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.

Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying is that the lifetime value of the customers is very high. People sign up for an extended period of time to develop themselves and their resumes.

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?

Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure 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?

Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: That’s interesting because you had already validated that there was a market for what you were offering. One of the things that I don’t like about demo days at all is that a company just goes into an accelerator with no validation, and within three months has to go in front of investors and raise money; it hasn’t had the time to do the kind of validation you’re talking about.

You, on the other hand, had done several years of validation before going into demo day.

Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure 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.

Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 1)

EdTech is notoriously difficult to build at venture scale. Hanmei is doing it.

Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me a bit about your go-to-market strategy? I understand the system integrator part is straightforward. You do partnerships with system integrators who build on top of your platform.

When you’re choosing to work with startups or product companies who are building their products on your platform, how do you find these people? How do they find you? What’s the go-to-market strategy for that?