I started my first company in college after seeing a gap in the education space for sharing course notes. I registered a domain and relaunched a site, which quickly gained interest.
That's right. Yes. I was, just a week or two into into freshman year of college. And I had started a couple companies before in high school, so I kind of I understood some aspects of building companies, like buying domain names, getting a merchant account, SEO design, some web development, but mostly static like HTML. But, yeah, once I started school, I wanted to start something for students.
I wanted to start something for myself. And I remembered seeing some websites. My my younger brother actually showed me some websites in the education space where students were sharing, like, course notes, essays, research papers, stuff like that. And I thought that could be an interesting space to get into. So I remembered one of the sites that I had seen, you know, a couple years prior.
It was called oppapers.com. And I just just was doing some research, and I checked to see if the site was there, and it wasn't there. So I checked the domain name to see if it was still registered, and it wasn't. So I immediately registered it. And my friend and I, my friend Chris and I, just relaunched the site.
We basically put a splash page on the home page saying, if you wanna join, just let us know what you want your username and password to be and send a document that you wanna add to the site. Send send it all via email. And I didn't think too much of it, but I checked the email account two days later, and there were 15 documents in there, a bunch of people wanting to sign up. And I just knew, okay. We're onto something here.
And that that was the beginning of that that company. Yeah. Course notes and essays, somewhat controversial at the time. Probably, even sites that are big now, Course Hero, and really, I would say Course Hero is the main one remaining, are still seen as somewhat controversial sometimes because this idea that, okay, students are never going to study again or something like that. But yeah, so that's how that's the type of content we were sharing at that time.