ClusterHub

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good afternoon everyone. My name is Chris Bazett and I am here with my co-founder Patrick Wedgeworth. In the next 7 minutes, we are going to tell you why the Cluster Hub will grow to become an indispensible platform for group collaboration. Let’s get started!
• #3: We live in a group-based world, and globalization is causing interdependence to grow even more important.
• #4: The need for more efficient collaboration is reflected on university campuses across the United States. Students today are involved in more groups than ever before. Recently, the Economist Business Unit showed that 52% of administrators believe online collaboration tools will make the greatest contribution for improving education in the next 5 years.
• #5: Why do would these administrators say this?
• #6: We’ve experienced the difficulties of groupwork, haven’t we? Because from the individual perspective, managing all the group tasks is STRESSFUL.
• #7: Within a group, creating an efficient system is CHALLENGING.
• #8: Furthermore, the value of the output is often LOST and feedback is INSUFFICIENT.Although course management solutions like Blackboard are being used, these are closed applications and their group collaboration tools suffer from poor adoption.An open platform supporting collaboration activities and social networking could address these problems, but currently no such systems are in place.
• #9: Let’s now consider the perspective of a civil engineering student at Duke University named Kelsey Reed. Kelsey, like most university students, is really busy. She’s juggling 4 class groups at once, is an active member on student council, and has just joined a start-up venture. She hopes her team will enter the Duke Start-Up Challenge and wants to work some day for a large engineering company.
• #10: Although she enjoys working on all these teams, she has a hard time working productively with them.
• #12: Keeping track of her group obligations and using a wide range of tools is painful. But it’s not just collaborating effectively that is difficult. It’s also connecting efficiently with her surroundings. That means finding people with the right skills for her start-up, acquiring inspirational resources to guide her, and plugging into the right information streams to learn about events, competitions, and employment opportunities.
• #13: Fortunately, Kelsey remembers about an information session for a company called the Cluster Hub.
• #14: She is told the site will make collaboration on campus way easier!
• #15: So Kelsey gives it a try and goes to theClusterHub.com.
• #17: The Cluster Hub is an online platform that combines the benefits of social networking with online collaboration tools. Our new system addresses the problems of old using three, well-integrated portals.
• #18: The PERSONAL PORTAL allows you to create a professional brand and manage all of your productive activities in a single place. It helps to streamline group communications and eliminates clutter from your inbox.
• #19: In a few minutes, Kelsey creates a new account, makes group identities for her teams, and invites her teammates to join. From her personal portal, Kelsey is able to get a ‘big picture’ view of her groups, get the latest updates from them, and prioritize her tasks lists.
• #20: The GROUP PORTAL allows teams to rally around a branded identity. Students can access a suite of tools for file sharing, editing, scheduling, delegation, and communication. Finished work products can be published to the online Cluster Community.
• #21: Clicking on one of her group icons, Kelsey accesses the GROUP PORTAL. She finds that scheduling group meetings based on the combined calendars of her teammates is wonderfully convenient. At the end of her meetings, she can easily delegate tasks that automatically appear on her teammates’ task lists.
• #22: The COMMUNITY PORTAL allows you to find and collaborate with new teammates and groups, be inspired by others’ work, and connect to new opportunities.
• #23: In the COMMUNITY PORTAL, Kelsey explores the vast ecosystem of resources and opportunities that have been created by the Cluster community. She finds a model business plan, a bridge-building competition, and a crowd-sourcing opportunity for her teams.
• #24: She also ‘Clusters’ with the Boeing Company because she’s heard good things about the internship program. Now she will be notified of any updates Boeing makes on its page.
• #25: Several dayslater, Kelsey’s in command of her groups and is efficiently plugged into her environment. Rather than spending time on administrative tasks, she is able to focus on producing great results.We will check in again with Kelsey a little bit later, but at this point I will hand things over to Patrick Wedgeworth, who will describe the excellent opportunity we have identified for the Cluster Hub.
• #28: Explain the vast opportunity available (using quotes)Present the exciting opportunities and how there is high potential for corporations to engage the studentsWork is done in a group context, so group work is a better way than static resumesCorporations are increasingly seeking students who demonstrate an ability to work in groups
• #29: Briefly describe each yearYear 0Develop product and use survey data to determine problems that need to be solved and who to target initiallyYear 1Launch product and begin grassroots campaign at top 25 universities collect more survey data to help determine target market/how to improve productGain corporate buy-in by offering a free year and solicit feedback about how to make their experience betterYear 2Hire more programming staff, continue grassroots marketing campaignEngage bloggers to spread the word about the product Year 3Shift from Grassroots to online oriented marketingHire more marketing staff for corporate and user recruitmentYear 4-5Begin R&D, using our analytic data on usage, study group mgmt best practicesExtend corporate marketing campaign (now that we have a large userbase)Explain the current status of your product or service, what the near future looks like, and how you'll use the money you're trying to raise. Share the details of your positive momentum and traction. Then use this slide to close with a bias toward action.
• #30: AdvertisingWe will charge corporations for banner advertisements, starting at $1 CPM and increasing to $5.50 CPMAnalyticsAfter we have obtained a substantial userbase, we will sell analytic data to the corporations who own an account in order to supplement their advertisement effortsCorporate Account RevenueWe will charge corporations for a presence on the site, providing the first year for free as we build our userbase and subsequently charging in a manner proportional to the number of users they can access
• #31: We are making productive connections as opposed to some of our competitors.We are not trying to compete with Dropbox, Google Docs etc. What we are doing is providing a broad value proposition for university students to more productively interact with their teams and environment.
• #33: Targeting 1 campus per monthTargeting at least 100 initial “seed” users per campusQuadratic growth of number of companies involved with The Cluster Hub15% of our userbase is online daily (helps to determine banner ad profits)We charge $1 CPM in year 1, $2 CPM in year 2, $3 CPM in year 3, $4 CPM in year 4 and $5 CPM in year 5The Cluster Hub expects to become cash-flow positive and profitable in Year 3 using discounted cash flow analysis.
• #34: Where are the underlying assumptions here?Provide a five-year forecast containing not only dollars but also key metrics, such as number of customers and conversion rate. Do a bottom-up forecast. Take into account long sales cycles and seasonality. Making people understand the under- lying assumptions of your forecast is as important as the numbers you've fabricated.
• #35: We see that Kelsey is now a proud graduate of Duke University and is excited to explore opportunities in the job market. With a professional online portfolio that includes her favorite group projects, Kelsey stands out from the crowd and is accepted as a junior engineer at the Boeing Company.
• #36: At Boeing, Kelsey continues to manage her portfolio to document her professional development and certifications. She has also found it useful to help manage the groups she leads at work, and oversees the company’s ClusterHub page by announcing news, events, and competitions. We believe that millions of other Kelseys and corporations are waiting to benefit from the rich and productive Cluster community. And we believe that the ClusterHub will revolutionize collaboration on university campuses across the country.