My name is Zee, Founder at Connected. We are a startup based out of Ottawa with a mission to help international students around the world make the best education, career, and lifestyle choices. Each year over 5 million international students face a massive problem. I was one of them. 6 years ago, when I decided to study in Canada as an international student, I had no idea how to get started, didn’t know what program to study, how to apply for my visa and develop my career once I moved abroad. On top of that I had to spend hundreds of hours finding a recruiter who wouldn’t scam me! Eventually I moved to Canada, but it came at a price! I got scammed twice, chose the wrong program of study, had to switch programs in my 3rd year, almost got kicked out of Canada because I didn’t know how to renew my visa. And it took me 2 years to land my first professional job in Canada.

Thanks to my persistence and support from the community, eventually I was able to build a successful career. But why did I have to go through all of that in the first place? Because currently, there are no platforms in the world that focus on solving problems specifically for international students. Which makes sense, it’s a hard challenge to solve. You have to setup teams all over the world, train them, maintain your brand image and mass market to students. Even though companies like Applyboard entered the market to solve this challenge, they settled with becoming the broker between the institutions and existing recruiters. Because it’s easier to do that. But what about helping the students. Are they just for sale?

At Connected we took on the challenge to help international students. We represent students, not institutions. We have created an end-to-end platform to help students select the right program of study at the right institution, simplify their visa process and help them develop their career once they move abroad, all within one platform. So, they can successfully transition to a new country and have the best experience as an international student. Just 2 months ago we launched our platform and have great traction already. We have an online audience of over 30,000 international students, signed 80 customers, and over $180,000+ in revenue. All bootstrapped. Our customers are both students and the institutions. Students pay $1000 to get started and institutions pay $1500 per student placement, which makes our customer LTV $2,500. We have also partnered with over 1,200 Institutions already. At this point we are doing everything manually and have mapped out the entire customer journey.

We are looking to find a brilliant CTO or a Tech-cofounder who can help us build our first MVP and create an exceptional product for our customers. The ideal person needs to be skilled with MERN stack, have experience with the entire software development cycle, and any leadership skills will be highly appreciated. If you are interested, please connect with me on Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/syedzeehad/