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What and where should I study? This platform will help you choose

After a week, Marvin Zornig (31) had enough.

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What and where should I study? This platform will help you choose

After a week, Marvin Zornig (31) had enough. When the Berliner unlocked his apartment after work in the summer of 2021, he found his girlfriend at the computer, deep in research for the right university for a master's degree in psychology. Nightly.

It went on like this for days, says Zornig in an interview with “Gründerszene”. "At some point I googled it myself and found out: In Germany there are 22,000 courses at 422 universities in 900 locations."

Questions would have arisen: How should prospective students find their way in view of this mass of offers? And: At the end of her research, how can his girlfriend be sure that she made the right choice?

After all, she could only rely on mere tables, curricula and external evaluations. And if the choice of the right place to study doesn't depend on many other factors, Zornig asks: "Do I like the city? Would I like to live there, maybe start a family later? The decision will have consequences for the next two, four, eight years, maybe even for life,” says the marketing graduate from the University of St. Gallen (HSG).

Marvin Zornig quickly came up with the idea of ​​using an online platform to relieve prospective students of most of the research work. Anue ("A new Life") is the name of his project, a search engine for places and places to study.

It works like this: On the homepage, users enter the subject they want to study (geography for a bachelor’s degree, for example), when they want to start (summer or winter semester?) and whether they want to study part-time or full-time.

Anue then asks about soft factors: how big should the city be (“rural idyll or big city madness?”), are nearby bodies of water, mountains or forest areas important, are extensive shopping opportunities desired?

Last but not least, users enter their monthly income and the available rental budget. An algorithm then suggests universities that best match your interests.

Anue founder Zornig explains that more than 800,000 different data points are taken into account when making the selection. The 31-year-old created the database on which the algorithm is based himself after weeks of hard work, also with the help of so-called crawlers, which read out public data on the Internet, for example about universities and cities.

This gave users a detailed picture of their dream university. "This also distinguishes our platform from other offers of help, such as Studycheck, for example, or the well-known study guide of the time," says Zornig.

In any case, he was satisfied with the response. Launched in June 2022, more than 6,000 users have registered on the platform so far. Trend: meanwhile strongly increasing.

"In the beginning we still had the problem that many visitors didn't fill out the questionnaire because they had to register first, which was a deterrent," says Zornig. He then adjusted the process. Now registration with Anue is only necessary if users want to see their results afterwards.

Zornig adds: "This has led to every fifth visitor also registering with us."

However, Zornig cannot easily solve another problem: the search for universities is a seasonal business. 90 percent of the search queries would come from the winter semester.

"So we generate most of the traffic in the summer months, when high school graduates are looking for a place at university," says Zornig. Not good prerequisites for a start-up.

The founder therefore follows a multi-part business model: In addition to premium profiles in the search results, he offers universities so-called leads, i.e. contacts with interested freshmen.

Universities could then address them more specifically with advertising, which in turn would reduce the dropout rate in the courses in the long term, Zornig believes. Universities pay a monthly fee for this. This in turn guarantees his company reliable income.

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