By Anis Shakirah Mohd Muslimin
ClusterFlunking is no longer an option.
ClusterFlunk — a free information-sharing site for students to communicate with their classmates about courses — released a statement via email to its users on Wednesday, saying the site will shut down and discontinue services by the end of 2015.
Joe Dallago, a cofounder of ClusterFlunk, said in an interview the startup company decided to close its services after four years in existence because of its inability to find a sustainable business model.
“We’ve since run out of funding,” he said. “And we decided it’s in the company’s best interest to shut down services.”
However, Dallago said, the closing was not due to complaints from university faculty members, who were supportive and appreciative of the program’s services.
“We had professors use ClusterFlunk in their classes,” he said. “Later, we launched another product called Piapp, and we’ve had a number of professors from the University of Iowa experimenting with and using that software in their classes.”
Piapp is intended to ease communication between professors and students.
Dallago said the company could not find a sustainable business model because of the long educational sales cycle and the limited amount of resources the company had.
AJ Nelson, the other cofounder of ClusterFlunk, said he and Dallago started the company after they realized how difficult it was for them to communicate with their fellow classmates about class work.
“These rich forms of communication have been built about in every single industry besides education,” he said. “Why is it so hard for me to sit and talk to the kid that I take classes with or see three times a week?”
UI junior Jared Bolhmann said the program was a good resource that has helped him occasionally by giving information on what to study for finals or tests.
“I think it’ll be sad just because the guys who started it were from this school, and you want to see Hawkeyes do well,” he said. “It’s too bad the resource will be gone.”
Sharrif Belweil, who used ClusterFlunk, said the service helped him connect with other students in a large lecture class.
“It was only really useful and effective for large classes, since people don’t really talk to each other or anything like that in those large classes.” he said. “Its closing is kind of sad, since students just lost a massive resource for working together.”
The cofounders were sophomores at the UI when they created ClusterFlunk. Nelson said he and Dallago are not planning on creating another educational product, although an idea could be somewhere down the line.
“It’s been a fun ride. We’ve had hundreds of kids telling us how much of an impact ClusterFlunk made,” he said. “Whether it was making a new friend, making sure they didn’t feel alone in their classrooms, I think it’s made a pretty positive impact at the University of Iowa.”
