Dutch Student Entrepreneurs Building a Large Scale EdTech Marketplace: StuDocu CEO Marnix Broer (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you build the platform yourself?

Marnix Broer: Yes. I started with Jacques. He was my roommate in the student house. Soon we needed someone to build the website. That’s when I knocked on the door of my old friend from high school who was also studying in Delft.

Later on, we saw that he was great at that. He also had a friend helping him out. They joined us. That’s how we bootstrapped the first website. As soon as we had the first documents up, it went like wildfire. Everybody started using it in just a couple of weeks. Then we got requests from students in other cities. They gave their documents. We put them online.

Sramana Mitra: Everything is free at this point?

Marnix Broer: Yes. We were completely free for the first four years. In the Netherlands, you can borrow money from the government to study. The tuition is around €1,800 a year. You can also borrow more to provide yourself a living. If you would borrow that money and not spend everything, you would have some spare money to use to pay to build things and pay for servers.

Only after four years when we graduated did we charge. We had to pay back our loans and had to think of a career. How can you pay for housing and food? If we were to continue, we had to put in a business model. With the business model, the company can survive and so can we.

Sramana Mitra: You’re in this period where you were borrowing money from the government and funding your student life while also building this company. What kind of usage numbers did you have? How many content producers did you have? How many were consuming content?

Marnix Broer: Especially in the exam season, that was the peak. When you had to study, you can log in into the Google Analytics app which wasn’t so sophisticated back then. We used to send screenshots every hour. As soon as an hour is over, you can get new data. At some point, it was 350 visitors per hour. When we decided to continue, we were probably at around 90,000 students a month.

Sramana Mitra: All in the Netherlands?

Marnix Broer: Yes. We were quite far in terms of covering the audience of the Netherlands. There are around 450,000 students studying in the Netherlands. We almost had half of them on the platform.

Sramana Mitra: These are university students?

Marnix Broer: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Was it in Dutch?

Marnix Broer: The website was in Dutch. It was also the Dutch brand. In the Netherlands, it became a verb. It means studying fast in English. That brand name is so strong here. We didn’t change it. It also had a nostalgic feeling to it. The website was in Dutch though you study almost everything in English. Only rarely you would have an exam in Dutch. Expats could also use the platform. They have to navigate in Dutch, but the website was so clear.

Sramana Mitra: What was being uploaded was English content?

Marnix Broer: The majority was in English.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Dutch Student Entrepreneurs Building a Large Scale EdTech Marketplace: StuDocu CEO Marnix Broer
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