Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So, talk to me about the various business models. Is it the regular one – the college counseling one where you are hiring mentors or college counselors by the hour, and they’re being paired with the families that are seeking guidance?

Talk about internships. How do internships work?

Hanmei Wu: Yes, it’s actually another mini marketplace within Empowerly. So, we find mostly bootstrapped, pre-seed, or seed stage startups looking for support in marketing, business development, and maybe some engineering. Then, we’re able to provide highly vetted high school interns who’ve gone through assessments and training through us to do a summer internship.

Sramana Mitra: These are paid internships or free internships?

Hanmei Wu: It can really vary by the startup. Some get academic credit, some are unpaid, some are paid a stipend or hourly. It really varies depending on the company.

Sramana Mitra: And who’s paying for this? The companies are paying to be in this program?

Hanmei Wu: The companies do not pay today to be in the program.

Sramana Mitra: So, the students pay to be considered.

Hanmei Wu: Yes, the students do. We are helping them with how to interview properly and how to do their resume. It’s actually very helpful for the students because they are getting that experience of job hunting.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. This is something I would like to use and tap into.

Hanmei Wu: Yes. In the early days of Empowerly, we actually had some students come to us and say, “Hey, we’d love to intern for you even if it’s unpaid or I could get academic credit for it, we just want the experience.”

Sramana Mitra: It looks very good on the resume. On the college application, it looks very, very good.

Hanmei Wu: It’s great on the resume. For us also, they were very good, especially in social media.

Sramana Mitra: They live on social media.

Hanmei Wu: They do. So, they were able to help us make videos. They helped us with research, with content, and with some of the websites in the early days.

Sramana Mitra: I will follow up on that. Let’s come back to your story.

Hanmei Wu: We would love to help. It helped Empowerly so much. I want to help other companies at that stage too.

Sramana Mitra: So $1.5 million seed. What other financing have you raised?

Hanmei Wu: Yes, we’ve raised a couple of rounds since then. So, our most recent was a $15 million Series B round. We announced that in early 2024.

Sramana Mitra: And what was the Series A?

Hanmei Wu: The Series A was $10 million.

Sramana Mitra: $10 million. So to raise your $10 million Series A after the $1.5 million seed, what were the metrics and how did you get to those? $10 million Series A is a big amount of money.

Hanmei Wu: Oh, yes. We were already at an eight-figure annual revenue at that time. We were showing pretty significant growth. Our margins were pretty good. They were 70% and still are 70%. We’re able to collect a lot of the payments within the first six months of signing up with Empowerly.

Sramana Mitra: So, people don’t pay when they’re signing up?

Hanmei Wu: They do pay when they’re signing up, but sometimes they’d sign up for a four-year package, but they’re not paying over the four years. They’re mostly paying upfront.

Sramana Mitra: Oh, I see.

Hanmei Wu: So I think that was something that looks good for fundraising.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu
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