Ann Johansson for The New York TimesJonathan Yan (left) and Zak Kukoff: improving grades and reducing crime.
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The adventure of new ventures.
Founded in January, TruantToday is a messaging service that alerts parents instantly via text and e-mail message when students cut class. The goal? Reducing truancy and restoring state and federal financing to school districts, which can lose as much as $50 each day that a student is missing.
Employees: Three full-time employees and hiring two more: a sales representative and a designer.
Location: Westlake Village, Calif.
Founders: Zak Kukoff, 16, and Jonathan Yan, 18, classmates, started TruantToday after Mr. Kukoff skipped a 7 a.m. honors geometry class at Westlake High School. Administrators took two days to call his parents and notify them of his absence.
“An actual person from the school called and said, ‘Your son was absent two days ago and, you know, get on that,’” said Mr. Kukoff, the company’s chief executive. By then, of course, it was far too late to get him back into class. On top of that, the school was expending limited staff resources to make calls that he felt could easily be automated.
“Being the entrepreneurial sort that I am,” he said, “I immediately thought there was a huge opportunity to make a much more efficient — and much more cost effective — system for the school.”
For the record, Mr. Kukoff adds that he was not actually playing hooky. “I wasn’t skipping to go to the mall,” he said. “I was helping the student government set up for a dance.”
Pitch: “Right now, schools are losing millions of dollars per year because students don’t come to the classroom,” Mr. Kukoff said, adding that public schools in San Diego County alone lost at least $102 million in financing during the 2009-10 term because of absences. “Because we send messages out instantly, and because they go out to parents in a medium they’re already interacting in, parents can then work with the school to bring the student back to the classroom in many cases that same day, which not only saves schools millions of dollars but improves grades, lowers dropout rates and actually lowers crime rates as well.”
Traction: So far, TruantToday has signed up three paying customers in the Conejo Valley region of Southern California: Mr. Kukoff’s own Westlake High School, along with Thousand Oaks High School and Newbury Park High School. The company is running free trials at 10 more schools in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. It is also in talks with district-level education officials in Sacramento and Seattle, Mr. Kukoff said.
Revenue: TruantToday took in revenue for the first time last month (its customers prepay for a year’s worth of service). The company charges on a sliding scale — from $10 to $1 per student, annually — with lower rates going to clients with the most students. Mr. Kukoff declined to disclose current revenue or projections for this year.
Financing: The company is currently nearing completion of a $500,000 round of angel investment, with investors including Dave McClure of 500 Startups.
Marketing: TruantToday has been building buzz with a few early, high-profile coups. Last week, it won $15,000 in funding and took second place in the Innovation Challenge at NBC’s Education Nation Summit meeting. In June, it was voted the most promising of five start-ups selected to participate in CGI America, a Clinton Global Initiative event dedicated to creating jobs and improving economic growth in the United States. In August, the company completed a 13-week program in Boulder, Colo., with TechStars, a start-up accelerator that provides participants with seed financing and mentoring.
Mr. Kukoff said he was pitching TruantToday to media outlets that cater to educators and developing strategies that would give districts incentives to promote the service. He also blogs for The Huffington Post.
Competition: TruantToday’s primary competitor is SchoolMessenger, a service of Reliance Communications, which was founded in 1999 and is based in Santa Cruz, Calif. SchoolMessenger offers a notification system that disseminates information about emergencies, attendance and schoolwide events using voice mail, text messages, e-mail and social media. Earlier this year, New York’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, teamed up with SchoolMessenger as part of WakeUp! NYC, an initiative that sent chronically absent students recorded wake-up calls from Magic Johnson and other celebrities.
Other rivals include Edulink Systems, based in Orange, Calif., and ParentLink, a service of Parlant Technology, which has its headquarters in Provo, Utah.
Mr. Kukoff believes his system is more user-friendly than most other software now available to educators. He also said that TruantToday’s system lets educators address individual absences more rapidly than his competitors’ broad-based messaging services. “We’re pitching a very specific return on investment for schools,” he said. He added that his service was the only one that allows two-way text messaging, which lets parents reply to the schools with their phones rather than connecting to the Internet.
Challenge: Getting the word out and hiring the right team members. “We’re looking for people who are not only going into business just to make profit, but to have a social impact as well,” Mr. Kukoff said. “It’s important to us to have a company that’s founded on an ethos of helping people.”
Now it’s your turn to weigh in. Can this pair of teenage social entrepreneurs go head-to-head with rivals that have been around for more than a decade?
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