Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Networking website for school goers





Recently my cousin, who is studying his 6th class, came over to my house for his vacation. He immediately ran over to the computer.
I was curious about his enthusiasm and followed him to find out what it was, that has evoked such a strong feeling of attraction. He opened the site: http://classteacher.com/horlicks/ He was very strongly influenced by the advertisement in TV which is aimed at school going kids. It just has a couple of games and a little relevant info, but it certainly caught my attention as a wonderful business model.

I see this is as a good opportunity in a relatively blue ocean market with massive potential.

We will build a portal aimed at specifically at school goers.

What do we provide:

  • Add online games which can be played along with their classmates. This is such a thrill, if u've ever played online pool with your classmates or other friends. (Directly buy the games from developers)
  • Add ideas for science projects, link things to www.howstuffworks.com. So they have abundance of ideas, whenever they need to work on something. (This is a huge plus, my little sisters keep wandering all over the place and net for ideas.)
  • Target the students from 4th standard to 10th standard. Pore through their books. Provide detailed info on every topic. Provide ideas for essays, school debates, etc. (Hire some teachers to provide this info on a pay-by-work basis.)
  • Keep interacting with schools to assess the needs of the students.
  • Post math tips in an animated way.
  • Provide a platform, where the kids can post personal experiences and award them with their day of glory by posting it on the homepage.
  • Provide tools to unleash their creativity and help them develop their distinct personal page, which they will be proud of and flaunt it to their friends.
  • Provide an online interaction-social networking platform similar to facebook, targeted at school-goers.
  • In short-make the site such an attraction that kids want to spend all their online time with the site because it provides both educational stuff and fun stuff. Cater to all the needs of the school goer.

Revenue making model: The primary advantage of this site is that you have a large saturated group of target audience withing the same age group and with almost similar tastes. So any advertising just hits the core group unlike an advertisement on a hoarding. I can see this primarily as a advertising based model. If you boast of a high number of registered users or everyday clicks, kid product companies would not want to miss this opportunity to advertise. Better still, approach leading kid based product companies like Boost, Maggi, chocolates, etc to sponsor the whole thing. It helps them build a strong bond with their target consumers.

I am still not convinced by this revenue model and open to ideas on how we could milk this cash cow. This is a largely untouched market segment.

Waiting on your valuable input

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