Textbook rental powerhouse Chegg is expanding by helping students organize their academic life by better integrating two recent acquisitions. In August Chegg purchased Mountain View, Calif., start-up CourseRank, begun in 2007 by three Stanford University students who wanted to make it easy for students to share schedules, write reviews of classes, and find out how professors grade. Then in December Chegg bought Cramster, a social online homework help platform started in 2002 in Pasadena. Now it is integrating both on Chegg.com.
“Generally we’re going from textbook rental to one-stop shop,” says Gibson Biddle, senior v-p of product management for Chegg and former v-p of product management for Netflix. “The trick for us is to continue to make it wicked easy.” Beginning today, students who visit Chegg.com can pick a class, see the course list, rent a book while browsing available classes, and sign up for homework help (for a subscription fee) on a personalized home page that remembers the school they attend and what year they’re in. Chegg plans to increase the personalization features over the course of the year and to increase course offerings from 600 schools to 1,000.
To better position itself, Chegg has sought more funding. In September it received $75 million from Ace Limited. Coupled with previous funding of $144 million, the Santa Clara-company is rumored to be poised to go public this year.
