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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

1638 How He Makes Universities More Money By Keeping Students From Flunking

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Ceo, Entrepreneurs, Founders, Software, Business, Entrepreneurship, Saas, Startups

4.6683 Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2020

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ethan Keiser is the CEO and founder of StudyTree, an app leveraging artificial intelligence to provide students with a mobile academic assistant. He received his B.S from Drexel University in Computer Science before founding StudyTree. Ethan has won various business plan competitions including the Microsoft Imagine Cup and Dell Innovation Award, and regularly speaks about artificial intelligence at top education conferences. When not working on StudyTree, he spends time weightlifting and hiking. He is fluent in 7 languages: English and six computer languages.

Transcript

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0:00.0

helps colleges make more money by making sure students keep paying, i.e., they don't fail out,

0:04.5

using a predictive model he's built called study tree. They've got over five customers now,

0:09.0

you know, each paying five, six grand per month on average. So call it 30 grand per month

0:12.6

today in terms of run rate up from five grand a month about a year ago. They're about break-even

0:16.9

today, raised 35 grand, about to go out and raise 750 grand. We've got a convertible note at call, maybe a six cap or seven cap with a 15 to 20% discount. Team of six spread out

0:24.9

remote locations. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Ethan Kaiser. He's the CEO and founder of

0:29.8

Study Tree, an app leveraging artificial intelligence to ride students with a mobile academic

0:33.5

assistant. He received his BS from Dreuxel University in Computer Science before founding

0:37.6

the company. Ethan, are you ready to take us to the top? Yep. All right, man. So tell us about

0:42.1

the company. What does study study tree do and what's the revenue model? How do you make money?

0:46.1

Absolutely. So we solve a problem for higher education and corporations. The problem is that,

0:51.9

at least in higher education, 50% of college students fail out. It's a big issue. And the reason for why they fail out could be a number of things. And what we find is that a lot of students come to college without the skill sets they need to be successful. That means they procrastinate, they don't self-regulate well. And we built an artificial coach that can analyze how a student is performing. Look at their grades, integrate with

1:11.1

the university systems, and then intervene when problems may arise. And we can actually predict the

1:16.6

risk of a student at a university. And we've been selling this directly to institutions to help

1:21.1

improve the retention rate. So more students come back. They pay tuition. And that's the university

1:25.0

revenue model. We then support that by help improving their retention. So we sell an enterprise license. Yeah. So what's the university revenue model we then support that by help improving

1:28.0

their retention so we sell enterprise license yeah what so what's the average i mean what's the average

1:32.0

university pay you per year for this kind of thing uh it could be anywhere between 25 000 up to

1:36.5

half a million depending on the size of institution so the sliding scale based on the number of

1:40.6

students enrolled at the university we charge a per student fee would you say for a fair average for you would be about call it 25, 30 grand a year?

1:47.5

I would say that would be on the low side for sure. I mean, the average would be closer to like 70.

1:51.6

70-ish. Okay. And again, I want to just, just because I don't want to go on every cohort,

...

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