THE CONCEPT
More than 3.6 million students apply for college admission in the United States annually. With
the college application process becoming increasingly competitive, students are applying to more colleges than in years past, hoping to increase their chances of being admitted to at least one of the colleges of their choice. In 2008, a record 2.5 million students are expected to apply to 3 or more colleges, including an estimated 900,000 students who will apply to an astounding six or more colleges, with some applying to as many as 20 colleges. These numbers are expected to rise in the coming years, as the college applicant pool continues to grow and students confront a concomitant increase in competition. For students applying to multiple colleges, the application process is particularly time-consuming and complicated. Students must visit several websites, track dozens of different deadlines, answer the same questions many times over, and reformat answers based upon the special characteristics of each individual application.
GiddyApp integrates innovation and technology to change all of that. GiddyApp College allows
students to apply to all of the colleges of their choice by completing a single custom-generated
application. GiddyApp’s core technology then instantly fills out each and every selected college’s original application with all of the student’s information. Users can also use GiddyApp College’s profiling technology to identify additional “safety schools” or “reach schools” to which they should consider applying based on their individual profiles and preferences.1 A simple and dramatically more efficient way of applying to college, GiddyApp eliminates countless hours of tedious work and frees students to focus on the most thought-intensive sections of the application, making admission to the college of their choice faster and easier than ever before.
MARKET & INDUSTRY ANALYSIS
No company has effectively simplified or consolidated the college application process itself by
eliminating the need for applicants to log on to multiple websites, complete duplicative applications, and keep track of overlapping deadlines. Similarly, no company has developed a centralized product through which students can apply for the over $1 billion of scholarship money available to college applicants. GiddyApp enters the market with these objectives as its primary focus and offers an integrated solution.
Several companies have attempted to meet the needs of students applying to multiple colleges in other ways, however. These companies have employed two primary types of strategic models, both of which fail to solve the core problem. First, several companies have attempted to eliminate the problem of multiple applications by substituting a single standardized application for the individual applications that colleges currently offer; the most successful of these ventures is the Common Application. The obvious limitation of this strategic model is in its dependence on the participation of colleges, each of which must agree to accept a different, standardized application in lieu of their own individual forms.
More than 85% of colleges have resisted these efforts. Even for those colleges that do accept
standardized applications, students must still provide duplicative information and keep track of multiple forms, since virtually all member schools require students to complete “supplemental” application forms. Second, several other companies sell tools that allow students to neatly type their information directly onto college applications. This model fails to address the core problem that our target market faces, however, since students must still fill out separate and repetitive applications for each school. GiddyApp employs a completely new strategy to solving the critical problems that millions of college applicants are confronting annually.
BUSINESS MODEL
Business Strategy
Phase 1: Launching GiddyApp College
During its Launch Phase, GiddyApp will introduce its core college application product,
GiddyApp College. Market research confirms that students are eager to use and willing to pay for services that increase their chances of college acceptance or make the process easier to manage. The company therefore aims to generate significant transaction-based revenues from its target population, the more than 2.5 million applicants who apply to 3 or more colleges each year. GiddyApp will simultaneously launch GiddyApp Forum, a supporting site that features an open discussion board for students to discuss issues relating to the college application process, with the goal of increasing market share and supporting GiddyApp’s market position. GiddyApp projects that cumulative direct sales revenues from its GiddyApp College offering will total more than $46 million, from an estimated 250,000 annual user base, over the five-year period ending December 2012.
Phase 2: Launching Parallel Revenue Streams
GiddyApp will develop and launch a portfolio of products that capitalize on GiddyApp’s market
position within this $50 billion industry. Revenues from those products will stem from three key
demographics:
1. Students: GiddyApp will regularly offer users the chance to upgrade their service subscriptions to include GiddyApp Scholarship. Based on moderate price point and conservative market share capture estimates and growth rates for users who will upgrade to GiddyApp’s premium service, the company expects to generate more than $8.8 million in GiddyApp Scholarship direct sales revenues alone by December 2012.
2. Colleges: GiddyApp will exploit its unique access to hundreds of thousands of college applicants and its invaluable database which mines scores of information about those applicants, to offer colleges the opportunity to market their school to specific types of students through targeted advertising on GiddyApp College and GiddyApp Forum web pages. GiddyApp can charge premium advertising rates because it is uniquely positioned to enable colleges to (1) target very specific student profiles, and (2) reach prospective students at the critical time when they are actively deciding what colleges to consider.
Marketing Strategy
GiddyApp has devised a two-pronged marketing strategy. First, GiddyApp plans to aggressively
market its two core products to the annual target market of 3.6 million college applicants, which includes more than 2.5 million high school seniors. GiddyApp will incorporate low-cost, high-penetration marketing strategies to which this market is particularly receptive, including high school newspaper press releases and local sponsorships, as well as more traditional marketing strategies, including internet and print media advertising. Second, GiddyApp plans to launch a parallel campaign aimed at these students’ college guidance counselors, who serve as the primary resource for high school students’ college application-related decisions. These counselors will learn how GiddyApp dramatically simplifies the application process, lightens counselors’ own workload, and improves results for the counselors’ students. With a counselor to student ratio of 1:60, turning these counselors into advocates offers the unique advantage of continuity, as they can influence new pools of applicants each year.
GiddyApp Scholarship: A premium service that applies this same core concept and technology to scholarship applications. From GiddyApp Scholarship’s homepage, students can choose to apply for more than 1,000 scholarships using profiling technology to match a student’s profile to prospective scholarships. GiddyApp’s technology then generates a custom-made application tailored to fit the unique combination of scholarships the student has chosen. The student’s answers are then routed and automatically typed onto each scholarship’s original application form, radically simplifying the process of finding and applying to scholarships and positioning users to secure their share of the more than $1 billion in scholarship money with minimal extra effort.
GiddyApp has developed three integrated programs on which GiddyApp’s core product offerings
are built:
.GiddyApp Custom Application Generator: This tool instantly generates a unique customized single set of clear questions based on a user’s college selections. This set of questions is designed to capture all of the information necessary for GiddyApp to complete each selected college’s original application without prompting the user for any redundant information.
GiddyApp Application Populator: This tool automatically completes each college’s (and for
GiddyApp Scholarship users, each scholarship’s) original application by routing and manipulating
the information that a user already provided in response to the single custom-made application
generated by the Custom Application Generator.
· GiddyApp Mapper: This is a back-end program that facilitates GiddyApp’s effort to add applications to its database. Mapper allows data entry employees to efficiently catalogue the information that each application requires, simultaneously preparing that application for (1) the
Custom Application Generator and (2) the Application Populator by generating detailed SQL statements that those two programs utilize.
