Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to $10M+ in Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like it’s a two-sided managed marketplace. What’s the business model? How much are you paying the counselors? How does this work out?

Hanmei Wu: Our counselors are mostly hourly, and it’s based on the number of years of experience. It’s a pretty wide range.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have a commission structure or a revenue share structure?

Hanmei Wu: We are testing out a couple of different models right now, but generally, it’s more of an hourly model.

Sramana Mitra: Oh, so you pay by the hour. Whatever you can get for that is up to your experience.

Hanmei Wu: Yes, but we do like to have our counselors stay for a long time. As many of our counselors gain more years of experience, they’re actually entering a higher tier. So, we’re able to give them more pay over time as well because in one year they could have helped a certain number of students get acceptances, and that makes them a more experienced counselor.

Sramana Mitra: So with that $1.5 million, the first money that you raised, it takes you into COVID, I imagine?

Hanmei Wu: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: So, you have the market turn in your direction because now virtual is how people interact with the world. So, you are in a good place from a scalability point of view. You’re getting counselors, you’re getting customers. What customer acquisition strategy did you settle into?

Hanmei Wu: We started being a lot more intentional with our content marketing – a lot more blogging, a lot more webinars. We couldn’t do in-person events anymore, so everything shifted online.

We started to play around with Google Ads. At first, we just wasted a lot of money. We didn’t know what we were doing. It’s very easy to do that. Then, eventually, we made a key hire who was able to take over that function. That allowed us to spend efficiently. We definitely were able to get more leads through Google as a result.

Sramana Mitra: So Google Ads became your primary go-to-market strategy.

Hanmei Wu: It’s a big piece of it, yes. We also really built out our referrals and ambassador programs. Those have been big for us as well.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. So, with $1.5 million in seed, what did you accomplish? What were the milestones that you accomplished?

Hanmei Wu: A lot of them were around revenue. So, we’ve continued ever since that first round of capital raise. We’re in the tens of millions now in terms of annual revenue. We have also invested heavily in our product. We’ve built out a tool called the Empowerly Score, which takes a student’s data—their academic, extracurriculars, and writing—and we would actually provide insight into which colleges are safety targets and reaches for you. How can you improve your chances of getting accepted to these different universities over time? So, that was a big piece of it.

Another piece was also just expanding the programs that we would offer students. We now expanded into tutoring for test prep and academic tutoring. We have a startup internship program. We have a research scholars program. We have an AI scholars program. We’re able to not just provide college admissions counseling but also provide additional extracurriculars for students and tutoring as needed.

Sramana Mitra: And these are all paid programs?

Hanmei Wu: Yes. They are paid programs.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to $10M+ in Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu
1 2 3 4 5