We would like to create a platform for college students to provide services to one another and rate each other (like Yelp or TaskRabbit but for college students). Services can include a variety of tasks that users request or are able to provide — drives to Costco, dogwalking, etc. The platform may also include buying and selling services, such as exchanging of textbooks.
Some of the profit models we are considering are the following:
- A percentage of the money obtained by the service provider
- Membership
- Advertising
For the below TAM/SAM/SOM, I assume we follow the first profit model.
Our total addressable market is the number of colleges students in the US. As per https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_311.15.asp, there were ~19.63 million college students in the US total in Fall 2019. The monetary value of the market would be: 19.63 million * # of services requested per student * profit per service.
Our SAM is the number of college students taking at least one in-person course, which was 16.81 million in the Fall of 2019 as per https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_311.15.asp. This is because remote students are much less likely to request services, unless these services are online.
For the purposes of this class project, we restrict ourselves to providing this platform for Stanford students. There are 16,937 Stanford students currently as per https://facts.stanford.edu/. The monetary value of the market would be: 16,937 * # of services requested per student * profit per service.
I conducted two interviews with current Stanford students. The first interview was with a Stanford graduate student who lives on-campus and works part-time at a technology company. He completed his undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley.
He obtains all his services through professionals, saying “I like to use Yelp. I wouldn’t trust students to provide services.” This suggests an opportunity for Yelp-style ratings to increase trust in students’ abilities to provide services.
Additionally, he recounted how, during his undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley, he used to use a Facebook group for students to buy and sell textbooks for a cheap rate. When discussing this experience, he said, “It was a bit disorganized, because I had to just do command F to find the textbook I needed. However, the casualness made it feel more personal.” This suggests that we will need to strike a balance between casualness and organization when creating this platform.
He also mentioned seeking tutoring from Berkeley’s student learning center as an undergrad. He said, “I don’t think peer tutoring was ever very useful to me cause there’s usually a disconnect between the course staff and the peer tutors.” This suggests that, if we provided a peer tutoring service, a Yelp-rating systems would be valuable to ensure tutors were well in touch with the course material.
While he did not express interest in obtaining services from fellow students, he said, “I could be interested in providing career mentoring to undergrads.”
Overall, his interest in providing or obtaining services from fellow students seemed low. This suggests that students without high-paying part time jobs may be more keen on providing services to other students.
