Have you ever decided to start a company while sitting in a shared college dorm kitchen with your roommate? To be clear, we did not decide to launch a business; it was more of a project to design a tool that we could use while in school. Jacques Huppes and I started sketching down the perfect platform for readily sharing resources as if study guides and class notes with other students would look like because of our personal problems with finding the correct study materials to prepare for examinations.
To begin began; we knew we needed to design a basic interface, which was quickly followed by the time-consuming task of manually importing hundreds of papers we had accumulated from our own past test preparation and from other university colleagues.
Our concept began to take shape after only three weeks, with friends from other colleges asking if we might construct the website to offer their school’s study tools as well. We just requested their paperwork and began dividing the material by university. Our firm, StuDocu, officially launched, and it is growing quicker than we ever dreamed. Our initial investment was a USB hard drive, which we carried from room to dorm as we knocked on doors to tell as many kids as possible about our tale. We would insert the hard drive into their laptops, copy their files, and submit them later that evening to the StuDocu website.
While more and more students are going digital, we used to see many students with handwritten or printed notes, which we would gather and bring back to Delft to scan and put in the library. We worked from our dorm rooms in Delft for the first three years before coming to Amsterdam to expand our firm.
Based on feedback and statistics, we have introduced several variations of the platform. We started by doing what we believed was needed, based on our personal frustrations with learning as a roadmap for how the platform should progress.
Lucas van den Houten, another of our co-founders, suggested that we utilize Mixpanel to measure the data we get from users, and from there we were able to breathe fresh life into the platform. Suddenly, data was telling us where we needed to improve and where we needed to expand.
We have added many features over the years and continue to do A/B testing based on the hard data we currently have. Building a website takes a lot of time and effort, but we saw a direct link between each update and the increased uploads and student involvement we aimed for. It was heartening to witness those modest victories day after day.
