Prepared – Instantaneous School Security

The system of communication used in schools is inefficient and slow. The current system is not fit to handle dynamic emergencies such as an active shooter on campus, and it shows in the tremendous communication inefficiencies which has cost countless innocent lives. Prepared acts as a decentralized and instantaneous way to convey essential information during an emergency to everyone on campus and first responders at the press of a button. This solution will be live in schools next year, and its impact if scaled can not be quantified. Our impact is clear. 

Prepared has the potential to save lives, and that is an impact that will change the world. 

Clear and efficient communication within a school is essential for navigating tragedy, yet the traditional process is centralized and rife with inefficiencies—any faculty member must first become aware of a situation, find a way to get in touch with an administrator, then convey that situation to an administrator, who then finally must alert the school to take proper action over the PA system. 

At Parkland, students and staff saw Nickolas Cruz in the hallway with a gun prior to any bullets being fired, but because of their convoluted and centralized communication system, they were unable to communicate this intel. It took them over 3 and a half minutes to lockdown their school, and in that time 24 students had either been shot or killed. While the shooting itself, only lasted six minutes. 

This means that for the majority of the shooting victims internally were scrambling trying to obtain more information. In addition to this, the average response time to a school active shooter is eighteen minutes, while the average shooting is done in twelve, so instead of first responders being there when every second counts; they are only there for the aftermath. 

Prepared’s mission to combat school shootings has the potential to not only improve lives, but also to save them. We firmly believe that students, faculty, and staff at schools today are being left extremely vulnerable by their school’s slow and outdated communications methods. It is for this reason that our chief objective is to improve emergency communication and serve those being fatally impacted by these events.

Prepared’s system has been created through the insights of countless school shooting survivors, teachers, district administrators, activists, education experts, police and emergency responders. For example, we spoke with Jenny Wadwa and Charlie Servitus, student survivors of the deadly Sandy Hook and Parkland shootings respectively, about empowering student voices. Additionally, JT Lewis, a national school safety advocate for the president and secretary of education, intends to have our team present to the secretary on a possible nation-wide agenda.

As a team of current Yale University students, alumni, and faculty, this issue hits home. For our undergraduate co-founders, the fear of a shooting on our campus and at home lingers as an ever-present possibility. This is true for too many schools. For too many kids. That is our source of drive and the population we serve. 

Prepared is a one-touch mobile alert system that is placed in the hands of trusted faculty at schools. PREPARED allows the school’s emergency response to be instantaneous and decentralized, while also streamlining the process of contacting authorities. In an emergency situation, seconds are lives, and clear, dynamic communication is vital.

At the simple touch of a button, the app will communicate an emergency situation immediately to the entire campus, in addition to streamlining 9-1-1 interaction. From their own mobile phone, a trusted administrator will receive live information regarding the situation and be able to swiftly decide the proper action to take. They can then send out instructions as an alert to the phones of every single person on the campus. This whole process will secure the school in less than 20 seconds at the first hint of true danger. 

Another major failure of the PA system is its inherently centralized nature. There is nothing stopping a shooter from attacking the school’s central PA system and annihilating their only line of mass communication. A key feature of our app is its decentralized design. Any teacher can, from their mobile phone, report an emergency situation. Every administrator will receive this report, and any one of them can send out the proper response. 

Prepared provides an innovative and patent-pending system in response to a nationwide epidemic. Our system utilizes intelligent user interface updates that allow for more effective situational communication. Simply put, instead of a teacher or administrator needing to search for the pertinent information they need to communicate, our interface update system displays that vital information easily accessible on their interface. 

Our product looks simple, that is our innovation. For every layer of simplicity in the design, there is ten fold complexity on the backend. Pressing the active shooter button doesn’t just report an emergency to administrators, it converts every phone in the school into a node in a data collection machine. Each teacher is prompted to confirm that the threat is real and present -- and with each confirmation, each request for help, each student marking safe, each data point, each GPS location allows us to construct a real-time heatmap of an active threat within a school. Not only is this data vital for situational awareness during the event, this data is critical for post-event investigation. By providing prompts for constant information updates a real-time timeline is created which can be leveraged for more effective post-event knowledge. 

This is the difference between responding to a threat in seconds versus minutes -- the difference between a clear unified response and unordered panic both internally within a school system and externally with police, fire, and emergency services. The difference between life and death.

Our app takes the complicated process of collecting, analysing, and distributing information during emergency situations and consolidates it into the two second press of a button. This may seem simple -- but that's only the case for the end user. PREPARED leverages our patent pending technology we call “Threat Adaptive User Interface Design” to make this simplicity possible.

The basic principle behind this technology is that each user type (students, teachers, administrators, police, other emergency responders, and parents,) all care about and want to know different things during an active emergency. Administrators want to know if the threat is real and keep others informed; Students and teachers can be in danger and need help; police need to know where the threat is and what the threat look like. These priorities are never static. They change from the first report, to confirmation, to emergency response, to distribution of emergency personnel, and finally determining the “all clear” situation resolved call. 

The fundamental problem in school communication during a crisis lies in handing all these groups, hearing their requests, and getting the right people the right information as fast as possible. This is where our Threat-Adaptive design comes into play. Our interfaces dynamically changes for each user group, following the emergency situation progression. Each group is only presented the information and given the features that they care about, and thus we only display and receive relevant information at every step

The single most effective way to save lives during a school shooting is by initiating a lockdown as quickly as possible. Our product, Prepared, was created with this in mind. We set out to significantly cut down and correct the many inefficiencies and failures of the existing PA system-driven lockdown process. 

Our product will give every faculty member of the school a one-touch mobile alert system. At the simple touch of a button, the app will communicate an emergency situation immediately to the entire campus, in addition to streamlining 9-1-1 interaction. From their own mobile phone, a trusted administrator will receive live information regarding the situation and be able to swiftly decide the proper action to take. They can then send out instructions as an alert to the phones of every single person on the campus. This whole process will secure the school in less than 20 seconds at the first hint of true danger.

A major failure of the PA system is its inherently centralized nature. There is nothing stopping a shooter from attacking the school’s central PA system and annihilating their only line of mass communication. A key feature of our app is its decentralized design. Any teacher can, from their mobile phone, report an emergency situation. Every administrator will receive this report, and any one of them can send out the proper response. This process all takes place in the cloud; as it’s decoupled from any existing school infrastructure, it is therefore extremely fault tolerant.

We have currently secured verbal agreements with 24 schools, representing an initial $50k in annual recurring revenue (ARR). To date we have targeted mostly suburban school systems, and are averaging about 1200 students, 100 staff members, and 200 emergency personnel per school. This means were are currently reaching about 36,000 individuals. We are incredibly excited and encouraged by the traction we have achieved so early in our formation, and are seeking to finalize license agreements with many more schools which are currently in various stages of negotiation.

By January 2020, we would like the schools we’re in, which we’re projecting to be around 100-150 schools, to absolutely love us -- through extremely personalized and rapid customer service. This will be a driving force behind our milestone goal of deals with around 300-400 schools by this time next year. That would put our ARR up near $1M, and facilitate even more rapid growth through reinvestment in the company. With around 300 schools under our belt in a year, we expect to be servicing around 300,000 individuals. 

In the next five years we expect our growth to be exponential as we have identified numerous verticals through which our patent-pending technology can be leveraged in executing vastly more efficient emergency communication. The unfortunate truth is that the threat of mass shootings is not unique to educational settings. Corporate campuses, malls, hotels, places or worship, and even military bases all can benefit from the installment of innovative emergency communication. 

In the next five years we intend to have exercised our mission of helping every school be Prepared for emergency events, but we see our patent-pending system as having significantly more applications. 

Prepared intends to combat mass shootings. 

Our focus currently is the rapid correction of the deadly emergency communication inefficiencies that persist within the K-12 education system. However, we know that the gun violence issue is pervasive and by no means affects schools exclusively. 

For example, Yahoo Finance stated that active shooter threats is the number one security concern of corporate offices in 2019 and that the number of head company security officials reporting directly to CEO rose by 40 percent. 

Secondly, the FBI reported that last year, "16 of the 27 incidents occurred in areas of commerce, seven incidents occurred in business environments, and five incidents occurred in education environments." The majority of shootings occurred in commerce related settings. 

Our impact within just our current addressable market has the potential to impact the lives of millions, but as we expand into other markets our impact grows substantially. The scalability of our solution is evident when considering the vast applications of our communications platform. 

Start-ups are confronted with significant barriers at every turn. We are no different. Yes, we have financial and technical challenges, but by far our most pervasive barrier resides in the inherent burdens associated with selling to the highly red taped education market. 

The education market is plagued by systemic problems shielding them from purchasing, the discretionary budgets that schools have available throughout the year are small, and the length of the sales cycle can be extremely long based on the time of the year. 

Put simply, 

Our product innovatively makes complex communication a seconds process, the customer likes it and wants it, they are willing to pay for it, but due to inefficiency budget cycling they can not pay for it now due to budgetary restrictions. Our biggest barrier is the fundamental nature of this market conflicts the time sensitivity of the issue. Our largest problem is the decision making process within this market is not made to respond to a problem that is so urgent. 

While active shooter is one of the biggest problems facing schools today. The challenge is that the bureaucracy of schools paralyzes them to buying quick.

Unfortunately, the need for our product is evident to all school administrators that we meet given that there is a school shooting incident every 8 days in the last year. The barrier to implementation lies not in the need for a solution but in the intricacies and myriad of red-tape bureaucracy that exists in every school district. However, our team is best fit to effectively hurdle this barrier as our technical co-founders creating and implements apps in schools. 

The systematic and bureaucratic market barrier that we face will be creatively addressed through three avenues: our large districts pilot program, utilization of current education vendor relationships, and eventual technical sales automation.

We are currently pursuing large districts for minimal cost pilot program. This program is calculated as it generates artificial buy-in through the cost, but the cost is still low enough to tap into known discretionary budget funds. 

Secondly, we are in discussions with current vendors dealing with school districts for wholesale/revenue share opportunities. By using thee relationships we allow ourselves to cut through some of the red-tape with the connection of an already familiar company. 

While the third phase of our technology development focuses on creating a process to efficiently help a school administrator navigate his own internal bureaucracy and help them get approval for our product. 

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Four Full-Time Staff: Michael Chime, Neal Soni, Daniel James, Dylan Gleicher

We also have two business oriented co-founders—Michael Chime and Daniel James. They are able to effectively drive the team’s vision by using the leadership and teamwork skills they developed from their time on the Yale Football Team and operational experience from their time on Adobe and the NFL. The entire team is comprised of recent high school graduates. They are intimately familiar with their target market. Having lived it for basically the entirety of their lives, they know it far better than any possible competition. In total, their team members come from three different states representing the Northeast, Midwest, and South. This brings a host of different experiences and connections from across the country. There is no team more fit and more ready to take on the challenges that our domain will present.\

We have two technical co-founders—Dylan Gleicher and Neal Soni. At Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut, they collaborated on a number of projects. One such project was an app which is currently in the iOS App Store—iStaples. Their app greatly streamlined the school’s complicated block-scheduling system, and was very quickly downloaded by nearly everyone in the high school. This project acquainted them with the process and challenges inherent in creating a mobile application which is used daily by an entire school. Dylan excels at navigating the technical aspects of programming a secure system at scale and making sure everything integrates together perfectly where Neal is a product design and front-end wizard. 

First and foremost, we were accepted into Yale Law School’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Clinic. They provide invaluable support legally, and take care of what would’ve been our largest headache and expense. They have also begun to act as mentors, connecting us to advisors in cyber-security, physical-security, insurance, and more.  (MILLER and TSAI center?)

We are also formalizing our partnership with PunchAlert on 9-1-1 API integration. PunchAlert allows us to seamlessly integrate Emergency Services calling within our app. This means that when users press the 911 call button, their name, location, and callback number are automatically placed in the operator’s dashboard -- so 911 can respond even without the user saying a single word. 

An urgent problem needs an urgent solution. 

Our business model focuses on targeting the largest school districts in the country to perpetuate our brand and facilitate the distribution of our life-saving technology to those who need it as quickly as possible. However, selling to the largest school districts is a daunting task that is compounded by significant red tape, long sales cycle, and heavily scrutinized budgets. We mitigate these pain points by exercising strategic a two-aspect plan. 

Pilot Program: We utilize a minimal cost pilot program. The minimal cost we take is strategic in generating artificial buy-in and evoking loss aversion on the side of the districts, while also being low enough cost that it can easily fit under their discretionary budget. This portion of our business model is not profit-generating but is advantageous to us grabbing massive market share and distributing our technology into the largest districts in this market as quickly as possible. We are currently funding these pilots through our profit in our SaaS model and external funding sources. 

SaaS subscription model: Prepared engage with districts through a simple SaaS Subscription Model. This portion of our business model is high margin and we have seen significant traction. Within our first 5 months since incorporation, we have over 20 schools on contract resulting in nearly 50,000 in ARR. 

We are currently financially stable. With the contracts we have, we will be able to cover all fixed and variable costs. 

However, in order to get our technology into as many schools as possible, we plan on offering our product to the largest districts in the country by way of a pilot or discounted price. This means that for these contracts, we will most likely be losing money for our first year. 

We want to grow rapidly and get this in the hands of as many people that need it as possible. Our mission is grabbing massive market share. We have seen that we have the ability to sell our system at a price that will ensure our financial stability, and our goal is to convert this years reduced cost or pilot customers into paid subscription members meaning that our financially stability could be logically obtained at any moment, but in the sacrifice of rapid growth. 

We believe a partnership with Solve will accelerate Prepared’s mission to keep every student safe. This will be through improving our public outreach and education as well as funding our technology for underserved communities.   

Over the last year, we have presented our solution on smaller stages, such as Startup Yale where we won the Miller Prize or at NYU’s Summer Pitch-Off where we had people crying in the front row. Presenting on the Solve Stage, and working within the Solve Network, will give us the ability to reach and educate from hundreds of thousands of people about this issue. 

Our product offering has been iterated, refined, and recreated through the recommendations of hundreds of administrators, police officers, students, and teachers. Every time we demonstrate our product, audience members approach us with unique ideas and insights about what we can do to better serve our users. This vast audience will give us these invaluable connections and ideas through potential clients, partners in law enforcement, military, physical and digital security. 

Right now, we know our product can be profitable -- and we have shown it is. However, we do not have the necessary profits to enable us serve every district. Many school districts, such as New Haven (50+ schools) have explicitly stated they want Prepared but can’t afford it. The Solve provides (both directly and indirectly) will directly allow us to provide our technology to these underserved communities and protect hundreds of thousands of students that would otherwise be ignored. 

Our mission is to allow students to enjoy a school day without fear, and an education system focused simply on educating. We believe that placing our app in the hands of students, teachers, and administrators at schools is a strong first step towards making this mission a reality. 

It is not easy to get a school to say the final “Yes” to implementing our app. This is despite the myriad positive feedback we have received—our product is award-winning and works. There simply is a ton of red tape to deal with when selling to a government entity such as a school, and the unfortunate status of our country has many schools’ budgets close to the point of insolvency. 

The Everytown Grant would prove to be absolutely critical towards allowing for schools to better afford and budget for our system. We have found that many schools and districts are much more apt to try our system while starting on a reduced-price/pilot basis, and we have full confidence in the ability of our system to sell itself once we are in the door. We have recently received significant interest from large districts such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Cleveland, Dallas, Fort Worth, Miami-Dade and others representing over 1000 schools on running reduced-rate pilot programs for a starter period. We are trying to avoid venture capital at this point in order to continue prioritizing our mission over profit. For these reasons the Everytown grant is critical to allowing us to subsidize our system.