SchoolRack

SchoolRack

Artia Moghbel, 21
www.schoolrack.com
Los Angeles

Artia Moghbel thinks Web 2.0 can improve education. During his senior year of high school, he built a Web site for his English teacher, who wanted to distribute a 70-page reading assignment without having to make photocopies. At the time, Moghbel didn't realize he was laying the groundwork for SchoolRack, an online service intended to make it easy for teachers and students to communicate outside the classroom. When Moghbel went off to Columbia University, he majored in applications engineering and created two more businesses—a student discount card and a discount shopping Web site—both since sold. Now he is shifting his attention back to SchoolRack, which makes money from advertising and premium subscriptions and had just over $94,000 in revenue in the last fiscal year. Moghbel expects the four-employee business—which he says has users in some 90,000 different schools in the U.S. and overseas—to be profitable by June 2009 after bringing in approximately $1.2 million in revenues during the 2008-2009 school year. To make this happen, he plans to sell premium subscriptions to schools in bulk.