched with back in March) but functionally, StudyPool does a great job of onboarding.