For our Startup Spotlights, Times of Entrepreneurship scouted the most successful startups that spun out of top universities.
Startup: StudentCoin
One liner: the first academic token connecting universities, startups, and investors
Looking for: We are looking for people who imagine blockchain technology implemented into the world of higher education.
Location: Poland
Interviewee: Maya Synowiec
1. Tell us about your company
The greatest university challenge we faced and are still dealing with is related to COVID-19. It is happening right now but has started at the very beginning. The coronavirus crisis has challenged higher education institutions in many new and unexpected ways. We focus on using those circumstances to our advantage but also for students’ and universities’ advantage. Universities are forced to transfer their activity to online. We aim to be the remedy providing safe and quick solutions based on blockchain technology. Our activity is inextricably linked with university and student cooperation. Everybody’s attention is paid to managing this hard situation. We had to rebuild our idea, ways of project development and foundations to not only survive but to support higher education. Our previous development plan involved organizing educational conferences and panels being a part of our Educational Section. We are creating the biggest online database where everybody will be able to learn about blockchain technology and gain tokens for fulfilling each section. This is just a short example of how we adapt to the situation.
2. What is your elevator pitch? Has it changed much since you started?
We do not have just one elevator pitch that we repeat in every situation. We are so keen on what we do that our creativity is always on high levels. For now, this may be our elevator pitch. “Blockchain technology will sooner or later be implemented into every area of life. We aim to revolutionize higher education by sharing knowledge and providing tools making processes quicker and safer. ”
The main idea of what we say has changed because the pace of our development completely surprised us. We just wanted to create a token for our university and now we are available for students from more than 500 universities in the world. There are students, specialists and entrepreneurs from 17 countries in our team. Everything thanks to our hard work and the ground-breaking idea.
3. What should we know about you?
There are a lot of things we would like to share because our work is our passion. Unfortunately, we always have to choose what to focus on. It is important that we create the ecosystem that allows us to create tokens for universities, startups and individuals. It is crucial that we educate but what is the most important is that we are perfect for our users’ needs. This results from the fact that we had pondered over creating a token for our closest community, so we learned how to recognize customers’ problems to be solved.
4. What are you looking for?
We are looking for people who would appreciate our idea and would like to inform others about Student Coin. We are looking for people who would like to invest in our progress, because funds are what we need to achieve our goals. We are looking for people who imagine blockchain technology implemented into the world of higher education. This would be so beneficial especially now. We need people dedicated to the idea.
5. Why should someone invest in you?
People should invest in Student Coin because they would take part in a revolution by doing this. Higher education is so important for world progress. If it stops, the world stops. Funds are our fuel. We are going to implement really useful tools and solutions thanks to them. One of them is the voting system based on blockchain technology. There is a beta version of it on our website. Can you imagine how the world would look like if the Internet wasn’t introduced into every area of life? We aim to make a big change in the world of higher education.
6. Is there a clear evidence of success you would like to share?
There are a lot of achievements we perceive as our small success. Let’s start from the fact that we are available for students from more than 500 universities. We integrate students, faculty and businesses from all around the world. Cryptocurrency exchanges offer listing us and launching an IEO. There are about 500 new users every week. The best is yet to come. Our next plan is the Initial Exchange Offering.
7. If you would describe your startup to have a superpower, what would it be?
The clue is to discover a superpower and bet on it. That is what we do. We have found a gap that we are filling as Facebook when it was created. That will allow everyone to tokenize in the same easy way as create a social media profile raising our life to the next level.
