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NOTEWORTHY IDEA
KSU grad’s website helps students, gets incubator’s approval
By Grace Wyler
youngstown
Industrious students can now reap a financial reward for their diligence through a new website that allows college students to buy and sell their class notes.
FlashNotes.com functions like an eBay or Amazon.com for students who skip out on class. The site provides an online marketplace for study materials, giving meticulous note-takers the opportunity to earn hundreds of dollars a week from classmates.
The website is the brainchild of Michael Matousek of Brecksville, a 2010 graduate of Kent State University who came up with the idea for FlashNotes as part of a class project for a course in entrepreneurship.
The 22-year-old, who had considered job offers with companies in New York and Chicago, said the class — and subsequent success of his idea — changed his approach to business.
“Entrepreneurship is a way of thinking, of being creative and being innovative,” Matousek said. “I literally work on this project 20 hours a day.”
Since its launch in 2009, the site has had more than 3,500 transactions from 12 universities. Matousek and his partner, Dave Petruziello, 31, of Mentor, are working on expanding the site on a national scale.
The idea has earned the stamp of approval from the Youngstown Business Incubator, a sort of gold star for Northeast Ohio technology startups in the wake of the Turning Technologies success story and national media attention.
Matousek and Petruziello work out of the Incubator’s Inspire Lab several days a week. The company has benefited from the incubator’s open-source culture, Matousek said, gaining input and advice from the seasoned professionals who stop by the downtown campus, such as Neilson Company vice president Jeff Hermann.
“The incubator has provided us with office space and experience,” Matousek said.
FlashNotes is one of the first business-to-consumer companies accepted under the incubator umbrella, which has so far been limited to companies specializing in business-to-business software. The incubator made the exception because FlashNotes is “just a really great concept,” said chief executive Jim Cossler.
“There is no cost of content, no cost of marketing,” Cossler said. “And each individual user is actually a small-business owner.”
College students are also one of the most highly sought-after demographics for advertisers, Cossler added, which gives FlashNotes an advantage over other e-commerce startups.
“Advertisers are paying five times more to reach this group,” he said. “I think this has huge potential.”
The market for class notes is “wide open,” Matousek added. Although there are several sites that allow students to sell their coursework, FlashNotes uses a slightly different business model, he said.
Sellers set the cost for their study materials — the average notes are about $6 — and receive 80 percent of the price through a weekly payment from the company.
“There is always a market for buyers, but we want to emphasize that you can make good money off of it,” Matousek said. “By selling your notes, you are running your own business from our business.”
Perhaps more significantly, FlashNotes combines e-commerce with the key assumption that has made sites such as Facebook and Linked-In successful — people have a higher level of trust for others in their “social network.”
Like early versions of Facebook, FlashNotes’ social networks are primarily based around a mutual campus e-mail domain name. This shared connection operates as quality control for the site, Matousek said. Notes are course-specific, and potential buyers can view seller’s biographies along with one-third of the notes. A review feature allows buyers to comment on notes, which further encourages sellers to post high-quality notes.
The social-networking component of the site also helps address the problem of promoting the site, which can be a prohibitive cost for Internet startups.
Once FlashNotes achieves a 10 percent market share at a campus, the word will start to spread on its own, Matousek said, pointing out that sellers have a financial incentive to drive potential buyers to the site.
He and Petruziello are furiously working to expand and promote FlashNotes before their idea can be pilfered by competitors, which Matousek notes is an all-too real possibility in the cutthroat world of Internet startups.
The company has been working with an Akron-based marketing firm to develop more specific strategies to increase market penetration, Matousek said. So far, the bulk of FlashNotes’ transactions have been at KSU, Ohio State University and the University of Akron. The company also is looking for capital investments to finance its expansion to additional campuses.
“A lot of this has been off a shoestring budget,” Matousek said. “It’s been all about making it through the next semester.”
He insists that the site is not just for lazy students looking to get out of class. Many students, particularly those with jobs and families, are unable to attend some class sessions, while others may be looking for ways to get a better handle on course material, he said. The site discourages posting old tests and graded coursework, and has a flag system for plagiarism.
“We really want to be a tool,” Matousek said. “We want to be branded as assisting in academic success.”