Sieva Kozinsky

We give you the credits and you can cherry pick a few sets of notes or a few sets of study guides that you need.

Yeah.

A set of lecture notes is a set of one week lecture notes is going to be 25 karma.

And then a study guide that helps you prepare for an exam is going to be a little more expensive.

It's going to be 50 karma.

We found that giving people karma gives them a little bit more flexibility on what they can use it for.

For instance, if you're a student and you just want lecture notes week to week in one single class, you can do that.

If we just give you 150 karma, you can pick all lecture notes.

You can pick some lecture notes and some study guides without having to think of, okay, every time I need to set up lecture notes, I'm going to need to pay $4 or every time I need a study guide, I'm going to need to pay $15 or something like that.

It removes some of those barriers of friction.

Sure.

So we started this business two and a half years ago.

April 1st, 2014 actually was when we first tested it at three schools.

Jeff and I, my co-founder, had been working on a different education company.

Which one?

It was called Studiously before.

We used to sell a software to universities to replace learning management tools.

We actually started this business, Study Soup, on the side, and we tested it at three schools based on some of the conversations that we had with some of our students who were asking for study materials that were being prepared by other students.

So we tested it at three schools.

One of them was my alma mater, UC Santa Barbara, and it really took off.