UI student startup clusterFlunk expanding to 50 major universities

It's not uncommon for athletes to become campus celebrities and clusterFlunk is hoping that high achievers in academic pursuits can achieve the same star status.

AJ Nelson, co-founder of the Iowa City-based education startup, said clusterFlunk will rely on these super users to spread the word as the company plans a nationwide expansion to 50 public universities at the start of the next semester.

“The end goal is for it to perpetuate on it's own,”  Nelson said.

Around 33 percent of the undergraduate students at the University of Iowa have registered for the social studying site. Ten percent return to the site at least once a week.

Around 500 of the top users spend an average of 40 minutes online per session, dedicating their time online to help their fellow students learn. Nelson recalled taking one of these top users out for a drink, and having him recognized from his clusterFlunk profile.

While clusterFlunk's growth in Iowa City has been fueled in large part by grassroots efforts by Nelson and his co-founder, Joe Dallago – including throwing huge parties at the beginning of each semester – the company does not plan to put feet on the ground at each university.

The methods they have used at the UI, including developing a “cult-ish” following online, are more scalable than an in-person presence at each new site, Nelson said.

clusterFlunk had previously tried to expand to Kirkwood Community College, Cornell College and the University of Northern Iowa, before pulling back and reducing their presence in those schools. A mentor told them to perfect their strategy at the UI before expanding.

“If you think about the lean startup, we have hypotheses, then we test those hypotheses, we see the response, then we go onto the next thing,” said clusterFlunk mentor and investor Josh Cramer, founder and CEO of Cramer Dev. Both the product and strategy have advanced since then, Cramer added.

The number of UI students using clusterFlunk this semester convinced the co-founders that these methods are working and the time was right to expand, Nelson said. Fifty universities was a number the team feels comfortable with launching using purely online strategies.

The universities were chosen from public schools with more than 15,000 undergraduate students, and to represent a variety of regions, Nelson said. Users will have to register with an email address ending with .edu and join the network for their university to interact with other users.

clusterFlunk officially launched in January 2013 at the UI. In May, the founders quit school to work on their company full-time. In July, the startup raised a $100,000 seed round from local investors.

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Editor's note:

A version of this story appears at We Create Here.