Launch HN: Coursedog (YC W19) – Resource Planning Software for Higher Ed
My co-founder Nick Diao and I were CS majors at Columbia. We were motivated but mediocre students, skipping class and constantly building sorta-used not-product-market-fit apps that never took off.
During our Junior year, we realized how difficult it was to register for the CS classes we wanted to take, and had the unspecific but weirdly prescient lightbulb moment that all university students have where they say "wow university software sucks".
We reached out to Columbia University's IT department and learned that most universities build their schedules with a combination of excel spreadsheets, manual horse/brain/caffeine-power and SQL reports to clean up inevitable errors. It seemed like an obvious opportunity to take a swing at a business.
We spent that summer working out of a sweaty lounge at Columbia, awkwardly cold-calling University Registrars and building a Vue/Node web app to help universities optimize their class schedules. We utilized a mixed integer programming algorithm to optimize time and room assignments based on student + faculty preferences and space constraints, and reluctantly built a user interface for manual edits when university politics inevitably messed up our Moneyball-esque optimization. And we had bugs. Luckily for us, compared to the existing on-prem solutions and excel spreadsheets that could make the most dedicated investment banker blush, 40+ universities tolerated us enough to buy our $150K+ multi-year contract solution within a year and a half.
Although we’re focused on schedule and curriculum planning for now, it turns out that all higher education administration software is sort of very bad. Fun fact: There are 5 universities in the country on a cloud based enterprise resource planing solution. 5. As such, we feel pretty good about going down the line and rebuilding the whole thing from scratch: registration, advising, financials, all of it. That's the long-term vision. If you might want to work on something like that, please get in touch. We're hiring for the long term, but also right now 30 schools call us at all hours of the night, we launched 4 products this year and will be launching another 4 next year, and we could use engineers with brains that are more developed than ours.
Nick and I would like your feedback on all of the above, are happy to answer questions, and look forward to hearing about your experiences and ideas to improve university software. Fire away HN!
45 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadThe piece that is really holding back schools from moving to an all cloud erp is the "Student Information System" (SIS), which is the Higher Ed specific scheduling, advising, degree audit, credentials, advising, registration etc. piece of the ERP stack. A lot of companies that built Student Information Systems in the 90's/early 2000's are working to port their on-prem solutions into the cloud, but they are somewhat slowed down by having to support numerous legacy on-prem systems.
On the schools end, it also takes a lot of courage to flip off a system you've been using for 20+ years and start with something new, and right now there are basically no positive case studies of launched, cloud-based SIS systems.
It's really a new day and age that we're living in where school will spend a lot of money on software - as 5 years ago this would have been crazy.
To your point about moving to a better system - it's been an age old critique that universities are a slow moving bureaucracy.
We'd argue that the slow pace is a more or less an allergic reaction to the poor solutions that universities have been force-fed over the past 20+ years: including but not limited to incessant acquisitions, companies going under and products that don't work or integrate well.
Given that university administrators often work within a school for 20+ years, you end up with a lot of people who are just flat out skeptical of new products.
The good thing is that going from 0 to 1 product within a university is exponentially more difficult than 1 to 2 or 1 to an entire back-office solution. Now that we've got a couple of strong references and high NPS scores, we think that up-selling and cross-selling is going to help us break down these traditional barriers. Rather than rip and replace, why not go down the line with us and rebuild?
my college's scheduling system is very painful to use.
What's the best email to reach you at?
We're seeing a lot of schools now procure additional products once they enjoy their additional experience with us, like this school Laguna College https://coursedog.com/case-study123
Hats off to you for getting this thing going so strong! It ain't easy in that space, that's for sure!
It. All. Sucks.
Not one piece of software I have used (Canvas, Sakai, Slate and numerous in-house tools) are easy to use or easy to integrate with. A group of students here at UNC created https://www.coursicle.com/ which deals with the student scheduling side of things and actually looks pretty great but I've not used it. I'm sure you've seen it already.
I'm curious how many CIO/CTOs have had concerns with moving to your system or if you've got a canned response for all the FERPA FUD that gets tossed around?
I'm inclined to agree that the best Higher Ed products are not actually all that great. Some of the VC's that I've spoken with joke that a B+ product in Higher Ed is a unicorn.
As for the CIO's - we're able to standardize a lot of that using something called the HECVAT which is basically a tell all for security reviews. If you're interested in learning more, looks like you have a super interesting github and would love to connect, just shoot me your email
If anyone knows of a provider that would work with a high school on these points, we would be first in line.
Some good looking solutions for higherEd (eg courseleaf) aren’t available at the high school level, probably because there’s a big need but very tricky to get meaningful funding for it
http://easy-a.net
Tells students the difficulty of their semester, estimates hours they will have to work, expected grades, etc.
Happy to discuss, feel free to reach out.
They’re a rocketship!
I work in HE in Australia and a number of unis have switched from manual/xls to Akari [0]
A comparison page on your website with CourseDog vs X would be welcome – just so it’s easy to see what you provide vs the market
A scheduling tool that works with academic workload models (not sure if this is Australia specific thing) that optimises[1] academic and resource/room allocation would be very welcome
* No. 1 complaint from students is class scheduling!
[0] http://www.akarisoftware.com/index.cfm/page/solutions
[1] with multiple optimisation models
You described what we do perfectly. We're pretty interested in expanding internationally, and would love to connect via a call if you are open to it?
Recently I have been experimenting a lot with optimization strategies and their performance/results. I have tried to code some, including mixed integer LP, and applied them to multiple problems. I did this such that I could get a deeper understanding which sort of optimization algorithm is suited and well-performing for which kind of problem.
So far my results have been very inconsistent: sometimes genetic algorithms produce surprisingly good results, other times simulated annealing proves to be the clear winner, sometimes a plain old depth-first search, with a custom scoring heuristic produces greatest results... Since my results seem quite random to me so far, I get the impression that the only way to find out the best match for a problem is to try them all. Is this correct?
Since you're using mixed integer programming, could I ask you why you chose this optimization strategy? Also, if you would happen to have some more information about the specifics of choosing a correct algorithm for an optimization problem, could you provide me some insights?
Anyways, good luck with Coursedog!