China’s Coursebox App Gains 100,000 Users in First 10 Days

Depending on which you school Chinese college students are from, the backend student scheduling system may or may not suck. Sometimes it’s so bad that students have to create their own timetables.

But Coursebox looks to fix this; it’s a gorgeous looking timetable app. With Coursebox, students can have their full timetable on their smartphone easily with a few taps; you just pick your courses and place them into the right day and time of week.

The outcome looks like this:

There are plenty of substitute calendar apps in the app store. But Coursebox stands out because of its design. In the first ten days after the app was launched, Coursebox hit 100,000 users across 2,000 universities in China. And all that was done with a team of four people which I think is pretty cool.

Coursebox is also very social. You can see other Coursebox users who are also taking similar courses and perhaps meet new friends and/or project mates. The app allows for Renren and Sina Weibo integration which is also common social sites used by college students. Founder Tian Li shares with me:

We spent a lot of time designing the interface to be slick, good looking, and personalizable. 90 percent of our effort was spent on the server. All of the courses are stored on the server side, which allows us to do a variety of interesting things such as letting users browse other users’ profile and classes, chat, share homework and notes, reviewing and recommending courses, exchange books… etc. A simple course calendar actually makes a nice foundation for creating interesting social interactions.

The app is available for iOS and Android phones, just in time for school!