Sarah Schneider
This past weekend I had the chance to sit down with Jamie Wang, one of the owners of the successful company, NoteWagon (as seen on The National Post, Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, CBS Boston, and BNN), which was featured on Dragons’ Den last week. In a follow up article to Jesse Hunter’s article on NoteWagon last year, I was able to ask Jamie some questions about where the company was at since we last talked.
Sarah Schneider: Tell me about NoteWagon.
Jamie Wang: NoteWagon.com is an online student-to-student peer learning platform. We aim to ‘help students help each other’ by allowing them to work together and share notes online. We incentivize students to do this by allowing them to earn cash for sharing notes from current and past years. NoteWagon is the largest note sharing platform in Canada with over 20,000 users. Our main focus has been the Ontario and Boston markets; however, we are expanding very rapidly across Canada and have recently launched several new American institutions.
SS: How does NoteWagon work?
JW: Students can sign up for free and join their courses and use the promo code ‘noteswaggin’ to get started off with 150 tokens!
Students can upload their notes and classmates can see a short preview. If they like what they see then they will then exchange NoteWagon Tokens to the Note-Uploader in exchange for the document. The Note-Uploader can then use these Tokens to get notes in another course, or else cash out their tokens for real money! We even had a student earn $250 in just a couple weeks last April.
SS: What is your role at NoteWagon?
JW: As President, I manage all daily operations of the business, as well as our finance and marketing. I actually did my final New Venture Project at the Ivey Business School on a note-sharing website, which is how I learned about NoteWagon. I joined forces with these guys and created a new company, Scholarpanda Inc., which owns NoteWagon.com
SS: Tell me about your partners?
JW: Our founding team is made up of recent grads and drop-outs that are all very passionate about the business. We are a diverse team that works very hard to achieve our goals. My three partners are Saif Altimimi, CEO, Karin Bhangui, CTO, and Gabriel Chan, Product Design.
SS: How is your work environment?
JW: It’s been an incredible experience building our own company right out of school. We actually just moved into a hacker house (a house in which the activity is mainly focused on technological work) in downtown Toronto. We live in and work out of the house with our bedrooms upstairs and our office on the main floor. Our house is similar to the living/working environment in the Facebook movie, The Social Network. We work crazy hours and are all very motivated to build a website that can change education forever.
SS: How did your appearance on Dragons’ Den go?
JW: Great! Our episode aired on October 26th but was filmed in May before I joined the company. The Dragon’s had a very positive response to our proposal. We ended up getting all five of the dragons in on the project giving us $250,000 for 32.5%.
SS: How have things been going since Dragons’ Den?
JW: Since then we have continued to grow. We have also built a far superior website in which each university course has its own webpage, similar to a Facebook group. You can “see others in your class”, participate in Question Boards and Live Discussions, and have access to top quality class notes, textbook chapter summaries, and exam study guides. We actually didn’t go ahead with the Dragon’s Deal and we are currently seeking another capital round through some contacts in Silicon Valley.
Check out the video of their appearance on Dragons’ Den…
Check out Notewagon on Facebook.
View Notewagon.com.
