Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: That’s much trickier. What I see that’s really unique and very interesting in your business is the fact that you have taken a category—this college counseling or preparing high school students for college—which tends to be very transactional. You know, people pay on an hourly basis, and little bits and pieces, dribs and drabs. And you’ve turned it into a two, three, four-year, six-month kind of long-term, relationship-based, high customer lifetime value business, which I think is quite unique in your space.

Hanmei Wu: Yes. It really starts with our mission. Our mission is to empower students to become the most successful version of themselves. We’ve always gone into every customer interaction and every webinar with just our brand. We really want to focus on that piece.

Our goal isn’t to get every student into Harvard. We would like that, and that is the goal of some of our students; but it’s not of most of them. We are helping them get into their best-fit college and helping them become the version of themselves that they’d be most proud of. That means a little different for everyone. We’ve always approached our business with that personalization, that customer-first perspective. And I do think that has been a big part of why we’ve been able to really get that customer loyalty.

Sramana Mitra: You’re also doing some very creative things – what you just told me about internships, right? You don’t usually see great internships from high school students in college applications.

Hanmei Wu: No, it’s not an easy thing to do. It actually came from listening to our customers. Our first few customers said, “Hey, can you help my child get an internship?” I said, “Well, I can try.” Then I thought about it and decided to build an actual program around this.

This is something I wish I had when I was their age. I could have benefited a lot from having gone through a mini version of that as a 16-year-old versus going through it the first time ever as a college junior, and just having no clue what I was doing. I wish I had more mentorship around this very overwhelming process of interviewing with real companies at a later age.

Sramana Mitra: So last question. Tell me about your team. How big is the team? Where are they located? Is it all Berkeley-based? What’s the configuration of your company?

Hanmei Wu: We are actually fully remote. We’ve hired team members all over the country and even some internationally. We have a couple of engineers in Brazil, for example. We did a lot of our hiring during COVID, so that led to just a very distributed workforce.

Sramana Mitra: I’m a believer. I’ve been running a remote-only, complete virtual company since 2005.

Hanmei Wu: We try to get together at least once a year. The entire company goes for an offsite. We’re over 80 full-time folks today.

Sramana Mitra: That’s awesome. Is there anything else that you want to share that I haven’t asked you about?

Hanmei Wu: Not off the top of my mind.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Wonderful story. Congratulations.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu
1 2 3 4 5 6 7