Udrafter

Idea

Introduction

As students we struggled to gain experience relevant to the topics’ we spent so long studying. Not everyone has well connected parents and growing student debt can make social mobility unattainable.

Equally, growing companies can face resource constraints, competition-for-talent and cumbersome recruitment processes.

What if students and graduates could put their learnings and ambition into meaningful work, while earning extra income?

What if a business could distribute parts of it’s workload and succession plan with emerging professionals at the same time?

Udrafter (The University Draft) is a student workforce platform where businesses get on demand access to student talent and students get paid for completing degree-relevant projects.

Udrafter enables businesses to source emerging industry professionals before the competition while giving back to the next generation of talent.

Students build their experience profile, professional network and increase their graduate job opportunities.

Intended impact

Our platform promotes social mobility and equal opportunity for all students, graduates, and businesses.

Types of projects include market research, photography, content creation, engineering support and more, from as little as 2 hours per project.

We take care of our customers, that’s why Udrafter provides payroll, student insurance and checks.

Our aim is to be the biggest student workforce platform in the world, bridging the transitional skills gap between higher education and industry, with the power of platform technology.

Currently the average hourly rate on Udrafter is £12 per hour and students have earned a total of £37,203 so far, just in Aberdeen within the last 9 months.

We have observed the positive difference Udrafter is making to society. We must bring the platform to more people across the UK and beyond.

Join us in helping hundreds of businesses draft skilled students into meaningful work.

Substantial accomplishments to date

We have utilised Aberdeen as our test bed market and are now set to build upon the achievements below as we scale the platform to the rest of the UK:

· Elevator UK Accelerator in 2017: 3 month intensive programme to stress test new start up companies.

· Virgin Startup £25,0000: Business loan used to build a functional prototype.

· Secured Scottish Enterprise Grants worth £64,800.

· Won £10,000 at the Scottish Young EDGE pitching competition in June 2018.

· Won the Elevator Conference Pitching competition in November 2018 (£1,000).

· Winner of The Audience choice award at the Robert Gordon University Showcase (£10,000): 300 people voted for the best start up company from 16 live pitches.

· Received Seed Investment of £150,000 in February 2019. (Mixed equity & debt)

· Secured our first enterprise level contract with a global organisation listed on the Australian Stock Exchange.

· Adapted and modified version 1.0 of the platform through vital user feedback – we are proud to be launching version 2.0 in November.

· Onboarded over 915 students and 145 businesses in Aberdeen.

· 110 projects completed on Udrafter.

Monetisation strategy

Our revenue model involves a straight forward subscription fee for businesses depending on their level of requirements.

Udrafter offers 4 packages:

- Starter

- Growth

- Scale

- Enterprise

We also charge a service fee on the hourly rate paid to a student, for our always on services. All students use Udrafter free of charge.

Udrafter is currently revenue generating, but we have much more that we want to achieve.

Use of proceeds

With our solution we want to expand Udrafter and make it available to every student and business across the world.

- Grow Our Team: We have come a long way with just five team members. This investment will allow us to onboard sales and technical talent.

- Marketing: Aberdeen has been our product test bed and we are now ready to get the word out so we can scale to new locations across the UK.

- Continued development: great products keep improving and we intend to listen closely to our users so we can build the best solutions for them.