Disrupting Legacy Systems and Exiting for Six Figures - Devon Gethers, Founder of EarlyAdmit

All right, I'm here with Devon, founder of Early Admit, who recently got acquired for six figures. Devon, how you doing today?

I'm doing good, thank you, Andrew. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah. So for those that may not know you, do you want to give just a brief introduction of yourself?

Yeah, of course. A little bit about myself. I, in college, I studied behavioral science and finance, and I was very curious to learn a little bit more about the intersection of both of those things. And so after college, I joined a private equity firm based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. And they primarily Invest in enterprise SaaS and branded consumer products, which, which again, which was what I was really interested in was sort of the intersection of both of those. It was traditional growth equity, so series B to series D, you know, writing check sizes between 20 to 40 million dollars. And I spent three years at that firm and learned a lot. And so I did early on the side. And then about eight months ago, I decided to depart from that investment firm and go and launch my own venture capital fund called Meridian Ventures. And I'm currently a first year student at Harvard Business School right now.

Wow. I feel I went to Chico State. I, unfortunately, Harvard did not accept my application. I feel I'm on the, I'm on the lower side of IQ here. Congrats on all the accolades, man. That's awesome. So what made you, uh, what interests you about entrepreneurship? You were in venture capital. You're at Harvard now, and then you built early admit what, what made you, you know, want to kind of jump in and build a startup?

Yeah, so I think that entrepreneurship is somewhat innate to me. Um, it's, it's rolling through, it's rolling through the blood. Um, I've been very entrepreneurial, curious since a little kid. You know, when I was young, I grew up in a single parent household in Washington State. That situation really caused me to have a lens of how to create value. And So I was 11 years old, Andrew, when I remember going to the dollar store and I went and purchased raspberry thin mints, peanut butter truffles. And I went and created a sell script. And I would go around the neighborhood and I would knock on the door and I would have this big smile on my face and I would sell candy for a profit. And that was really the cusp of this excitement to want to. Want to create value and really be a salesperson. And so I took that with me kind of into. Into different settings and started to try to find ways where I could create stuff for other people and that led me ultimately, after business, or sorry, after college and undergrad, to starting early.

Admit that is an awesome story. I would do funny stuff like that. I guess it's not funny, but like I would sell baseball cards. I had an ebay store, like really young, just, you know, I think there's some breed of entrepreneurs that just start really, really early and the bug just never leaves you. So that's, that's awesome to hear. Tell me about just so people know, early admin. What does it do, what problem does it solve? And why did you start it?

Yeah, well, I'll start with the problem statement and then kind of walk through a little bit of the business model. But when I was. So I was admitted into a pretty a fairly new and unique program that Harvard Business School and other university systems alike offer called a deferment program. So you actually apply your senior year of college and then if you're fortunate, you gain admission and then you have an opportunity to go and gain two to four years of professional work experience before matriculating to the full time program. And so, you know, when I was in college, I had this ambition of applying to hbs. And what I realized quickly was, well, first let me back up first. What I did was I wanted to understand how you get into hbs. For me, I was a first generation student, so I didn't really know what that process looked like. When I was in undergrad it was open enrollment. And so I would ask people who went to the University of Utah who effectively made it to hbs. And many of them said, hey, you should consider hiring an admissions consultant. And so the next thing that I naturally did was I went and looked at admission consultants. And there were a couple of things that were pretty surprising to me. The first was that the cost was just unbearable. I mean, legacy admission consultants were charging north of $300 an hour. And quite honestly, that's just not a rate or affordable services and resources that many people around the world could afford. And so it was too expensive. A lot of the coaches looked the exact same. So there was a lack of divers. These admission consultants were very selective with who they wanted. They were motivated by success rate. So if they could maximize that success rate, they were looked as really the de facto player for customers to go to. And for me, I knew that that really caused this perpetual cycle of inequality. And so the last sort of problem here was that full time consultants were focused exclusively on full time applicants because the denominator is really what a consultant would care. So there's this new program called deferment, and the denominator is not that large. But in my mind, I looked at this as an opportunity for growth. I knew that these programs were really amazing and that I believe that many university systems would roll them out. So I was viewing this as a wedge into the market. The business model when we went to market was focused on admission, admission consulting services. So it was mostly a consulting service business when we started. As we grew that business, it really took on a new form we offered. So we expanded into other graduate school offerings. We expanded into career preparation. So if you're a college student looking to find employment post graduation, we would help with that. And then, you know, we even expanded in terms of not just going D2C, but creating an enterprise offering for university systems, which is fascinating as well. And we can kind of dive into that if you're interested about how to tease out admissions consulting. That's kind of some red tape for some of these university systems and create a product around that that I love how.

How succinct of just the understanding of the problem. I don't know that much about college applications. I just applied and went to school. I don't.

Chico? You went to Chico State?

Yeah, I just said, I want to go there, and that was it. I. But I love just like, also the mission, too, because I can see it reminds me of. And correct me if I'm wrong, but it kind of reminds me of, like, the H1B visa process, where it's kind of like a lottery. And so, like, there's not a lot of, you know, the success rate is really low and it's really randomized. It's not really, you know, necessarily fair. I. I don't have strong opinions here, but to my knowledge that's. Is that kind of similar to how the admissions process can work? Like, it's opaque and sort of.

It is, yeah, you're. You're exactly spot on. And you know the issue with this idea that, like, we. We obviously know, right? Like, if you can afford resources that help with a writing process, for example, that a key element and component of your application is how you write and how you can tell a narrative that has, like, an actual impact and outcome. And so if there's a segment of people who can afford those services, then naturally the quality of their application is going to be higher than for people who just don't have access to those resources. And so, again, this. This has a direct correlation with the type of demographic and diversity that we see at some of these elite business schools. And it was just important to me that that was democratized in a way that would allow and uplift more diversity at these big schools. Because it all starts with education, Andrew. And then after that, we see real outcomes happening in corporate America.

Yeah, I think what you built is so noble. I mean, it just seems like this product, I've, I looked at the numbers. There's obviously substantial track, like, you helped a lot of people, like getting into colleges. And, you know, it's, you know, there's the argument of, like, should you go to college or not? You should go to college. But for the people that use your product, you help them get into a school in a way they might have not otherwise. Like, that's incredible. Like, you really had, you know, I, you know, just think about, like, if they never went to college because of you, like, you may have had that outcome on someone anyways. I just think that's just incredible how you built that and you understood this and then built a solution for it. So my next question, I, I guess would be, when did you really feel like you. Did you ever have a moment when you felt like you, like, really bad product market fit where you maybe took a step back and you kind of said, like, I, there's something really here. Like, I know you knew the problem, but you still have to get the customer. Was there like a moment or a place, just anything, where you just kind of thought to yourself, this could go somewhere?

Yeah, it's, it's a good question. I was, you'll enjoy this. Did you ever, I don't know if you ever worked at Spiff out of Utah, but I was going to use that Utah Frick, Utah phrase, which is, I got a little ahead of my skis in the sense that I built the product before building the business. So before everything, anything was formalized that already had a product out there, and I took this product effectively put it in the hands of customers for free, or who would otherwise be potential customers, garnered the feedback from them, and then iterated on it. And there were slight variations, I would say, but ultimately, I think that what our customer base wanted was a person who was, who would take humility, inspire them, and really work with them to deliver a high quality outcome. And so I would say, like, PMF wasn't. It wasn't too complicated for us. But what was complicated, Andrew, was how we acquired customers. I'm more than happy to jump into that.

Oh, yeah, yeah. How did you get them? How'd you get your first customers?

Yeah, it was, it was scrappy. It was Scrappy. It was like, I feel like I was going back knocking those doors again, but, but digitally this time. So it was a founder led outbo motion originally and, and it was, you know, either cold outbound on email or I think a high success rate was going on social media platforms and finding those target market customers. And then I would say over time that naturally, that, that naturally morphed into I would say a more sophisticated model which was we developed core practices in SEO. We really developed an online presence with social media, with content marketing that allowed us to create a lot of organic leads. And then we did a couple of things that I felt like were pretty unique. So one was just this isn't unique, but one was like as we were able to have more successful customers who had positive experiences with our product, then referrals and word of mouth really helped flywheel that network effect for us. But we as a company, we went and hired about 75 campus ambassadors is what we classified, classified them as. And these were students that we, that we interviewed. They were, what we wanted to solve for was someone who was extremely active on their campus, a leader, somebody who we knew and who we knew was interested in going to business school at some point. And they acted as really an engine for acquiring customers for us. And we ran an affiliate program with them. So we effectively, any lead that they would bring in, we'd give them some percentage of the sell. But they got us in front of massive audiences. And we had 75ambassadors that represented unique institutions all across the globe. And so that campus ambassador, we would have them on maybe a monthly cadence, go to a club, they would do an event and then they would bring us there and then we would sell that product out for them. So that helped get that flywheel effect going. And so the combination of all those things, I think after year two of our business really allowed us to, to grow and scale at a rapid rate.

I'm, I'm really impressed, like, because it seems like you nailed so many different distribution channels, specifically the ambassador programs. I've invested in two college based startups before and both kind of stumbled onto an ambassador program and that led to being kind of the most effective way to get expand into other schools. And so I don't know if that was like, like you just kind of knew that would work because the two situations that I know of, they kind of just sort of stumbled onto it. Like was it was this, like were you like, hey, we need ambassadors or was it like to, were you approached by students to be ambassadors?

It was a Little bit of a stumble, to be fully honest. And it was, the stumble actually was fascinating. The stumble tended to be we were, we weren't just first movers in a market market Andrew, but we were creating, we were creating this market. So you have, you have a parallel process with the, the university system and then early admit and we were effectively parallel branding this new program. And so we needed a way that we could expand the market size. And so we actually used campus ambassadors as a way to help students understand about like this brand new two plus two deferment program. And then we found ways to monetize that. And that, that was, that was really important for us.

Man. Hearing all of you say this, like, makes me wish like I bought this business. Like it feels like I love the mission. I love how the problem it solved the just the impact it had on people's lives positively. And then just your customer acquisition strategy sounds extremely sound. So bravo, man. This is your first startup, correct? That be built first?

Yeah, this is, this is the first startup. And, and I have to give a shout out to the team as well, by the way. Like they, it definitely was not just the solo person here.

And you're, and you're a humble leader too. Okay. All right. I, I, I really hope you start another company because it's all, you're, you're, you're doing all the right things. From, from what I can tell, selling into schools is super, super, super hard. Like one of the other startups that I, they just couldn't get past, they, because there's a lot of bureaucracy at schools, as I'm sure you know, they eventually figured it out, but it took a long time. And it sounds like you were able to kind of get, you know, to your first customers much faster than this other company I'm referring to. But anyways, just, I'm, I'm just very, very impressed at just how you, you put this all together. But now I want to talk about that position. That's, yeah, that's, that's, that's where I want to hear this go. What made you like, how did you find acquire.com and how, what made you want to sell the business?

Yeah, so Micro Acquire was a gem, I think. Like a hidden gem, actually. I would say. Yeah, so see, that's how early I was, I know acquired, which was a good move too, by the way. Acquire.com. so it was a hidden gem at the time. I think it was Acquire and then Flippa. But for a business at the scale that I was at. Good luck. Kind of trying to go run a traditional sell process for that. I think typically in the business that we're in, if we were to go out to market to sell this business, this is like a business that would be doing like 5 million in EBITDA or something like that, right? So I really love, I think it was just a Google put.