Study With Me: A Gen Z App Startup
Two students, a few thousand dollars and a study-with-me app: live focus rooms, streaks and lo-fi, against a giant notes platform, a gamified timer, free study servers, livestreams and a funded AI tutor.
You and a friend built the app you wanted in your own first year: open it, join a room of people studying the same thing, start a timer, keep the streak. Your friends use it. Now you have to make it a business, on a few thousand dollars from summer jobs and a pitch-competition prize. The decisions are an app startup's. What do you charge students who compare everything to free? Do you spend your money on TikTok ads or on the feature that makes people come back? When do you hire a developer at a developer's salary, and when do you take an angel's cheque? The calendar plays too: back-to-school, December finals, AP and SAT season, a summer when nobody studies, a creator's video that goes viral and then fades, the big notes platform copying your best feature, a finals-week outage, and a co-founder who takes an internship. What you'll learn: subscription economics in a market full of free alternatives, why retention beats downloads, what the app store's cut and refunds do to a $4…
$5.00 a seat · 3 simulated years, decided monthly · by SparkTower.