ScholarCheck.io - Validate Students Emails

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#1

I’ve been working on a SaaS platform for just over a month now and I’ve just reached the MVP status.

ScholarCheck - www.scholarcheck.io allows any online business to validate students emails from over 10k education institutions around the world.

E.g. If you want to integrate special discounts for students simply place a HTTP request to our API - or use one of our wrappers for Ruby/PHP - and it will respond whether that email belongs to a student.

I’m currently looking for marketing advice, as well as your thoughts on the pricing, as I’m struggling to set a price I feel is appropriate.

If you want to try this out, use the Bootstrapped coupon for 2 free months.

#2

Did you already interview potential customers, to determine what features were critical in your MVP?

#3

Yes, I’ve been in touch with about a dozen small businesses who pointed me towards building the MVP with this specific feature set.

#4

I like the idea, especially if one can integrate it really quickly. I see that you already have some wrappers, which is good for an MVP. But consider adding a CURL example, that will be helpful for all other programming languages.

About the pricing, is there some kind of a trial? Or sandbox environment? I’d appreciate if I could put my account into a testing mode that is forever free, then I could work with it and integrate it. Maybe while testing is on you just spit out “True” all the time. As for the plans, what happens after the 500 calls (which I find a really low amount)? Is this a package and I can buy the same again? Have a look at Zencoder, I really liked their way of pricing when it comes to included vs. additional requests.

You should really try to calculate how much each request costs you, and then price accordingly (include costs of acquisition and so on). It should be a no-brainer to use your service, as opposed to keeping a list of institutions and/or validating manually.

For the marketing, why not sign up as a student from some foreign (or made up) university everywhere? When they want proof, ask them how they do the validation and offer your solution.

#5

We have all the API endpoints available at Github. You can access it through the “API Docs” button at the landing page. Do you think that’s not clear enough? How would you suggest me to rework that section?

There is a 7-day free trial, but you are absolutely right about having a dummy API which is free for development purposes.

Regarding the pricing, I think that if you have 500 potential customers trying to buy something from you, you should be able to afford the $9.99.

I’ve had a few businesses running on Shopify that are interested in using this, so I’m focusing on building a Shopify app to integrate the ScholarCheck API with it, but I’ll try hitting a few businesses with your suggestion and test it out.

Thanks!