Trustful cooperation in education domain with Admit.me for years

Client

The client came to us with the idea of connecting college applicants with admissions insiders: students, alumni, and experts at their target schools who'd help them get into their dream college. The aim was to provide step-by-step guidance through the admission process. The project gives structure to an otherwise overwhelming process by generating personalized admission programs based on the applicant's background and goals.

Admit.me provides tools and lessons designed to optimize the applicant's admission chances. Customized support and expert guidance frame the applicant's thinking and inform critical decisions related to college admission. The admission timeline guides future applicants through two dozens of steps to be taken, offering helpful tips and expert recommendations along the way.

Industry: Education

Location: USA

Challenge

Our team started cooperating with Admit.me at the concept stage and treated this project as a promising start-up looking for an effective business model.

The customer wanted us to be agile and support the start-up culture. It was expected that we'd allow them to test their product on potential users to make sure that the end result matches the actual college applicants' needs.

The most critical requirement was to ensure an extremely short time-to-market for new features, including dramatic changes in the core functionality.

"Slava and I have had long and fruitful cooperation since 2014. His team has always been a technical partner for us, making the right decisions and providing services just when necessary and protecting us from unnecessary costs. Together we have pivot our startup several times and now are ready to scale."

Eric Allen

Founder of Admit.Me, President in Admit Advantage

"All our work is about trust. We have constant direct communication with the development team as if it were a part of our company.
We always receive from Implex adequate estimates and management of the scope, which allows the startup to achieve optimal results on a limited budget."

Shawn Eliav

Director of Product & Marketing in Admit.Me

Solution

We successfully developed an architecture that survived two pivots and a series of changes over the years of true partnership and is still able to provide sufficient support for new features.

Applicant profile

The education portal offers a sophisticated Applicant Profile with a whole set of personal data: name, education, extracurricular activities, work experience, intended majors, target schools, target cities, and industries, etc. The detailed information is put together using a comprehensive selection of dictionaries to enable analytics. A smart suggestion algorithm is used to recommend friends to applicants to extend their network and boost their chances for admission. Each applicant gets visual feedback about their profile, provided by an expert.

Resources & Schools

The Schools module covers a list of schools and their stats, blogs, follower mechanism, and other data. The Resources module includes a selection of articles and video materials. It is integrated with RSS feeds for article sourcing and Vimeo videos available to users with the premium subscription. The Q&A module enables voting and ranking. All of these modules come with full-text search and filtering functionalities.

Interaction and integration

The Calendar, seamlessly integrated into the webinar platform, helps manage the applicants' schedules and arrange webinars without leaving Admit.me website. To facilitate networking and interaction, the platform offers in-app messaging between users. A complex notification system with 120+ templates was developed to reach out to users and inform them about the events of interest to make sure the applicants stay on top of things.

To support this comprehensive list of functionalities, we integrated a range of systems into the platform:

HubSpot, Mailchimp, GetResponse
Vimeo
RSS feeds
GoToWebinar
PayPal
Paperform
Excel syncing for dictionaries with thousands of entries

A variety of interaction and integration solutions ensure that future applicants stay fully updated and connected throughout the admission process

The tools and technologies we used were:

Results

Thanks to well-thought-out technological decisions and our team's solid experience in Agile development, the customer was able to run the MVP in the production environment in just three months.

Having spent years searching for the best business model, we managed to implement and decommission a number of functionalities built on top of the original architecture and run two pivots.

As a result, the customer found a suitable business model, closed a deal with several well-known universities (UCLA, Wharton, Duke, Emory, UNC, and others) and, generating a steady profit, is ready for the next round of investment to scale the existing model.

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