Do you remember going through the reviews on Rate My Teachers to find out which teacher is hot and who gives good grades? The teacher and class ratings site is one of the few 1.0 websites that are still well and alive today. when the portal was acquired by news streaming service Chedder in 2018, had a monthly user base of 6 million.
Its enduring relevance impressed jae lee, a US-educated South Korean serial entrepreneur living in Singapore, but the site is nowhere near perfect. Identities are not verified, for example, so there is no way to examine the validity of the reviews. After all, students see it more as an “entertainment” site than something serious on which to base their course decisions, Lee suggests in an interview.
However, the popularity of ratemyprofessors.com indicates a need for students for a place where they can help each other with their college experience. Lee and his co-founder danny woo so he set out to build Campingan anonymous online community for US college students
Specifically, Kempus aims to create a reservoir of knowledge to help students reach their ultimate goal, in Lee’s words, “the pre-degree phase.” That knowledge, or what the founder calls “a data set unique within higher education,” can range from professor ratings, advice on buying second-hand textbooks, housing reviews, to how to get counseling on campus. .
“We’re democratizing the level of access to information, which starts with course reviews,” says Lee.
Incorporated in August 2022, Kempus recently raised $3 million in a seed round from Bithumb Korea, a major cryptocurrency exchange in South Korea, though the founder says the company has no plans to partner with cryptocurrencies.
The reason for accepting money from Bithumb, according to Lee, is that Kempus is fundamentally a data business, so “we decided to pitch our idea to an early investor who had prior investments relevant to a data-driven business, including but not limited to , blockchain, under his portfolio”.
autonomous
A flurry of reports has shown that teenagers are especially prone to social media harm. While ambitious startups like Fizz promote “secure and private” social networking for college students, sparking investor interest in the “next Facebook,” Kempus positions itself more as a “community” leveraging the experiences and insights of the students.
Users are anonymous, but their identities are verified through their school emails, and they can only join their own college communities. To foster a safe environment, Kempus created a self-governance mechanism through which students can point out the bad guys. “We are not these mega social networks where we can hire thousands of people in the Philippines to moderate content, so the first layer [of filtering] it’s the community,” says Lee.
The second layer is Kempus itself, which rewards students with points for their contribution to the content. In doing so, the company aspires to become the facilitator rather than the moderator or censor.
To attract early adopters, Kempus is reaching out to the student and faculty associations at all universities. You released your MVP (minimum viable product) only at the end of January, so it’s still too early to say if you’ve found your product on the market. While course reviews sound niche, Lee acknowledges that narrow focus is exactly the startup’s strategic advantage.
“Multiple blows have been taken to solve the problem of higher education as a whole… But I think there are multiple aspects, multiple categories that are so deeply embedded in society and the human race that it is a very difficult problem to solve because it could be related to politics,” he argues. “We are not here to solve higher education as a whole problem. We are trying to focus from the bottom up.”
