.
We have covered a ton of EdTech startups lately, but we just came across one of the more interesting products. Helpified is a pretty unique platform. Rather than reinventing the wheel, Helpified has built a platform that allows teachers and individuals to gather resources in a simple way. Think of it as sort of a Pocket for educators. Anyhow, we had a chance to ask the Helpified team a few querstions about their new curation tool:
Helpified
What is Helpified?
Helpified is a curation platform for teaching and learning.Using Helpified, you can gather, and save any resource from the web (e.g. articles, videos, images, lines of code) or your computer (e.g. PDFs, docs, presentations) and organize those resources into learning paths to show the exact step-by-step processes to learn anything. This allows you to create world-class teaching and learning material simply by organizing and annotating already-existing resources.
Why did you build Helpified?
Helpified began as a free education curation tool to gather online resources around learning web skill such as coding and design. It quickly grew to over 100,000 users through usein schools, incubators, and economical development agencies as a way to quickly create and share learning material, and to build expertise.
How is your product different from what is currently available?
Finding useful information and tools on the web is a pain. We started looking at the things you need to start and run a business: validating ideas, getting customers, marketing on the web, and a countless other tasks. To find tools and best practices to complete these things, most people scour search engines where they’re inundated by tens of thousands of options, most of which are useless information, or people trying to sell you things. This can be a nightmare and path to failure. And when you finally find something, how do you organize it?
Tell us your founding story. Was there an “ah ha” moment?
While Shane was going to college at St. Bonaventure University, he never found the time to get a real job. He was a basketball player with workouts throughout the entire year and summer, with classes on top.
Being a broke college student, he decided to start a web business that he could run on his own time. As a marketing major, though, he had no idea how to build a website. And, starting a business was a pretty overwhelming task. Things like getting customers, legally structuring your business, organizing expenses, paying taxes – you know, typical stuff you should understand to run a business, were not that intuitive.
After a couple years of obsessive research and producing some of the worst looking websites the web has ever seen, Shane found some glaring issues with how we figure out things on the Internet.
All of the information that he needed was on the web somewhere, but it took months of scouring search engines, forums, biased reviews, and incorrect or outdated information to find it. The process was a nightmare. Shane decided he wanted to do everything possible to make this process suck less for the next entrepreneur trying to start a business.
From there, Helpified was born. Instead of spending months sifting through search engines, you can find everything you need to know, in the order you need it – absolutely free.
Tell us about your founding team and their backgrounds.
Shane Hvizdzak – Founder and CEO at Helpified
Mike Cheverda – Developer at Helpified
What’s the next step?
We want to lower the barrier to entry to starting businesses and completing any endeavor by creating a place to build off the experiences of our peers and counterparts
