PRNT | Devpost

Inspiration

PRNT was born out of a simple observation: although Technology has improved the ability to deliver education at a lower cost, the price of college textbooks continues to rise, even with the availability of e-textbooks. This doesn’t feel right to us, because the contents of a basic physics textbook hasn’t changed significantly over the past 50 years.

We conducted interviews with a dozen professors, PHD candidates and students to understand their needs. We uncovered that while professors may want to write academic textbook materials for students, there are high barriers for doing so, including very low compensation, and an inefficient timeline for release. In the market, students also find purchasing textbooks painful, as the cost can be very high, but also because there is no marketplace for resale for their e-textbooks.

We are passionate about building out the creator-led economy where those who work hard are rewarded for their efforts.

What it does

PRNT is a creator led, blockchain-based & open-economy focused e-textbook marketplace that propels professors and students into Web3.0 - our value add is a faster release of materials, better ownership for academics, and easy resale for students

How we built it

We prototyped in FIGMA. Our all-women team is composed of an ex- technology consultant (with 6 years' experience in blockchain), an ex- strategy consultant (with specialized experience in consumer) from BCG, and a talented UI/UX designer.

Challenges we ran into

Understanding to what level of depth to analyze key design decisions as a part of MVP, determining the scope of testing (i.e., how many partners to onboard in earliest rounds of beta testing and similar).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Putting together a prototype of the website/ e-comm marketplace!

What we learned

How to prioritize tasks while formalizing an idea & MVP. Working on a start-up inevitably presents an endless stream of "to-do" items; the hackathon helped hone in on elements that need to be sorted first.