When 27-year old Mike Matousek was a senior at Kent State University about six years ago, he sold his friends’ outlines from a statistics class at $10 a pop and made $1,000. That success gave Matousek the idea to build a business. There was obviously a demand for well-written, personalized notes.
By 2013, Matousek had raised $14 million in venture funding from a group led by Atlas Venture and launched Luvo, previously Flashnotes.
Today, the Boston-based online marketplace for study materials and tutoring has 118,000 registered users, Matousek boasts in a recent Bloomberg.com article.
The piece lead with Florida State University junior, Angel Card, who first got into online note selling after she was able to sell 66 students her study guide for her Nationality, Race, and Ethnicity class. She priced it at $5 each and after Luvo got its 30% cut, Card netted $178. By the semester’s end, Card uploaded notes from 2 of her history classes and 1 macroeconmics class and fetched another $700 total.
Selling notes has become a way for some cash-strapped students to make some extra dough. Matuosek says students earn an average of $400 per semester.
It’s for those students who blew off class all semester and need a last-minute tutor, the crammers!
Card told Bloomberg.com that she sold most of her guides on the morning of the exams or the night before.
California State University banned one note selling site and threatened students at its 23 campuses expulsion if they were caught using the site. Even though buying notes don’t violate university policy at Florida State, Dennis Schnittker, a spokesman for the school said, “those who purchase notes online are short-circuiting the learning process that others have taken.”
But not all academics and educators are shunning these sites. (Luvo acquired its competitor NoteUtopia).
Dean emeritus of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, who also serves on Luvo’s board, predicts that colleges will eventually embrace online note-selling once they notice students’ test scores improving.
“There is a lot of research that suggests that information is retained longest when you’ve attempted to teach it,” he said.
Card said that even her grades went up because she knew she could only make money if her notes were top-notched. Her grade-point average has jumped more than a point since she started selling her notes, she said.
This business is so lucrative that online textbook seller Chegg is getting in on it. In 2010, it acquired note-selling services Cramster and Notehall, and companies like Course Hero and Nexus Notes that offer services similar to Luvo’s.
Wowza!
For those of us who have been out of school for a long time, “it’s a different world, than where we come from.”
h/t Bloomberg
