Each year hundreds of university aspirants miss their entrance exam or fall victim to fraudsters in Nigeria.
Though the information they’re looking for is available on the internet, it’s not properly organised in such a way that noobs can find them. And fraudsters take advantage of this, posting that a school’s application form is out when it’s not and defrauding many.
Netsob aims to solve this problem by organizing these admission information and making it easily accessible. To do this, Netsob provides users with tons of news updates, articles and tips and a sophisticated search experience to help them find exactly what they’re looking for.
Can these information be sourced from the website of the schools? If yes, then i see no reason why a candidate will want to subscribe. If the information is exclusive to Netsob then bingo. You can confidently say your USP is exclusivity of admission information
On the flip-side, curating all admission related information is massive.
Why not do a test run and determine the usage before introducing subscription?
How do you intend making the Netsob a staple for admission candidates?
@princehumphrey thanks for your comment. I really appreciate it.
With regards to your question, the information is all over the internet: on the schools’ website, on blogs and so on. All Netsob does is organise it.
The major issue here is that the people searching for the information are noobs. Most of them don’t even know the school’s website and even the ones that do can’t find the information there (if you’ve ever visited a Nigerian university’s website, you’ll know what I’m talking about).
So the way most of them get the information they’re looking for is by searching on Google. And that’s where fraudsters get them. They create posts that the school’s application form is out when it’s not and give false info about how to pay for the form (which usually involve paying some money into the fraudster’s account) and the young aspirants, not knowing any better, fall for it.
What Netsob does is organise these information so people can easily find them. The subscription feature is just a plus: instead of coming on the internet every other day to see if the form is out, you simply subscribe to that news and when the form comes out, you get a text message.
If I have to choose a USP, I’ll say it’s that our info is always legit and up-to-date. Now you may not think that’s a big deal, but if you’re a university aspirant who just google “when will Uniport 2016/2017 Post UTME form come out” and get several results saying different things: some saying the form is not yet out, others saying it’s out, and other saying the deadline has already past and you have to pay N50,000 before someone can squeeze you in, it is good to have a site you can go to and be sure.
@light, I read your Netsob episode 2, in which you said iunilag is a flop because it has only 8 registered users after two weeks. I feel your pain, however do you know that snapchat had only 160+ users after three months of going live? You are wrong is saying students do not need another social networking platform, do you know how many social networks have emerged after facebook? Do you know that google was the 20 something search engine to join the game?
The entrepreneurial journey is a tough one, and I will advise that you tweak Netsob, because what you seek to achieve can be done by students on face book or twitter or whatsapp.
Let me give you an idea, as an undergraduate ( i finished Uni over a decade ago), one of the major pain points for students was accommodation. You can make netsob, a student accommodation info platform .
I wish you all the best.
@osu_emmanuel thanks for your advise. But bear in mind that the entry you just read was written about five years ago. A lot has happened since then.
But you are right. I may have been too hasty to say students didn’t need another social network. There are several other reasons why students may not have registered on the site: one being that the site may have just plain sucked. But even now, with hindsight, I realize a social network may not have been the best way to solve the problem Netsob was trying to solve.
Anyway, keep up with the series and see how things unfold. Who knows, you may even come to agree with me that the social network flop was a blessing in disguise.
@Light, I tried to post on the series but couldn’t, also the series was dated 15/Mar/2017 (lol).
‘the site may just plain sucked’ are you kidding me? You are being too harsh your self though.
I have learnt that if your first start up product is perfect which means you were late coming into the market.
Sometimes, our first products may fail woefully but that in itself is not bad if you learn lessons from the death of the product. I am on my first start up (www.debutch.com) and I must say its been a roller coaster ride. I am not afraid of it failing, I will be disappointed if it does but that will not prevent me from trying something else.
I would like to hook up with you on twitter if you don’t mind. My personal twitter is @osu_emmanuel whilst my startup handle is @debutchltd.
@osu_emmanuel 15/Mar/2017 was when the entry was posted on Techcabal. However, it was originally entered into my journal in February, 2012 as was mentioned in the beginning of the post.
As regard the twitter thing, unfortunately, I’m not on twitter or facebook or whatsapp or any other social network. The easiest way to contact me would be to send me a private message here or an email to sorbari@netsob.com.