A few ideas later… developing an MVP for a global university search platform
By: Sarah Grippay
Tags: Edtech Startup, Startup Life, Entrepreneurship, Higher Education, University Of Kent

In early October 2019, I was back in Canterbury for a bit and set out to build a pitch deck to illustrate my initial vision to two dear people from the Kent Business School at ASPIRE. Our meetings were incredibly insightful and they pushed me to keep looking for new ways to go about building Got U. By then I had created a Google Form with all the prototype questions, bought my first domain name, and was experimenting with building a website, designing a logo, choosing colors and fonts for the brand. Looking back at it, the Google Form was incredibly long, much like this story, and not very aesthetically pleasing at all. I wanted to put it all out there, but maybe it was too soon.

So what exactly is Got U? It’s a global university search platform that provides students with recommendations on WHERE to go and WHAT to study. How does it do that? Students answer a series of questions and then receive best fits based on the available data from universities. They are able to make a more informed decision with the information in the palm of their hands, while universities can better prepare for incoming cohorts and hopefully see fewer students dropout.

Since the launch of the website, I have had 15 people fill out that long Google Form for advice on universities (latest version here)— some I knew, others I didn’t, but THANK YOU! You waited for me to give you the results, and helped me validate my questions and the concept. I was still facing a tech challenge but continued to improve the user journey, website, and general flow.

In early 2020, I was talking to developers and that’s when I discovered all the different steps that are involved in building a website from A to Z. I had a diagram of the several aspects of the back-end to consider before reaching what the end-user sees. I made an introductory video with EditVid, reached out to universities, and was making slow but steady progress when the pandemic hit and we were soon entering a full lockdown. I was confused as to where to go from here, so I started prototyping using software available online to redesign the user journey, identified even more use cases and features, designed a Typeform…but I was essentially at a standstill with a loss of motivation. My initial deadline for this had been April 2020 and here I was stuck at home, without knowing in what direction to go. I started reading up on students not having access to classes and saw how much a platform like this could help the next cohort of high schoolers narrow down their choices.

Luckily, that was the day I got an email to participate in Stanford Rebuild — an 8-week program to innovate and solve the challenges of a post-COVID-19 world. I used it to re-validate my business idea, starting from the beginning, doing interviews with other members from the program located all over the world, from Mexico, LA, Peru, Brazil, Malaysia, India, UK, and the USA. Met some amazing people and also gathered some great insights that again helped finetune this project from the customers, unique selling points to the financing and business model.

After this, I signed up for the GSV Bootcamp to learn from successful entrepreneurs and business leaders of today on management, running a business, building a team culture, and fostering innovation. The event ended with a Demo Day allowing me to practice pitching. These two programs led me straight into autumn where I was ready to make something more concrete of this project.