ConnectEd

ConnectEd provides a platform in which highschoolers can seek internships, connect with other highschoolers to attain professional relationships, and seek information about careers, college readiness, and success in high school.

Job specialization

The specialization of a certain job means that the amount of knowledge required as a prerequisite for that job increases as more information about the respective topic is derived as time goes on. Especially in the 21st century, where specialization is very frequent, the workforce has to constantly learn and adapt, especially high school students. In addition to the pressure to learn earlier.

Information search

Many students in high school are looking for ways to be a better college candidate, find a career of interest, and for ways to succeed in high school. However in order to do these things, students require information to help guide them. The issue is that to find this information students have to consult multiple references like YouTube videos articles and etc. Essentially the whole process is inefficient since there is no "one-stop-shop" for this type of information.

Difficulties in the internship search

As a result of the increased pressure on high schoolers to learn more about an industry and to be competitive college candidates, high school students are more interested in obtaining internships than they ever have been before. However, despite the great interest of high schoolers wanting to intern, there is excessive difficulty in trying to find internships specifically meant for high school students. The difficulty for high schoolers in finding internships arises because there is no clear way for high school students to look for these positions.

High school students often have to consult major job-seeking platforms, which mostly cater to the needs of college students and beyond. As a result, a majority of the listings for internship positions are for college students or above, with minimal to no listings meant for high schoolers, despite there being companies that offer high school internships. The other option for high schoolers is personal connections. In this solution, high schoolers would ask their connections, typically family members or known adults, for internship offerings in a company they work for. While this is a feasible method, not all high schoolers have access to such people, and the method is not efficient as it requires high schoolers to find and keep track of information on their own.

General website

Our website will have general aspects that all websites encompass, however, this will change depending on three types of users. Companies will have a larger focus on analytics, current students will have a focus on networking and information, and mentors will primarily have a focus on platform building and information. However, messaging, a search bar (for users), a general profile, and a home page will be common for all users.

High School Student Aspect

Students will have access to a sophisticated internship search bar, a connections tab, and a forum tab. The search bar will direct the student to a page of listings of internships related to the user’s interests he/she can apply for. In addition, the student will have filters to further specify their search. Some filters are as follows: location, industry, salary, etc. Students will also have access to a connections tab in which they can see recommended connections suggested to them based on similar interests and other factors. The connections page serves to help students find other students, whether it be for forming a professional relationship or a teammate for a contest.

High schoolers can also find industry professionals who post about their industry and offer guidance. Another key feature for students will be a forum section where any user can ask or answer questions and offer advice to other students relating to topics of college readiness, high school success, and career advancement.

Company/Employer Aspect

As per the companies, they will have an analytical view. Companies will have an "entries page" where they can create entries and keep track of applications for their internship listings. Companies will also have an analytics tab to see key data about their entries. This data ranges from data about the applicants to data about the advertising of the listing. 

Primary segment

Our primary target audience consists of college-bound high school students in their sophomore, junior, or senior years. These are the high schoolers who wish to progress their careers earlier on or simply gain more knowledge in an industry that ConnectEd helps them with. On the other hand, companies that provide internships to high schoolers are another part of our primary target audience. ConnectED primarily helps these companies by providing an outlet to qualified high school students, to whom these companies can provide internships in an efficient manner. In order for ConnectEd to function properly, both employers and high school students must be on the platform, as they are what attract each other.

Our secondary market consists of older users and users who have been members of ConnectEd before their graduation. These users are people who want to help the younger generation or give back to the platform that helped them. Furthermore, these users may wish to create a platform centered on assisting high school students. In order to obtain such users, we will advertise to people who currently have a platform revolving around education. These types of members help ConnectEd attract more members by actively engaging with the platform and sharing their expertise. This can include but is not limited to, posting updates, building a following, and participating in discussions in forums. By engaging with the platform, these members create a go-to destination for valuable information regarding education and career, which helps generate interest and activity on our website.

ConnectEd launch plan

As of now ConnectEd is being created as a minimal viable product for market testing. After testing, ConnectEd is planned to launch in the summer of 2023, we plan to initially target companies and students across Texas and then scale further to the entire US. With the specifications mentioned, we can expect the total addressable

market to be around 6.2 million businesses and around 11.5 million high school students. However, for the first year, we plan to only

During this year, we will market toward high school juniors and seniors and companies in industries known to provide the most internships; those industries include healthcare, education, government, etc. After assessing results from the first year, in our second year, we will perform necessary changes and then, region by region, expand to the whole United States. In addition, in the second year, this is when we plan to integrate mentors because we will have a meaningful number of graduates, whom we will then advertise to through emails.

Benefits for high school students

In short, ConnectED is a professional social media platform that aims to help high schoolers get internships. Unlike other professional social media platforms that may cater to a wider audience, our platform would specifically help and cater to high school students. This would make the use of professional social media all the more relevant and applicable for high school students. We are also unique in the way that we provide tailored resources and advice. Our platform provides resources and advice specifically designed for high school students to succeed, whether it be in high school, college readiness, or a career. In addition, we also offer forums where users can create discussions, for example, sharing their experiences about certain internships so that other students know what to expect from a certain company.

Our platform also provides a way for high school students to connect with graduates in their field of interest. Our platform gives current high school students direct access to graduated students who have insight they are willing to offer.

While other platforms also allow students to connect with graduated students and industry professionals, ConnectEd offers access to people who have been through a similar situation, therefore, making help more relevant to the high schoolers.

Benefits for employers

However, our solution does not only benefit students but also companies as well. For companies, we offer a way to recruit high schoolers for internships in an organized and efficient way that was previously not available. On other platforms, companies would have their entries viewed by demographics in which the company isn't interested. ConnectEd enables these businesses to specifically target a demographic, such as high school students.

Benefits for graduated/older users (mentors)

Mentors have the opportunity to give back to the platform in addition to being able to create a social media platform revolving around high school success, college readiness, or a career. Mentors on this platform will be people who have already utilized the platform in the past but have now graduated. As a result, they have the opportunity to give back to the platform that helped them by participating in forums or directly helping out current students. In turn, especially if mentors already have a preexisting following based on their high school success, college readiness, and career, they can use ConnectEd to further expand their following across social media sites.

The entire team met after they all signed up for an incubator program called INCubatorEDU at Lone Start Highs School. Prior to joining the course everyone knew that they had some sort of interest in entrepreneurship and wanted to get started with team members. Near the start of the course when we were assigned together as a group, we were to come up with 10 problems we faced as possible problems we could address with our business. This is when we came up with out business idea made to address academic and career concerns for high schoolers. The most advantageous experience we have when it comes to this business idea is that we are highs schoolers ourselves. As high school students we have faced these problems first hand and can better modify our solutions to match specific problems we face. In addition to our personal experience, we are able part of the previously mentioned course. In this course we learn everything pertaining toward instantiating and running a business through developing our own idea. 

In order to understand the needs of our population, we have taken several measures among the lines of interviews, forms and putting ourselves in the shoes of the likely user of our company. We have tried out current ways to find internships, connect with other students professionally, and try and find information which was quite easy since we are already high schoolers and students like the ones we described. After doing so for around 2 months with intent, we noted our observations throughout and adjusted our business plan accordingly. As for the other segments, we realized on interviews and data online to come to a consensus. After doing so we have determined that there is a valid market interest for this Idea and we will focus on pursuing it. We also plan to launch our minimal viable product soon and further collect data and possibly pivot our innovation.

Our innovation is completely new since it focuses on creating a different outlook and new opportunity for high school students so that they can advance earlier on. Currently high school students are not at all encouraged to step outside the classroom and gain professional experience. With our platform we will encourage the learning of industry for high schoolers and possibly revolutionize the way that they learn. With our services, high schoolers will be able to advance their careers earlier on and aid the current professionals to work on more complicated tasks while the high schoolers can work on the basics. In addition, the implementation of high school students will make workplaces and learning a more efficient process while also making learning advanced industry related skills more accessible.

For next year we want to be able to expand our audience to something larger than FISD (Frisco Independent School District), preferably Texas or the entire nation. We also want companies to enlist internships on our platforms without us having a heavy marketing influence. We will do this by devising a system where we can easily advertise to many companies. So essentially another goal we have is to have a solid marketing plan down.

However for the purpose of our business, we wish to have the stigma of high schoolers being too young to start their careers to start and fade away. We believe that high school students are more than capable to start work in a specific industry while offering massive benefits to not only the world but also to businesses.

With ConnectEd, we not only hope to have our first successful business venture but also an outlet for transforming the influence high schoolers can have on the world.

The only way for us to achieve these goals is to, at this point, gain funding through means of competitions and pitches, grow an audience, and work hard to achieve these things

The main technology is just simply a website which will use a database we plan to enhance with other technologies later on. The database will be used to store user information which will help us find opportunities for them alongside help guide other services we offer.

Our solution currently doesn't serve an audience however upon the launch of our MVP (minimal viable product) in the middle of February, we plan to cater to the students in FISD. Upon the launch on this MVP we will address 16,000 college students, 17,000 high school students and around 1,200 local businesses. We will cater to this audience for around 3 months and then pull out our services. Based on the data we gain we will modify our solution in order to better our services or even pivot some aspects of our business. After this step we will launch to the state of Texas and then the US. Once we scale to the entire US we expect to cater to around 26 million college students, 12 million high school students and 6 million businesses at most. 

We currently have two barriers we need to cross: the legality of providing  internships for minors on our site and also ensure whether companies are willing to hire high school candidates for their businesses. Both of these issues are related to the increased about of legal involvement for minors and the stigma around high school students. Our goal is to be able to get the legal aspect fully cleared and also effectively convey why a high school student would offer more value to a business compared to a college student. 

We don't necessarily have a partnership however we are guided through a course we are currently taking called INCubatorEdu. In this course we are guided through several aspects of our business. Currently our team is working on making a MVP (minimum viable product) in order to test our current solution in a small market of Frisco, TX. After the end of testing which will commence around the middle of February and end around May we will analyze the data derived from testing and change aspects of our solution depending on how the public reacts to it. Then we plan to pitch our solution to investors and work on expanding the concept further and extending our serviceable market. After the summer is over, we plan to take part of an Accelerator course where we can extend on our work in the summer but this time through further guidance. 

If we go in order of a BMC we created, it is as follows

Problem: High schoolers want to find internships but cant do as easily since there is no straightforward way to apply/get one, connect with other high schoolers to form professional relationships and easily find information to help them in High school, career and college readiness. 

College students have to deal with debt so they look for ways to find quick cash. In addition they often don't have skill they can monetize other than the asset of knowledge about the college process, high school, and act. which is difficult to monetize.

Businesses are not able to take full advantage of high school interns who are more willing to work for free, take up basic tasks which can help more advanced employees focus on advanced tasks alongside other benefits. 

Solution: A website where high schoolers can connect with other high school students professionally, post about recent professional events, find internships  to apply to, and find information relevant to their careers. Companies can get onto the platform to find high school interns and run advertisements. Mentors can come onto the platform to exchange information for payments.

Key Metrics: # of internships attained, # of people engaging with information, #of companies doing advertisements, # of connections made. 

Unique Value Proposition: We are a simple and easy to use platform that provides needs that have not been met in the market despite the growing need of such a service.

Customer relations: We will maintain customer relations through having emails which prompt the user the come back onto the platform along side other means to keep the people on the platform.

Channels: We will access our users though SEOs, social media and adverts which will prompt users to get on our app or website. 

Customer segments:  ambitious high school students, college students, and businesses in advanced industries.

Costs structure: Website running, Development, advertising

Revenue streams: Ads, User premium features, mentor payments.

To be quite straightforward, we plan on being financially sustainable in the long term. We are at the Prototype stage of development and plan on moving to the Pilot stage in order to test our service in our local community (Frisco, TX). With this development in mind, we have concluded that it is optimal to first be able to sustain ourselves without losing our finances rather than attempting to profit immediately. In regards to this, we will be using a Cost-Based Pricing Strategy in our Pilot stage of development. This strategy we have in mind is to set the amount it costs us to deliver our service once, to our price point. With this strategy, we will be able to cover all expenses while not incurring any losses. After this is deemed successful, we will then be able to apply a markup to our service, thus, generating profit. As a whole, we plan on being financially sustainable throughout. As for the starting point, namely, funding for our work, we plan on receiving this from investors after we pitch our business model in the IncubatorEDU program.