In October 2022, a close friend came to me looking to collaborate on a business idea. He said when he was in college he always wished there was a community or platform where he could find information about the professors and the classes so he could make informed decisions about his electives. I told him how we used Rate My Professor in college for the same purpose. After some more research we learned that while there were no similar platforms in Turkey, students have developed workarounds to meet this particular need. They were using WhatsApp groups and in person meetups to exchange information with their peers on professors and courses they took in the past. We decided to pursue further research, because we believed there is an opportunity to bring more accessible information to all students whether they are socially adept or not.
The Process
I led the following research and planning process to assess the potential value such a business would bring Turkish students, educators and parents.
Identify Hypothesis
Through research I found that in Turkey's tertiary education scene there are:
- 3,695 schools
- 179,685 educators
- 7,791,280 students
- Approximately 50% of the tertiary student population is located in 5 big cities
- 92% of tertiary students are in public schools
- 99.0% of tertiary students use the internet regularly
I then used this information to create user personas. I hypothesized pain points, motivations and potential gains for each persona.
Formulate a Value Proposition
Using the hypothesizes pain points and potential gains, I created a value proposition for each persona. Finally, using the value proposition I made a list of all the "must have" and "nice to have" features that would be in the platform. The "must have" features would be on the MVP, so we could test them and validate the value propositions as early as possible.
Build a Minimum Viable Product
I created mock landing pages for a school and for a professor. Both pages include example student reviews and average overall rating. The school page includes ratings for common categories such as Opportunities, Safety, Social Life, Location etc.
Conduct experiments & measure their results
We talked with 8 high school and college students to collect their feedback.
- 100% of the participants confirmed that they would find a platform like this helpful
- 100% of the participants confirmed that them and their friends would use this platform
I believe we have found an opportunity to create a useful product that will help many students and families make informed decisions about their education. We also aim to increase the quality of lectures by providing professors with a clear channel of feedback. We are currently creating a working prototype we can use to test the features more thoroughly. While we used other platforms that solve similar problems in western countries as learning resources, we are not modeling our solution from them. Our goal is to build a new platform that is centered around solving the needs of Turkish students. That is why we chose to come up with our own list of features derived from our research and value proposition. And that is also why we will continue to validate the need for each feature through experiments involving Turkish students.