The Seoul Student Company
Educational resources, events, and communities are scattered across millions of sites. We catalogue all this information into a thoughtfully crafted web index to make learning frictionless.
Building the OS for students
The student extracurricular ecosystem lacks the most basic web infrastructure. That’s why event calendars are being run on Sheets or Facebook, student clubs are building expensive sites on Wix, and school districts face unequal, sporadic access to opportunities due to outdated bulletin boards and legacy LMS software.
The goal is to make extracurriculars like competitions, clubs, internships, scholarships, more searchable; to create a search engine for education. LMS tools and extracurricular sites are often built on clunky software, fragmented across numerous platforms, and reliant on varying technologies and registration formats. This decentralized infrastructure introduces needless user friction, siloes knowledge and makes it dependent on arbitrary metrics like recency, SEO, and how affluent your school district is. Rather, searching for extracurriculars should be as simple as "I'm interested in science. What are some local science fairs I can participate in?", instead of manually browsing.
Someone once called us the "Luma of extracurriculars". We'll take it. All students and schools should be able to freely access a 'single source of truth' repository of opportunities. So, just as Mosaic and Yahoo indexed the first few hundred sites of the World Wide Web, it is by completely redesigning the infrastructure built around education that we can increase the searchability, accessibility, and awareness of these opportunities. After all, how exactly are students supposed to excel, when they don’t even know what they could excel in?
Think of us as a group of kids with Post Kumon Stress Disorder, hacking away at silly projects as a way to give back to the communities we love, but importantly, to orchestrate a violent overthrow of hagwons, Korean cram schools, and expose students to educational alternatives, because students genuinely learn more from hackathons, debate clubs, and science fairs than they do from endless KSAT mock exams.
Who are we?
We were the first Korean team to receive the Medici Grant from Danielle Strachman, GP of the 1517 Fund, co-founder of the Thiel Fellowship, and early backer of Ethereum, Figma, Loom, and others.
Our previous projects placed 8th in Y Combinator’s SUS Pitch Competition, were nominated for Site of the Year by Framer, won a global case competition hosted by UC Berkeley, were featured on the front page of read.cv, and reached #1 trending on the leaderboard of Korea's Product Hunt.
If you’re a student based in Seoul (or not) with even a passing interest in building meaningful tools for students, get in touch.
Seoul Student Company is run by Joonseo Chang. Illustrations by the great noona Hannah Lee 🌼.