October 7, 2009
Millions of primetime TV viewers watched DreamIt company Notehall.com strike a deal with investors on ABC’s primetime TV show, Shark Tank.
“I have no doubt you have a home run hit with this,” said Barbara Corcoran, the investor who won the Notehall deal and out-competed two other of the sharks who expressed interest.
The show’s 2-5 million viewers generated so much traffic that the Notehall site went down temporarily while the show aired.
Notehall is a marketplace for college students to buy and sell course notes and study guides. In their pilot launch at the University of Arizona, Notehall signed up over 40% of the student body. They processed over 5,900 credit card transactions and $39,000 in revenue in their first 18 months in business.
Notehall graduated from the 2009 class of DreamIt Ventures program just one month before appearing on Shark Tank. Stephan described the DreamIt experience and the Philadelphia startup community in an interview with Technically Philly:
“Philadelphia, in the underground almost, has one of the strongest communities for a technical startups of anywhere else in the country,” says Stephan, the company’s spokesman. “It’s a community trying to identify itself nationally, and we’re happy to be here for it.”
The Notehall team earned widespread media attention during and after the DreamIt program, including features in The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and TechCrunch.
Notehall is using the investment “all for customer acquisition” and has plans to expand to over 60 schools by the end of this academic year.