Inline offers expert advice to college applicants at the most stressful point in the process: while they are working on their applications. In a world where higher education is still the most reliable way to launch someone into a comfortable life, Inline is designed for a generation of digital natives who aspire to a great college education but might lack the resources or the know-how or the connections. Inline meets applicants where they are: online, struggling with a sometimes tricky application form, and needing help with it in the moment. While there are a number of adjacent tools out there, no other digital product focuses exclusively on the college application and covers every question and every essay. It also includes special content for international students, homeschooled students, veterans, and first-gen. Created by former admissions officers, Inline's advice is ruthlessly practical, strategic, and authoritative, and teaches you how to apply like a pro. It's like TurboTax for college applications.
Product developed (incl. content for 800 colleges): 2016-2018 | Website visitors YTD: 3,772 (77% from US, 74% organic search) |
Product beta tested: 2018-2019 | Pageviews YTD: 9,845 |
Product updated: Sep 2019-June 2020 | Target launch: September 2020 for 2020-21 application cycle |
Books are outdated the day they are published, and not ideal for digital natives.
Many school-based counselors in the US are overburdened, and counselors at international schools lack expertise in US college admissions.
Private admissions consultants are very expensive.
Inline is a self-guided software tool that helps students as they are filling out their online college applications (specifically those using the Common Application platform). Think of it as the TurboTax of college applications:
Affordable
Up to date
Convenient
Designed for digital natives
Strategic advice based on best practices
Break down what you are raising the funds for. Change the color scheme of this pie chart through module settings.
Pie Chart
30% Marketing
20% Engineering/IT
20% Customer support
20% Salaries
10% Legal
We are pre-seed and need to acquire users to keep iterating and refining until we have an MVP and determine the pricing sweet spot. We were planning on a freemium model ($149 max), but during COVID we have temporarily removed the paywall as people are making the transition virtual college counseling.
We need to hire a marketing expert (or agency) and provide them with a viable marketing budget. We will also need help on the content side to update the application advice for the coming cycle, and to create content for colleges that are recently joined the platform.
K-12 test prep market: $8.3 billion
Number of students who took the SAT last year: 2.2 millionFormer admissions officer (UChicago), veteran admissions consultant, regular college admissions expert in major media, co-author of "How to Prepare a Standout College Application" (Wiley)
Former admissions officer (Dartmouth, Southern Methodist University, University of Chicago), CEO of Ivey College Consulting, co-author of "How to Prepare a Standout College Application" (Wiley)
CTO roles at at OnCell and Polimedia Group, delivered internal- and external-facing web applications for Boston University as part of their software engineering team