20 Ou Bang Ni Fill In a Course Selection Sheet: Two Valencia Grads' Erasmus Business, with the App Added Last

Erappmus is a Spanish-language Erasmus exchange app. It launched in Oct 9, and by Nov 6 it charted #7 in the Education free chart on the Spanish App Store. But it didn't come out of nowhere. Behind it is a small Valencia company that's been running for a year and a half, whose core business is charging students €20 to €50 to fill out their Learning Agreement (the course-matching form for studying abroad). They built a following of a few thousand would-be exchange students through TikTok and WhatsApp groups, then shipped the app right when Spanish universities opened Erasmus applications, and pushed it with their own videos.

A video with 310k views

On Jun 5 2025, @erappmus posted a TikTok with a single line of caption: "alguien que se vaya de Erasmus con el mismo problema??" (Anyone else going on Erasmus with the same problem??). The video has since reached 316k views. The top comment in the thread:

Bro, this is honestly the only bad part of Erasmus. I got run around by it too, but once it's done it feels great. (882 likes)

Second comment:

Just seeing this now, and I've already submitted a draft of the Learning Agreement version 15. (305 likes)

A parent also wrote: "My daughter went to Florence and came back after a month. They only recognized two of her courses, since the ones over there were master's-level and the ones here were undergrad."

The Learning Agreement is a form every Erasmus student has to submit before leaving: which courses you'll take at the host university and which of your home university's courses they'll count toward. Your home university's Erasmus coordinator has to sign it, and if the courses don't match, it gets sent back. The official platform only handles signatures. It doesn't help you find the few courses that match among hundreds at the host school. The work is tedious, the deadlines are real, and if you get the matching wrong, your credits don't transfer. That's what Erappmus sells.

Who's behind it

The founders are Pablo Herraiz Soto (CEO; a COPE report from January 2026 gives his age as 23) and Juanfran Artés. Both graduated in business analytics from the University of Valencia and both went on Erasmus. The project began as Herraiz's undergrad thesis: his thesis advisor happened to be the faculty's Erasmus coordinator, so he turned the "credit matching" problem into his graduation project (Las Provincias, 2025-04). In March 2024 the project got into Lanzadera, the startup accelerator in Valencia run by Juan Roig, the boss of Mercadona, Spain's biggest supermarket chain.

This wasn't two coders building an app. It was two students who had just been through this process starting with a service. The app came a year and a half later.

Where the money comes from

The money isn't in the app. It's on the website, erappmus.com:

Revisions after coordinator rejection are free. The site claims "500+ delivered, 91% pass on first try" (self-reported, unverified). At 500 orders and €20–50 each, that's roughly €10,000–20,000+ cumulative over a year and a half (estimate). A COPE report from 1 says the web service only went live in mid-June 2025, and in its first few months it had only 40–50 paying users. If the site's numbers are accurate, volume grew about tenfold this application season.

It's tiny, but the demand is real. Testimonials on the site keep repeating two lines: "quitarte un peso de encima" (lifting a weight off your shoulders) and "volvería a pagar" (I'd pay again). Several also say "at first I worried it was a scam." So for them, the Lanzadera backing and local press coverage work as trust signals.

What the app does

The store page lists three things: each destination city's places, language requirements, climate, cost of living, and how many people are in that city's WhatsApp group; it asks a few questions and ranks the best destinations based on the partner spots your school and major actually have; and it reminds you of school deadlines. The last line: "Gratis. Hecha por gente que ya se fue de Erasmus." (Free. Made by people who've already gone on Erasmus.)

"Ranking choices by your school's partner spots" is the hardest part to copy. The website has a page listing partner agreements for 85 Spanish universities, 3,087 majors, and 1,950 destinations, and all of it had to be collected one school at a time. Searching "learning agreement" in the store puts it first, but almost nobody searches that term. Searching "erasmus" doesn't show it in the top 25 results (Spanish App Store, 11-06).

The app is Spanish-only and iPhone-only. Under the 11-04 video, the most common questions were "when is the Android version coming," "can't pick a double degree," and "my first-choice school isn't in the app."

Why Nov 6

Two things lined up.

First, timing. Spanish universities usually open Erasmus applications for the next academic year between November and the following January, and some open as early as October. Erappmus posted a video in Oct 6 reminding people: "Some schools open in October. Applying early doesn't mean you have to go." The app launched in Oct 9, and in Nov 3 they shipped the 1.2.0 version with the €10 advisor, hitting exactly that window.

Second, their own audience. @erappmus has 5,588 followers and 148k likes on TikTok (11-06). Their biggest asset isn't TikTok, though. It's the city-based WhatsApp groups: 2025 people in April 1,500, and over 2026 in January 2,000 (Las Provincias, COPE). A video from Jan 2026 16 saying "if you got a spot, join the group now" got 191k views and 1,737 shares, and more than half of its 556 comments were "is there a Chile group," "can the Lublin group get approved," "is there one for Padua."

On Nov 4, they posted "Ya está: la app para hacer tu lista de Erasmus" (The app is here: make your Erasmus list with it). Sign up with your school account, see the partner schools you can go to, five questions to rank them, reviews from people who've been to each city, free, iPhone only for now. The video got 33k views and 784 shares. The next day they posted one on how to choose a destination, ending with "too lazy to think it through? Just use the test in our app," which got 14k views. Two days later the app was on the education chart.

Read the numbers together: it's #209 on the Spain store's free overall chart and #7 in Education (free), but it has only 3 ratings, and all three were written within an hour of each other on Nov 4, each giving 5 stars (App Store Spain, 11-06). The bar to chart in Spain's Education free category is low: a few hundred to a few thousand downloads over a few days is enough (estimate). Three ratings landing this close together suggests people close to the developer helped out (inference). I found no evidence of paid acquisition, but I can't rule it out.

The market itself is large. Spain is one of the biggest Erasmus sending countries. In 2025, higher education alone, Spain's Erasmus+ funding covered about 72.5k mobility placements (SEPIE; that figure includes internships and staff). At the self-reported 500 orders, Erappmus hasn't even reached one percent of that.

Who it's competing with

There's almost no competition on the App Store. The official Erasmus+ app has only 19 ratings in Spain, at 1.58 stars, and doesn't rank choices or fill out forms. Most other apps with "Erasmus" in the name are small dating apps with 0–2 ratings.

The real competition is web-based "Learning Agreement fill-in" services, and this fall others have already started copying:

The service has no real barrier to entry, and it got copied within a month. What Erappmus still has is an early lock on TikTok and WhatsApp groups, its partner-school list for the home university, and a year and a half of accumulated word of mouth.

If it were you

B, worth a shot. This is a real pain point with a hard deadline and people willing to pay. Few people know about it, and outside Spain it's basically empty. The weaknesses are obvious, though: one application season a year, €20–30 per order, roughly €10,000–20,000 in a year and a half (estimate), and in Spain it's already a race with two copycats.

Who it suits: student teams who went on Erasmus themselves, or are studying or just graduated in a major sending country like Italy, France, Germany, Poland, or Portugal; people willing to spend months compiling their home country's partner-school lists and course data; anyone who already has an expat community and wants one more paid offering.

Who it doesn't suit: people looking for steady year-round subscription revenue; people hoping an app will pick up installs organically in the store (nobody searches this category); people unfamiliar with a given country's university processes who can only build a generic tool.

How to do it:

1. Change the country, don't crowd into Spain. Pick a major Erasmus sending country and first check whether anyone there already does Learning Agreement fill-ins. Erappmus only covers Spanish universities, and its data only covers Spain.
2. Service first, app second. Version one is a landing page plus manual fill-ins at €15–30 each, with free revisions after rejection.
3. Data comes next: compile partner-school lists for the top few dozen universities in your country and turn them into a free "rank my choices by my school and major" tool. That's the acquisition funnel, and it's the part nobody can copy in a month.
4. Use AI to draft and humans to review, to bring down the cost per order. go-erasmus is already doing this.
5. Then add rental, insurance and flight affiliate links, since those are things people really buy in the months before they leave.

How to get users: Follow its playbook. Post pain-point videos on TikTok around one topic: "how painful filling in the Learning Agreement is". The comments heat up on their own. Then set up WhatsApp or Telegram groups by city and pull in the people who got their place; the group is the best funnel, and the next cohort finds you by itself.

When to move: Before your country's application window. In Spain, applications open November to January. Learning Agreements are usually filled in after a place is confirmed and before departure, and spring through summer is peak season for done-for-you services. Start preparing now and you'll be ready for the spring Learning Agreement rush in 2027.

Signs you're reading it wrong: If Erappmus's App rating is still single digits by spring 2027 and its official delivery count hasn't visibly risen, demand is just this small. It works as a side hustle, not a business. If a university or the EU itself builds course matching into the Online Learning Agreement platform, or students widely use AI on course syllabi, nobody will pay for this service anymore. Conversely, if a team in Italy or France copies this model and delivers thousands of agreements in one season, this opportunity should be upgraded to A.