Bootstrapping an EdTech Venture to $6M, Ready to Scale with AI: Daniel Santos, CEO of Prepory (Part 1)

This story is a great example of an EdTech company that has built a validated, bootstrapped, profitable business that can potentially be scaled using AI.

Sramana Mitra: Alright, Daniel, let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Daniel Santos: I was born and raised in South Florida. I was born in a small community called Opa-locka, raised in Hialeah. They’re generally low-income, primarily Latino populations. My parents were first-generation immigrants from the Dominican Republic.

I think one of the big shifts connected to my entrepreneurial journey is that I went to a K-12 charter school. It was a small school that was really nurturing and had a tight-knit community but wasn’t necessarily the most academically ambitious. Without having attended that school, I probably wouldn’t have gone on the entrepreneurial journey that I ended up opting in for.

Sramana Mitra: But you did college before your entrepreneurial journey?

Daniel Santos: Yes, I did. I went to University of Central Florida, a state school here in Florida. I graduated with a degree in International Relations and Political Science.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Daniel Santos: I graduated undergrad in 2015.

Sramana Mitra: That gives us a marker of what’s happening in the industry at that time. So, what did you do next?

Daniel Santos: My entrepreneurial journey actually began in undergrad in about 2012–2013. One of my best friends from that K-12 high school and I started reflecting on our own academic journeys. We were both academically competitive in high school, but because of the school we went to, we didn’t understand the college admissions process or what it took to go to a good school—or even what an Ivy League institution was.

My friend heard about something called QuestBridge, a scholarship program geared to high-achieving, low-income students. He became obsessed with higher education. By the end of it, he got admitted to the University of Pennsylvania with a full ride. When he got there, he was amazed but also frustrated that students from our community didn’t know how to navigate the process.

That became the birth story of our initial business: a college admissions consulting business to support high school students through the college admissions process. We launched in 2012–2013 and started working with a few high school students from our own community.

In 2015–2016, after I graduated from undergrad, I initially planned to go to law school. But after conversations with my co-founder, we decided to go all-in on our business idea. In 2015, I became the first full-time employee of our bootstrap startup.

Sramana Mitra: What customer segment did you go after? You said you went back to your own community, a low-income community, to consult with students. That’s a community that doesn’t have a lot of money to pay. What is your business model and who pays for all this?

Daniel Santos: That’s a great point. We learned quickly that our community wasn’t able to pay for this offering. While we continued to work with a handful of families we met through other networks—like friends at Penn and my university—we realized there was a gap.

So, we started partnering with high schools. While individual families couldn’t afford our services, a high school with ambitious students might be able to fund the service for them. That year, we partnered with three high schools to supplement their college admissions counseling. Most school counselors focused on socio-emotional or mental health counseling—not academic or college admissions. We became that support for these schools and helped radically change outcomes for their students.

That was the initial phase of growing our business. It bought us time to enter new markets and reach new audiences, including individual families who could afford to retain our services. Now we work with about 1,100 individual families supporting them through the college admissions process.

Sramana Mitra: Did you keep the high school business, or did you switch completely to the individual family business?

Daniel Santos: We still support high schools and work with larger organizations like entire school districts, large NGOs, and international nonprofits. We deliver college admissions counseling to their students as well.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Bootstrapping an EdTech Venture to $6M, Ready to Scale with AI: Daniel Santos, CEO of Prepory
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