🎒 Introduction
Hi Stefan, thank you very much for your time. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your product? Hi, my name is Stefan and I am the CTO and co-founder of iamstudent.com. Our platform connects businesses, universities, and students in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. We gather student discounts and benefits from our partners and provide a way for students to enjoy their student years with ease.
How many discounts does your platform offer? How many students have signed up? At the moment we offer around 250 different discounts on iamstudent. Ranging from your local 🍔 burger restaurant to global brands like 📱 Samsung. Those discounts can be used by our ~360.000 verified students.
What is your vision? Do you offer only discounts or strive to become a closer companion to your students? Our claim is “For a student life without limits.” We believe that supporting students during their education is beneficial not only for students and their families but also for businesses and society as a whole. 👨🏫
In addition to our discounts, we offer students a way to review and rate their universities and therefore provide important insights for future students. 🏫 Universities, on the other hand, are able to introduce themselves to our target group. Furthermore, we offer a way to publish 💼 jobs for students on our platform, and in the future, there will be more services available for our users.
💡 Innovation and entrepreneurship
What is your product's unique value proposition that sets it apart from its competitors? In which fields are you innovating? Our motto is "Delivering Happiness" (RIP Tony Hsieh) - and that's how we act towards our customers and our users. We know that we have the best customer service in our field and that is something we are really proud of. We also try to use state-of-the-art technology (like Machine Learning) and infrastructure (like Kubernetes).
If you could start again with your product, what would you do differently from today’s perspective? Product-wise I would try to find other products (SaaS tools) that solve my problems without building solutions on my own. There are so many great products out there solving almost every problem. Combined with no-code tools like Zapier and others, these are really powerful. We’ve been using them for years now, but we should have started way earlier with that.
Any future projects or plans? Recently, we launched iamstudent in ⛰️ Switzerland. We’ll see which country is next! Furthermore, we always try to rebuild parts of our product to make it better and use the latest technology. For instance, we are in the middle of rebuilding our frontend with React. Some parts are already rebuilt and the rest will follow soon. Of course, there will also be more services soon. Stay tuned!
Do you think the drive for entrepreneurship is something people are either born with or not, or is it something that can be taught? I think the passion for being an entrepreneur is something you have to be born with, but the skills you need to be successful are definitely something you need to teach yourself on the way to success.
Nevertheless, I would love to see more fields regarding entrepreneurship in schools. It’s important to educate and support children to become successful founders in the future.
What do you think – how will your industry look in about 10 years from now? In my opinion, a lot of universities and educational institutions need to digitize their administration in the near future. Established universities will struggle to get enough students because there are going to be more and more private universities. All this will lead to trying to provide students with benefits at their university to bind them (like corporate benefits). That's where we come into play.
Would you like to highlight some services or products you really like to use on your own? Of course, Localazy. It is one of the best-built products we are using.
Happy to hear that! Why did you choose Localazy? Good fair pricing, very nice interface, and CLI, it just works! The simplicity which Localazy provides with their CLI is just awesome, especially for developers!
Localazy hasn't stopped development since I joined. You can see progress every time you come back and log in. That is something really important and I haven’t seen that often with other tools.
Thank you! Is there anything else you would like to recommend? These are some of the services that we also love and use:
- Firebase: We use Firebase for push notifications, logs, and analytics in our mobile app.
- Gumlet: Gumlet is a tool to scale your images just the size you need them. It is super easy to use and makes a huge difference regarding site loading performance.
- Bannerbear: Bannerbear is a great tool to automate the creation of e.g. social images. We integrated this in our Zapier Zaps to create Instagram posts. But you can do way more than this.
- App Radar: App Radar is used to monitor our apps in the App and Play Store. Easy to use and has a good UI.
✔️ Conclusion
Thank you very much, Stefan! Is there something you would like to say? ➡️ To all students out there: have a look at our website or app (iOS and Android) and start saving money today!
Very well! And for all students considering using Localazy for their hobby projects, get in touch, we will be happy to help you!
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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://localazy.com/blog/interview-iamstudent-helping-students-save-in-a-global-world