Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to $10M+ in Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: And what did you end up doing to address that itch?

Hanmei Wu: Well, it wasn’t very planned out, to be honest. I was still quite young, only a few years out of college. I was just kind of doing it on my own at first, maybe just charging an hourly amount. I was helping with essays and things like that. Then I decided that I want to get some other people to help me with this.

So, if there was a student and she had a sibling who was really interested in pre-med, I wasn’t an expert in that. But then I had friends that had just gone through that process themselves. I felt they were responsible and would be good mentors. So, I would connect that student with that friend of mine to be their mentor. Then I would actually pay that friend through my company at the time. That’s really kind of the beginning of how Empowerly started to become an actual business company.

Sramana Mitra: So, it was all manual. You were just basically looking at your friends, drawing from your friends, and connecting them to your potential clients and so on?

Hanmei Wu: Yes. It was extremely manual in the early days. I have a co-founder too. Changxiao Xie was also very instrumental in the early days. We did everything ourselves. We were doing the counseling, building the website—Chang could code, so he was really helping out with that aspect. But then we were also doing the sales, writing the blogs, and handling the finances.

Sramana Mitra: How were you getting these people to come to you? Through the blogs?

Hanmei Wu: Yes, in the very early days, it was a bit like family, friends, word-of-mouth. We started writing some blog posts about science fairs, about how to get into UC Berkeley, or how to get into Princeton. We were very hyperlocal, so we would kind of show up to libraries and say, “Hey, could we do a talk here and help seniors with their essays?”

It was a lot of in-person work in the very beginning because we just didn’t really have much of a presence or a brand. I remember if one family referred a friend, I would actually go out and meet that friend, sometimes driving very far, sometimes in their house, sometimes at a café.

Sramana Mitra: This is 2017 we’re talking?

Hanmei Wu: Yes, I would say around that time, like 2018 or 2019-ish.

Sramana Mitra: How much were you charging for this?

Hanmei Wu: We’ve charged all over the map. In the earlier days, it was around a couple of hundred dollars. It’s now in the thousands, depending on the type of package and how many years of support you’re looking for.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s stay with the journey you were on in 2017, 2018, when you were just figuring things out. You were already charging around $200?

Hanmei Wu: Yes. I’d be like, “You know, if you want to sign up for a couple of hours of support, it would be this much money.” It would be a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand dollars. We tried to stay on the lower end of the market back then because we didn’t really have much of a presence. We were really building trust with the families in the very beginning, ensuring they were happy so one family would ideally refer ten of their friends.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Hanmei Wu: We bootstrapped for a couple of years, and it was really tough. We never got very big from it, which is why I really admire companies that can bootstrap to significant traction, because that’s really hard. We didn’t have a lot of money in our bank account in those days. We were very, very small and lean.

A pivotal moment for us was actually joining a startup accelerator. I met some founders through my UC Berkeley network, and they told me about a UC Berkeley accelerator called Skydeck. We applied, we got in, and we got a small office space. It was actually in the penthouse – a really beautiful space with a great view of Berkeley. But we finally had an office and were able to get access to mentors and advisors, which was a big thing for us because we didn’t really have a lot of direction.

Sramana Mitra: You didn’t really know what to do.

Hanmei Wu: Yes, exactly. Someone came to us and said, “You know, you really need to do X, Y, and Z. Here are the things you’re doing wrong; here are the things you’re doing right.”

Sramana Mitra: And this was 2019?

Hanmei Wu: We joined Skydeck in 2019. It was before the pandemic, so we were fortunate to have a lot of in-person sessions back then. A key moment for us was the investor demo day, which was at the end of our cohort. In that, we got on stage and presented to a pretty large audience. We were able to then raise our very first round, about $1.5 million from that demo day, from a combination of angel investors and venture capital funds.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to $10M+ in Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu
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