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Comment by hparra | Hacker News Reader

If your system is registering a C average for a student in Calculus perhaps your system can recommend a tutor. This is where referrals and sponsorships come in ($). Or perhaps someone in that same class. There's a social networking aspects right there. There's tons of interesting things you could do!

I'm curious if anyone else thinks that charging for this may not be the best approach. Anyone?

(Wait, you're in the bible belt of SoCal? Is that South OC?)

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College students may be the only demographic to consume more ramen noodles than bootstrapping start-up founders (willing to be proven wrong!).

They'll expect this to be free and most likely won't pay unless they see incredible added value. I really like the tutoring angle though - targeted tutoring referrals seems like a great way to monetize something like this.

That's a pretty good idea, but I need a good user base before I can experiment with that, I think.

Traditional freemium may indeed not work for this. I've seen examples of freemium working for b2b services but charging customers, especially students, may really not work out. This is one of the things I've wanted to find out for a while now.

It's near the OC but worse: The Inland Empire.

We don't want any 909ers 'round here brah. :)

On another note: there is a ton of opportunity in web companies with a background in applied mathematics with all the data mining and social graphing and business statistics. Don't sell your degree short in this field. Do a little research into the major electives available to you and how they may apply to your own work.

You at UCR?

I'm aware of my degree's utility. In fact, my next idea may require a lot more math (graph theory, particularly, which is the case for most social stuff today). However, I like learning being for the sake of learning and don't mind pursuing a degree that I may not want to turn into a career - but if business doesn't work out, I can always go into academia or industry.

I'm not at UCR. I'll be moving to Berkeley next Fall.

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