Class Connect

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Agnieszka Ligendza, Jainam Patel, Niket Panjwani, Chelsey Boyle Advisors: Lisa Johnson (Director Development, WEM at Genesys)

The Covid-19 pandemic left nearly 1.7 billion learners unable to attend their educational institutes in need of online education. This increased the demand for asynchronous learning tools and classroom resources. However, educators still struggled to communicate with students and effectively convey coursework expectations, and answer student questions. Institutions desire a new service to manage digital learning and provide more efficient and clear communication to classes.

Class Connect is a communication chat application designed for college students and instructors. Our service provides channels of direct messaging based on class enrollment, which will allow for more streamlined communication about skill development and learning achievement with more efficiency than email. The app can be customized for every university to contain its own branding style. Our application is being developed for Android users and we hope to expand to IOS users in the future. Market Size: The global education technology market size was valued at $89.49 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $108 Billion by 2026. The global higher education market size to grow from USD 13.7 billion in 2020 to USD 35.8 billion by 2025. Based on this, we predict a SAM of $4.475B.

Competition: Our key competitors are Canvas, Slack, Schoology, and Brightspace. However, these platforms are either web-based learning management systems, which primarily serve for educators to upload class content and post assignments, or workplace business technology applications that aren’t designed to be customized by different universities and class enrollment.

We plan to charge institutions a one-time implementation fee to gain access to our product and then an additional annual subscription fee based on an institution’s total number of users. We are asking for a $500k loan. LTV- $100,800 (10-year lifetime) CAC - $3,500 (Sales analysis, marketing, and onboarding costs) LTV/CAC Ratio – 29:1

Offer trials runs to universities at a discounted rate to spread app promotion while also giving us customer feedback.

Pitch to all major universities and educational institutions starting in Indiana and branching out. Finished our Alpha launch and beta launch and are working towards the initial release and second release.

We currently have three developers and we would like to at least double our team by October. We want to be out in the market in 1 year. Our goal is to have have 4 million+ users after 2 years

Our team members have served in both student and instructor roles in educational institutions. Our initial discussions about these experiences revealed one universal issue: communication. Especially during the pandemic, we struggled as students and instructors to convey our questions and expectations with virtual Learning Management Systems and chat platforms. Questions were frequently lost over email and course websites were inconvenient to check on the go. This shared frustration led to our proposed solution: Class Connect.

Class Connect is a communication chat application designed for college students and instructors. It creates more streamlined communication about education skill development and learning achievement with more far efficiency than email and the easy usability of a mobile app.

Our team initially built a prototype which took form as a storyboard sketch. This helped us in identifying the workflow of our app. For next stage, we started designing the pages of our application on Adobe XD and eventually we moved on to Android studio where we implemented our application design ideas, added important features to our app and connected our app to the database. We occasionally updated our app based on the feedback from our coaches to improve the user experience and meet customer expectations.

This team faced several setbacks with losing and gaining team members as the challenge went on. We had a few that were unable to continue after beginning the project. One team member switched into our Education team from a Sports and Entertainment team 2 weeks into the challenge and had to adjust to the new problem and market at hand.

We’re proud of how we were able to come together as a team and support each other through various stages. We worked through busy work schedules and family emergencies to pull off our completed app.

We learned the value of iteration and that it’s always ok to return to the drawing board. We made several rounds of changes and updates to our product, business plan, and sales strategy. We all saw the benefit of repeatedly questioning the value of our product and returning to those initial user pain points to ensure we were adequately addressing them.

We believe in our product and the plan we have behind it. If this is paired with investors who believe in us and our mission, Class Connect could be a reality and benefit countless students and instructors.