Deal Highlights
How we got here:
High School Responder Timeline
2017-2019—founder-funded; 2020—first investment
- MVP1-A (minimum viable product) released using GPS location services
- Round 1 angel funding—$347,000 closed
- MVP1-B (2nd version) released via Apple App Store and Google Play
- MVP2 in final testing with beacons, pending 2021 release to app stores- Current
- Active discussions with national/international partners
- Pennsylvania: statewide feedback and in-roads into the education market
- Grant team system developed for dynamic matching of schools with federal, local and private foundation funding opportunities
- Knowledge Base constructed for how-to videos for students, family & friends, and staff
- Beta test schools kick off March 2021
High School Responder founders have assembled the fundamental components and the business know-how for modernizing secondary campus “rapid response” communications—critical infrastructure, foundational software, real-time communication capabilities, and compliance—to establish a new benchmark for mental health, wellness, and student safety.
High School Responder employs SaaS (software as a service) mobile apps with the power to mitigate and de-escalate high school problems on and off campus, offering unprecedented communication capabilities for students, staff, family, and friends.
The founders utilized their expertise in the education and their deep understanding of the operational complexities inherent in school communication. Our key strategic relationships and international partnerships with school services organizations are driven by our mutual interest in campus communications, guidance, and response plan data. It’s an art. It’s a science. Partnering with global educational enterprises provides HSR with enormous reach and access to prospective school clients.
To succeed in the technology market today, innovations must be cloud-based, secure, easily available, and fast—and charge users only for what they actually use. Software should be “rented” per user and with data driving the apps, not hard coded and inflexible. We chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) for all these reasons. Our secured transaction and user account methodologies are time-tested and have followed industry standards that have lasted decades. We live by audit-able, repeat-able and scale-able rules—with data privacy our senior objective.
Problem
Who is Listening When a Student Calls Out for Help at School?
America’s secondary school systems are in desperate need of new campus communications protocols to manage the rapidly growing student mental health and wellness crisis threatening the safety of students, overwhelming school staff, and crippling the educational process.
Current systems, such as Pennsylvania’s Safe2Say, are designed for threats of school violence. However, these systems are currently overwhelmed by a flood of reports about students’ mental health. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro revealed, “As I traveled across Pennsylvania to talk to students about Safe2Say, they weren’t peppering me with questions on school shooting drills or metal detectors. They were talking about fellow students who seemed depressed, came to school without lunch, and chronic online bullying.”
The top five categories of tips received during Safe2Say’s first year:
- Bullying/Cyber Bullying
- Cutting/Self-Harm
- Suicide/Suicide Ideation
- Drug Use/Distribution/Possession
- Depression/Anxiety
According to Attorney General Shapiro, this reality means state officials should do more to address students’ mental health: “We need additional funding to ensure there is at least one mental health counselor in every school building in PA,” Shapiro said. “We must expand mental health services in our schools.” [1]
Solution
High School Responder has introduced a transformative, purpose-built communications system that better serves mental health, wellness, and student safety by leveraging existing Wi-Fi school technologies, school-issued and personal devices, offering a low-cost, rapid response communication solution that is quickly installed, comes ready-to-use, and delivers rapid results.
Paying close attention to the 911 model, High School Responder has developed hyper-local communication systems for high school campuses and a broader communication network designed for compliance with school district, county, state, and even federal compliance reporting requirements. High School Responder achieves this alignment while working at the intersection of mental health, technology, and education, creating fundamentally better ways to communicate and positively impact school campus safety.
Students most often communicate using smartphones—they speak with their thumbs. High School Responder transforms student devices into their local resource for 911-style “rapid response” service when they need to call for immediate help in school. Through High School Responder, their phone becomes an alarm in their pocket, allowing them to dial in the type of incident they are experiencing and get the help they need. In this way, High School Responder levels the playing field for threatened and distressed students who are exposed to bullying, depression, isolation, off-campus dislocations, and other every-day student problems.
High School Responder can help bring our high school campuses back to safety for students, staff, families and friends.
Help us help them. Together we can change their world.
Business Model
Audit-able, Repeat-able and Scale-able
Our business model is a traditional seat license with an annual subscription. With 5-year contracts, there are no start-up costs for the school. They can use their in-school wi-Fi and school-issued equipment alone or in combination with personal devices.
Our software as a solution (SaaS) pricing includes apps for iOS, Android, Chromebook, and HTML. We also supply the server-side software on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our choice of AWS is based on security, separation, and scale. Each and every school counts on these fundamentals.
What makes our business approach unique is our process using the grant matching tool we have built to pay the school’s seat license fees. The goal is to find state, federal, and private foundation grants, matching them to schools who want our system without impacting their school’s budget.
We have had excellent feedback from National Institutes of Health (NIH), specifically the Director of Early Intervention at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), who saw the value of data captured directly from the individual who reported the incident—quantitative data from our 1-10 (Likert scale) severity assessment and qualitative data from symptom descriptions. He confirmed that our near real-time, actionable intelligence was a game changer.
Market
We Estimate The Total Current Annual Addressable U.S. Market at $2Bn
High School Responder has introduced an unprecedented “rapid response” communication system that is purpose-built for managing and mitigating mental health and wellness while improving student safety on U.S. high school campuses.
With nearly 29,000 U.S. secondary public and private schools and more than 22,000,000 high school students, we estimate the total current addressable annual U.S. market at $2bn for rapid response mobile apps enabling communication on- and off-campus for secondary schools. High School Responder is a scalable business in a marketplace that is profoundly underserved.
The need continues to grow: The global pandemic has dislocated, isolated, and disconnected millions of students and staff from their daily educational routines and their school communities. The entire school system has been impacted. High School Responder’s rapid response mobile apps provides critical communications solutions in reconnecting students, staff, families and friends.
The U.S. education market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.7% from 2019 to 2025, according to a report conducted by Facts and Figures. The major factor driving the growth of the U.S. education market is the rising demand for online education. High School Responder provides a vital, enabling component of online education. In all, the $2+ trillion U.S. education market is both vast and in critical need of HSR’s advanced, crisis-focused communication services.
Press
- October 2020 - PR newswire
- June 2020 - PR newswire
- May 2020 - PR newswire
Team
Deep secondary school experience with Summa Cum Laude degree in Organizational Behavior and Applied Psychology. Extensive corporate business background. Began career as Lancaster County 911 emergency dispatcher.
Respected fiduciary. International finance and accounting expertise. Product architect, transactional systems, high-level real-time communications. Specialization in purpose-built escalation matrix software. Subject matter expert in ticketing and admission control.
Global B2B marketer, communications specialist, executive creative director. Former CMO of ICD, guiding marketing development to the world's leading independent liquidity broker dealer. Enterprise marketing expertise in finance, motion picture and music industries, advertising technologies, destination, gaming, and telecommunications.
Investor and Chairman of the Board. Global leadership in institutional liquidity sales and fintech solutions. Guiding force for ICD sales and management, launch of London trade desk operations. Propelled ICD Portal to industry leading $200bn AUM. Business strategist, international sales specialist, author and professional public speaker.
Footnotes
Use of Proceeds
If the offering's maximum amount of $249,999 is raised:
| Use | Value | % of Proceeds |
|---|---|---|
| Compensation for managers | $50,000 | 20.0% |
| Operational Expenses | $107 | less than 0.1% |
| Commercial version of apps, with multi-language, audio/video 1:1 | $107,642 | 43.1% |
| Software Development (group chat) | $10,000 | 4.0% |
| Contractors for re-design of app | $20,000 | 8.0% |
| Knowledge Base "how to videos" | $25,000 | 10.0% |
| Grants/Sponsors (track & issue) | $25,000 | 10.0% |
| Intermediary fees | $12,250 | 4.9% |
Terms
This number includes all funds raised by the Company in this round on Netcapital. This is an offering of Membership units, under registration exemption 4(a)(6), in HighSchoolResponder LLC. This offering must reach its target of at least $10,000 by its offering deadline of October 29, 2021 at 11:59pm ET. If this offering does not reach its target by the offering deadline, then your money will be refunded.
If the offering is successful at raising the maximum amount, then the company’s implied valuation after the offering (sometimes called its post-money valuation) will be:
Pitch Deck
Financials
SEC Filings
The Offering Statement is a formal description of the company and this transaction. It’s filed with the SEC to comply with the requirements of exemption 4(a)(6) of the Securities Act of 1933.
We’re also required to share links to each of the SEC filings related to this offering with investors.
Understand the Risks
Be sure to understand the risks of this type of investment. No regulatory body (not the SEC, not any state regulator) has passed upon the merits of or given its approval to the securities, the terms of the offering, or the accuracy or completeness of any offering materials or information posted herein. That’s typical for Regulation CF offerings like this one.
Neither Netcapital nor any of its directors, officers, employees, representatives, affiliates, or agents shall have any liability whatsoever arising from any error or incompleteness of fact or opinion in, or lack of care in the preparation or publication of, the materials and communication herein or the terms or valuation of any securities offering.
The information contained herein includes forward-looking statements. These statements relate to future events or to future financial performance, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, that may cause actual results to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements since they involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, which are, in some cases, beyond the company’s control and which could, and likely will, materially affect actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements. Any forward-looking statement reflects the current views with respect to future events and is subject to these and other risks, uncertainties, and assumptions relating to operations, results of operations, growth strategy, and liquidity. No obligation exists to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.
More Info
Updates
- Oct 30, 2021Primary offering finalized, selling units
- Sep 9, 2021New information here: School Responder is...
- Sep 1, 2021New information here: High School Responder is...
Ask a Question
Proofread your comment before submitting: once it's posted, you can’t edit or delete it. Investors are advised to review our Discussion Board Policy before submitting a comment. For the fastest help with the web site, email help@netcapital.com instead of commenting.
Looking to raise capital?
We can help turn your friends, family and customers into investors.
Interested in more investment opportunities?
Browse all offerings currently available.