timebite
Study better together with timebite
Outline
Brief
timebite is a crowd-based learning platform where students share their learning tips for exams and reflect on their learning behavior through individual statistics.
Work
The student platform was our first project and is still a cornerstone of our company today. From development to marketing and sales, we have grown with timebite and timebite with us.
Outcome
More than 40,000 users from over 70 universities in the DACH region have recorded 700,000 hours of studying with timebite.
Challenges
Need
Every new product aims to fulfill a previously unmet need. In this case, though, the demand has been rather evident for our founders. It concerned them personally: When our four founders were just ordinary students, they got tired of desperately searching for study tips for their exams.
The best ideas often come when the current solutions are frustrating. In the kitchen of our founder’s shared flat, they materialized the idea of a platform that reduces the time spent searching for how to learn for the next exams. After all, the information was already there but spread across hundreds of Facebook groups, forums, and websites.
Combined with answering the question “How long should I learn?” the basic concept of timebite was born.
Development
After our founders had the idea for timebite, they were already faced with their first big challenge. How do you build such an ambitious platform? Except for Paul, a computer science student, none of the three mechanical engineering students had much experience in programming, and their ongoing studies took up most of their time anyway. Nevertheless, the idea was so compelling that our founders taught themselves all the necessary skills and put most of their energy into timebite. It was an irony of fate that three of the four founders eventually dropped out of their studies for the student platform.
Usability
However, a good idea alone is not enough to make a platform successful. From the very beginning, before we even launched our first project, it was apparent that a brilliant concept ultimately has to be usable. Therefore, a comprehensible user interface with minimal input hurdles and a pleasant user experience from the registration to the submission of learning tips were a top priority.
Privacy
As a crowd-based platform, timebite lives off the trust of its users, and we ourselves are privacy enthusiasts who highly value data protection. This is why we are adamant about keeping our user’s private data private and never sharing them with anyone. We also wanted to refute the old saying, “if you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” But how could we keep timebite afloat economically?
Monetization
With all the features we planned for timebite, the platform had to have a steady source of income. As we stated before, charging a fee, selling data, or putting advertising tracking on timebite was never a possibility, so we had to find another way to monetize the platform. Luckily our platform boasts an exciting target group that employers fight over in the war of talents: university students and graduates.
timebite's goals
- Easy access to tips for students
- Crowd-based, scalable information
- Added value through learning statistics & self-tracking
- Focus on data protection
- Free of charge for students
Flow
Crowd-based Content
timebite is a constantly evolving student platform that offers students from all German-speaking universities and colleges the opportunity to find and share learning tips for their courses. The most crucial feature of timebite is that all learning tips and the statistics for the individual classes are entirely user-generated. Likewise, the courses and even the universities are created by the users themselves, meaning that there are no limits to timebite’s growth. Thus, just one student of a particular course of study is enough to provide the impetus for many other users. Since all the content (except the timebite-Lounge content, which we write ourselves) comes from the students themselves, it is directly tied to the students’ learning reality. So real people help real people who are in the exact same study situation. Old learning tips also don’t disappear into long orphaned Facebook groups from years past, so students can also refer back to recommendations from previous semesters, while new tips are constantly added by new students to keep the learning guides up to date. Of course, the platform lives from the active cooperation of the students, which is why free access and a low-threshold participation option are always the focus.
For Students
timebite was developed by students and is entirely focused on the needs of students. Therefore, timebite’s solutions are precisely what our founders and many of their fellow students were missing in their studies. At the heart of timebite are the user-generated courses, which, once created, are continuously updated with new tips. The tips include advice on how, with what, and how long to study, as well as mentioning the learning materials used with the possibility of linking to them and recommending the respective course to others. The data entered is used to generate statistics that offer students added value by allowing them to track their own learning progress and compare it with the average. These statistics are generated automatically and show users how many hours of learning on average should be expected for the respective course.
We constantly add new features to timebite to continuously adapt the platform to students’ needs. The timebite-Lounge provides informative and interesting articles on student life. These cover various topics ranging from helping with administrative issues to combating procrastination, a problem most students know all too well. Again, the premise is that students don’t have to search half the internet until they find answers, but instead find a source for the most critical questions about everyday student life directly on timebite. Of course, timebite thrives on participation, so we always create incentives to share learning experiences and exam tips. This includes many marketing measures and competitions, but also our direct presence at first semester events and university events.
For Business
timebite has the great advantage of being a platform for those young people who are probably most in-demand in the “war for talents”: very well-educated students. Therefore, we have decided to give high-quality employers the opportunity to present themselves on the platform in a highly visible way yet unobtrusive for users. timebite allows companies to create an employer branding profile directly on the platform, which they can customize with information about the company, current events, insights into everyday life at the company, links to job openings, along with photos and videos. Here, too, we pay attention to an excellent user experience by allowing our clients to design their profiles themselves according to their preferences using a drag & drop editor that is a breeze to use.
These employer branding profiles are displayed directly in the profiles of the users matching the companies without affecting the usability for the students. Which company profiles are shown to a specific user is based on the company’s industry and the student’s courses. This means that students in mechanical engineering will mainly see technical employers, while law students will, for example, be suggested law firms. This also creates added value for our users, who can thus obtain information for internship positions or potential employers previously unknown to them. Our users are consequently not a product but equal partners in a mutually beneficial system.
Finally, with the Resources section on our business customer page, we have created a constantly updated collection of information on employer branding at higher education institutions. In it, we show our customers and other employers interested in employer branding possibilities how they can also highlight their employer brand to Millennials and Generation Z inside and outside of timebite. This section also includes our studies and webinars on the topic, in which we shed light on the current state of affairs in employer branding and ask the target group directly what is really important to them.
Tech Stack
Connecting the dots
Our extensive research has revealed that students usually ask two to three friends how they prepared for a particular lecture. These questions are almost always: "How long did you study?", "What study materials did you use?", "Do you have any special tips for me?" timebite is the representation of these conversations with a hundred times more people, no matter where they currently are. The low-threshold participation option and the scalable expandability of the platform enable almost limitless growth, for which a single user can already be the impetus. Unobtrusive employer branding offers both our users and clients positive aspects and keeps the platform free of charge for students.
Advice from real people
On timebite, students find what they are searching for directly from their peers.
Unlimited scalability
timebite’s potential is limitless. Its scalable architecture allows the endless creation of new universities, courses, and learning tips.
Secure Data
While timebite receives a lot of data, we are adamant about keeping it private and safe. Our users’ data will never be shared.
Free of charge
Employer branding adds tangible value for students and keeps the platform free.
Achievements
700k+
tracked hours
50k+
users
70+
universities
timebite is a great way to support students in their learning. In addition, it is an excellent opportunity for us as a company to establish the first contact between students and UNIQA. That is why we are very happy about the opportunity that timebite offers us here.
Florian Graßmück MSc, MA - UNIQA Employer Branding Expert
With timebite, we can reach numerous students from universities and technical colleges in German-speaking countries. With our presence on timebite's digital exhibition stand, we can inform about our projects and get a steadily increasing level of awareness among the technical and business graduates of tomorrow.
DI Dr. Martin Bergaus MBA MSc - Managing Partner consourcive
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New Knowledge
The start of everything
Before timebite, we weren’t programmers, we weren’t entrepreneurs, and we certainly weren’t on course to start a coding agency. Everything we achieved started with timebite.
Good work leads to more work
timebite’s success didn’t go unnoticed. The TU Vienna discovered the platform and contacted us to create a product with them: the ECTS evaluation app Quinn.
Students at heart
While most of our founders didn’t finish their studies precisely because of timebite, they stayed students at heart. Our focus on EdTech, our purposely young team, and the modern working methods stand for this connection.
Let's chat!
You have a great idea. We have the means to make it real. Let’s talk about it: no pitch, no nonsense, no strings attached.