Niche Media Pioneers

At the age of 9, a dire health diagnosis drove Cary Silverman into the lawn care business to keep physically active; after entering college, a flare-up of his digestive disease inspired him to develop an Internet business re-launched this past week.

Silverman, a senior business management major at the University of Missouri, revamped GradeGenie.com, which already has over 5,000 users from 53 universities. The Web site seeks to serve as a repository for student notes, allowing students to freely upload class notes and download notes from others.

Old homework, papers, study guides and notes can be uploaded and downloaded for free – but there are limits to what the site features.

“No tests; no quizzes,” Silverman said. And no copyrighted material – which means professors, whose work is technically owned by the universities they work for, can look at what’s there but can’t upload any of their own course materials.

The idea for the Web site came about when Silverman transferred into the university as a freshman, causing a flare up to his condition, known as Crohn’s disease.

“In simple terms, the last nine inches of my small intestine is a scab, or it’s inflamed, so anytime that I digest food it irritates that swollen area,” Silverman said, describing the condition.

Stress can irritate the disease, and the move to Columbia put Silverman out of commission for a week. Silverman had few classroom acquaintances from whom to crib notes and had difficulty finding classmates online.

“I was kind of lost,” he said. “So then I thought OK, great idea. It’s a good opportunity to fill a need.”

Thus GradeGenie.com – version 1.0 – was born. The young entrepreneur put together a business model, found some student programmers and got the site ready for launch by November 2006.

The launch was an event, but not exactly of the kind Silverman was hoping for.

Between 4:30 and 7:30 a.m. of the launch date, enthusiastic workers wallpapered the campus with about 15,000 flyers. Later that day, en route to St. Louis to catch a flight for a medical treatment, Silverman’s phone rang.

One the other end of the line were university officials and police, and it wasn’t a friendly call.

“You’ve violated everything, every law that we’ve ever come up with for solicitation,” Silverman recalled the officials saying. “It was everything we didn’t want.”

One botched launch and an academic probation later, Silverman went back to the drawing board to fix both the site and his bruised relationship with the university.

He let the Web site limp along for a brief time before taking it down in early 2007 to partner with two other Kansas City professionals with Internet and marketing experience.

The trio, who self-funded the venture for the first round of funding before reaching out to private investors for the second round, oversaw a site redesign focusing on functionality and the user interface.

Silverman took the downtime to repair his burned bridges with the university while consulting with law firms to ensure the site stayed within the guidelines of academic integrity policies.

Officials have so far given the revamped GradeGenie.com a better reception than it’s prior iteration, Silverman said.

“We haven’t had anyone complain,” he said.

The site will eventually be supported by advertising, Silverman said.

GradeGenie isn’t Silverman’s first business venture. The Kansas City native got in the lawn mowing business as a boy following a misdiagnosis that predicted a grave future.

“Prior to being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, I was told that by age 21 I wouldn’t be able to walk,” he said. “I come from a very determined family, and so I was determined to make sure that didn’t happen.”

Already active in sports, Silverman got the idea for The Lawnboy Lawn Service while looking for a way to fill his free time. His parents put up the money for his first lawnmower, a Montgomery Ward push mower. The company had five customers the first year.

Now, he and two contract laborers service 1,700 yards per year, 250 of those on a weekly basis.

Silverman runs the venture, along with GradeGenie, via laptop from a rented office off Business Loop 70.

With the re-launch of his newest service, Silverman has been careful to reach out to university officials and show them the product. He stressed the site was not meant as a crutch for lazy students.

“It’s not supposed to be a substitute,” he said. “There’s no way that you can obtain the same experience by not going to class. The experience you gain while being in class-nothing can replace that experience.”

But GradeGenie might be the next best thing, he added.

Barbara Hammer, Interim Director for Disability Services for the University of Missouri-Columbia, has signed on and looked at the site.

“I think it’s a good site in the sense that it’s something that could be useful to students,” Hammer said. “I think the thing about GradeGenie is, like some many other Web-based programs like this, it’s a tool, and I do think some students will find it helpful.”

Hammer was careful to point out that the university wasn’t in any way sanctioning, supporting or endorsing the site. She was also quick to point out the site will only be as good as its content.

“It all depends on who’s uploading notes, and how good the notes are and how effectively they’re used,” she said.

Silverman plans to make sure there are plenty of notes to choose from.  A little over 1,100 University of Missouri-Columbia students were registered at GradeGenie as of mid-August, but Silverman said he hopes to get 80 percent of Missouri’s roughly 22,000 undergraduates on the site by the end of the upcoming semester.

Part of that boost will come from an intense marketing campaign.

The site officially launches on Aug. 20 and will be featured on the Cool Site of the Day Web site on Aug. 25.  Five-thousand GradeGenie promotional flyers are headed to off-campus living communities as part of the campaign, and notices are also being sent to 4,200 dorm rooms.

Silverman said the company hopes to grow the site through word of mouth and on-campus presentations. From Aug. 25 to Sept. 30 campus representatives will be getting the word out about GradeGenie, talking to people, professors, handing out cards and T-shirts at events.

“We are going to teach other people, and they’re going to teach other people, and they’re going to teach other people, and it will spread like wildfire,” he predicted.