Rishi Satpathy was faced with an age-old high school problem. "I was in a class that none of my friends were in," he says, "and I didn't like the teacher."
At most high schools, that's a problem with no easy solution. Changing your schedule is like a ridiculously cruel game of Tetris where you have to go out and find the blocks yourself. You make countless calls to friends, comparing schedules one class at a time, and then there's trip after trip to the guidance counselor as you try to fit your new set of classes together. But Satpathy and other students at the prestigious Illinois Math and Science Academy have a better way. They use a website called WikiRoster.
With the site -- co-created by an IMSA alum -- Satpathy can sync up with his friends and fill holes in his schedule from the web browser on his laptop. "It's saved many, many trips to the guidance counselor," he says.
Typically, high schools don't post student schedules publicly due to privacy concerns, but there's nothing to stop students from volunteering this information on a third-party website. That's what happens on WikiRoster. Students can then instantly compare schedules and view them in a visual way that makes it all the easier to mix and match classes. Once school starts, they can also use the site to discuss homework assignments or collaborate on class projects.
Teenage founders Jason Lin, Kendrick Lau, and Jung Oh created the site while still in high school. Like many startups, it began as a way to scratch a personal itch.
Lin was a student at IMSA, the state-funded boarding school famous for producing entrepreneurial hackers like OK Cupid founder Sam Yagan and several members of the "PayPal mafia," including Palantir co-founder Nathan Gettings, Yelp co-founder Russel Simmons, and YouTube engineer Yu Pan. As part of a database programming class he was taking at IMSA, Lin built an application that would make it easy for him to visualize his course schedule. He could type his classes into a Microsoft Access database, and it would spit out a pretty, Google Calendar-style schedule.
Then he realized that if every student entered their schedule into a database, everyone could see what everyone else was taking. That seems like a business opportunity -- and he brought the idea to Lau, a friend then at Glenbrook South High School in Glenview, Illinois. "We didn't know any web programming," Lin says. "I'd done some object-oriented programming, but never any PHP or anything. So we started learning together."
They built the site over the summer. Lin and Lau launched the site in August 2012, initially just for IMSA and Glenbrook students, after about two months of work. Then, one morning, Lin woke up to an email from Oh, another student at Glenbrook. "Hey," it said, "I can hack into your site and log in as anyone I want." Oh helped fix the problem, and Lin and Lau soon invited him to join the team.
The students continued to work on the project on evenings and weekends. IMSA gives students a free day each week to pursue internships or self-directed projects, but Lin's free day was already taken. He was interning at a Chicago-area startup called Better Weekdays. That, however, fed WikiRoster in a different way. "It was a great experience," he says, "It taught me a lot about how to run my own startup."
Today, Lin and Oh split the programming responsibilities, Oh and Lau split the graphic design work, and Lin and Lau do marketing. "It's the first time I've done true collaboration," Lin says. "You can't just partition the work. You have to communicate every step of the way because the disparate pieces can't just be assembled at the end."
WikiRoster is used by over 500 out of about 650 students at IMSA, and 500 out of around 2,500 students at Glenbrook. The team is now spreading the service to more schools, and though most are in the Chicago area, it's already at schools in California and Missouri as well. The plan is to roll it out nationwide, Lin says, but that takes time. Each school's schedule must be entered by hand. Typically, WikiRoster pays a student at each school to type everything in. Lin believes the site will span the country in about two years.
In the meantime, WikiRoster has moved beyond scheduling. "We had a problem with users using the site at the beginning of the year, and then stopping." So Lin and company added a tool for listing homework assignments, commenting on them and ranking them by difficulty. WikiRoster also offers forums, a note-sharing tool, and a marketplace for selling textbooks.
No, there's no business model yet, but it will likely involve targeted advertising. "Being able to target students at a specific school will be very valuable to advertisers," Lin says.
Next, they want to add more granular privacy tools. The only privacy setting now is the option to hide your full schedule so that you only appear in the listing for a class if the person viewing the listing is also in the class. Otherwise, your full schedule is public to all users. Lin and company also want to integrate the site with Facebook.
Oh is still in high school, but Lin and Lau are about to start classes at the University of Illinois and Purdue University. Is there a collegiate version on the way? Let them finish high school first.
