Stukent, Inc. exceeds its seed capital funding goal – raises over a quarter million
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho, Jan. 16, 2014.
Where better to learn internet marketing than online? What if you could learn how to do internet marketing online, while still enjoying face-to-face interaction with a teacher and peers? That is the premise behind the Idaho-based educational technology start-up venture, Stukent. The company’s CEO and founder, Stuart Draper, announced today that seed money from the Idaho Expansion Group and other investors has pushed funding for Stukent past its quarter million goal, to $275,000.
Draper said, “I’m happy to have the money secured, but I am elated to be able to fully focus my time and attention on connecting with university professors across the country. Our mission is to help them help their students help the world”
Stukent.com grew from Draper’s own experience as an undergraduate business major. His professor at BYU-Idaho had but one internet marketing course to offer, and the study materials were patched together from links to blogs and other websites. Years later, and after starting and running his own digital marketing agency, GetFoundFirst.com, his professor asked him to come back and teach internet marketing at the university. The curriculum hadn’t changed much. That experience later blossomed into talks between Stuart Draper and the marketing professor, Kent Lundin, about how to create a world-class internet marketing course for college students – and Stukent was born.
Says Draper, “The internet can be used for good or evil; it is a tool for reaching people. We want to give professors the tools they need to help students use the internet for good.”
The methodology of Stukent is to develop and provide cloud-based internet marketing courseware to give college professors the tools they need to teach internet marketing in a traditional classroom setting. The courseware includes:
- A digital, internet marketing textbook
- An internet marketing simulation
- An online lecture series taught by experts in fundmental internet marketing disciplines
Stukent’s funding will allow the company to gather the right team to help grow the company and get the word out to marketing professors about the Stukent solution for helping them teach internet marketing more effectively in a rapidly changing world.
Corey Smith, a founding member of the Idaho Expansion Group, primary investors in Stukent, said:
“We are pleased to have invested in the team, the tech, and the scalability of a business we feel has potential to change the way universities approach internet marketing education. We love helping Idaho’s entrepreneurs, and Stukent’s BYU-Idaho roots are a perfect match for us.”
Talking about his reasons for leaving a secure and well-paid corporate job to concentrate on launching Stukent, Draper said:
“The internet marketing industry evolves very quickly. Academia, up to this point, has not been able to keep up. I want to change that. By keeping the text in a digital format, we can quickly edit the content to be sure it stays current and relevant. Our students need and deserve much better internet marketing materials than are currently available to them.”
By combining an up-to-date digital textbook authored by Stuart Draper and Jeff Larson, a BYU Professor with a Ph.D. from Wharton, with simulated internet marketing projects, then bringing in topical experts to deliver online lectures, Stukent aims to help universities throughout the United States graduate students prepared to take the foundations of traditional marketing wisdom and apply them in a way that will help them excel in the realities of today’s super-competitive online world.
