At PageOne Startup desk, we are glad to feature Unigram.co. Unigram.co is a university and lecturer rating platform. The platform allows users to signup anonymously and rate and comment on their university and lecturers.
It is not out of place for you to still remember your good lecturers who have impacted you with timeless knowledge and you want to share the story with the whole world. Unigram goes a step further by allowing you to objectively rate any lecturer(s) you have encountered in a way that promotes them and benefit prospective students/parents choose the best schools.
Also, Unigram.co users are allowed to add lecturers that are not found on the platform, thereby making the platform useful and a scientific tool for universities and higher education administrators, ministries and the general public to get insights into what students wants in lecturers.
In an email note to PageOne.ng’s Startup Desk, Akin Asalu, Founder, Unigram said, They got the hunch to start Unigram.co when Dami Osiyale, his Co-Founder “came back from Canada after finishing his first B.Sc and decided to pursue another one but there was no platform to which university could suit him as person. No place to find crowdsourced information about any particular university”.
“I also had a problem with lecturers while in university, not knowing how to interact with lecturers to get good grades. So a platform where students could let prospective students know about the school and lecturers was what we thought about, then we decided to embark on building the platform” he said
Akin said the Unigram has two target groups. First is the rating and review users who is targeting “present and past students of universities across Nigeria”. The second group are prospective students as well as their parents who are “checking out the data and ratings” to see where the best lecturers are.
Unigram will not be charging anyone to use the platform. It will be interesting to see how they intend to make it self-sufficient. However, there is a probability that lecturers with high ratings and universities who want to get hired by the best schools might use the platform to market themselves. This might be a model that Unigram might look at.
As to how they want to market the platform, Akin said “We intend to use social media as a strong tool for marketing. We also intend to get users school-by-school which involves targetting users offline using influencers in the universities”.
At the moment, Unigram is self-funded and no venture capital supports. They will like to get Unigram “launched in all African countries after a certain time”.
As a three to five year plan, Akin said “Our goal by 2020 is to be available in every African Country having long lasting data which could be essential in university ratings. We want to be source of data mining for African universities as well as prospective students. We have also noticed a huge amount of corruption in most Nigerian universities, with our platform allowing users to be anonymous we can stop or reduce the amount of corruption in universities”.
Meet The Founders of Unigram.co
Dami Osiyale studied Software Engineering at the University of Regina, Canada. He had also worked on an appointment booking startup called BookedPlus while in Canada.
Akin Asalu studied Computer Science Babcock University, Nigeria. He has have worked with a youth oriented magazine called The Scene Magazine. He was in charge of Marketing and online content as well as being the Sports editor for the publication.
Dayo Onifade is currently a student of Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta studying Animal Science. He is currently part of the Google Developers at his university as well as other programming groups.
