Review my startup idea

1 points by dannyp32 13 years ago | 2 comments

I've been an officer in a club at my university for about a year now and I've noticed potential for a startup in this niche. There are quite a few repetitive processes that are quite tedious and time consuming. Keeping track of members seems to be a time consuming aspect of running the club, and I'd like to build a web app where officers can keep track of their members. A club will sign up for the site, and be able to login and add their members including their .edu email, major, and year. Ideally members would be able to pay their registration fee's through this site and become a member for the club so that they are automatically populated in the member list. Then members can check in to meetings and events through this site which will allow the chapters to track the members participation within the club.

They'll have an option to receive notifications. Officers will be able to create an event, and then the members will receive the information for that event automatically, the day of or the day before, whichever works best. ...I'm not sure about this feature though because this can already be done through facebook.

Do you think clubs would like to use something like this? If you think they would, do you think they would they be willing to pay a small fee for the service (I'm thinking about $5 a month or $50 a year, but I would have to reach out to clubs to see what they think is a reasonable amount)? I am also thinking about taking a small percentage of the club's membership fee as another source of revenue (maybe 5% per member that signs up through the site).

I plan on validating the idea by reaching out to all of the clubs at my university asking them about the idea and see if any of them will commit to the service before I build it.

Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

johnmurch 13 years ago |

Interesting Idea and Niche

Some questions come to mind.

1. College Students want to spend money on beer not on tools, even if it saves them time. What about using a free tool like http://mailchimp.com/ (free upto 2,000 members!) Plus you can email/notify and schedule them, so maybe you just want a better process.

2. Signups - with ipads/kindle fire being so cheap it would seam a simple webpage for signup and pass along to next person. You could just set it up out front and force people to put in Name, Email, Major, Graduation Year - simple and easy.

3. Community - With Meetup.com the value is in the tools, but more that it's one place you can go and get all the news/meetings/invites. What if you took over the "campus" (think facebook style) and got them to use your platform for setting up meetings/email students/etc. Now you have 1 platform and would be easier to go to a big company (linkedin?) saying hey we have all these students on the site and about to graduate - want to market to them?

Just some thoughts. Good Luck!

dannyp32 13 years ago | |

1. Yea I agree, but this won't be their personal money that they'll be spending. Typically university clubs receive funding from sponsors which the club uses for its activities.

2. Yes, that works and it's what we currently do, but after they sign up, the officers (at least in my club) use that info for other things, and they have to go through it manually if they're not experienced with macros.

3. That's a great idea. I think the simple member list would be my minimum viable product, and then I could continue to bring in features such as the ones you listed.

Thanks I appreciate the feedback.