Julia Haber's Helping You Tap College Students to Grow Your Business

We built the end to end rails that helps brands work with students from payments, contracting tasks and deliverables. We bought the domain homefromcollege.com when the world shut down in Covid. There's no kind of cool brand of the college market. I was 23.

How did you know how to raise money?

I did not. We have been a revenue generating business from the beginning. We generated I think a little under $1 million before we raised around a $6 million round.

Hey, business besties. Welcome back to the Female Founder World podcast. I'm Jasmine. I'm the host of the show person behind all things Female Founder World. Today I'm talking to Julia Haber, the founder of Home From College. Julia, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me.

Okay, people that don't know Home from College, what are you guys doing?

Yeah, we are a tech platform that helps brands work with college students at scale. So that could be anything from ambassador programs, focus groups, Gen Z advisory panels, your normal intern. We built the end to end rails that helps brands work with students from payments, contracting tasks and deliverables and really have positioned ourselves as a career platform for students. So helping them get their foot in the door, get their paid, their first paid experiences, and all that type of jazz.

I recommend Home from College in the Female Founder World group chat all the.

Time because we see people come in and we ask, where are you from? And we're like so amazing. Thank you for that.

Yeah, of course, Absolutely. It's such a good, it's such a good platform. And we're going to talk in this conversation a little bit about how businesses and brands can work with college kids and college students and Gen Z and to do different things in their business and what that untapped potential is to help grow, which I think will be really interesting. And you're absolute expert at that. But then also your story, what you've Learned, you've raised $10 million.

Like we're going to talk about that.

How you've been scaling the business and raising money. And then I also want to get your thoughts on marketing to Gen Z because again, Gen Z is like one side of your marketplace. So you clearly have figured out how to reach them.

We continue to learn and be humbled. I feel like they're evolving a lot as consumers, so definitely excited to chat about it.

Okay. So this business kicked off in 2021. Talk me through what the launch was.

Like, so I can even maybe back up a little bit. So I started my first company when I was a freshman in college. It was an experiential marketing agency. So the same way you think of the world of pop ups, this was specifically focused on college campuses. So we worked with the Shopify's Refiner 29T mobiles of the world to create basically 40 foot trailer activations on campuses. And when brands would activate on these markets, I would travel around with them. I think I've been to almost 100 college campuses in my life. But what we would learn was really that brands were trying to acquire an audience. But a really interesting learning that emerged was that students wanted to work for these brands. So it was this intersection between hiring and acquiring that kind of resonated as a deeper thesis that people want to work for brands they love. And that has really changed, I'd say in the last five to seven years because there is this emergence of consumerism and TikTok and wanting to fall in love with the founders and the business building piece that was really missing. And we bought the domain homefromcollege.com, really when the world shut down in Covid. And we spent about a year and a half doing product testing and focus groups to understand what is the problem we're trying to solve for students and for companies and what does that connection point look like. And one of the big things that we've really focused on is being a brand ourselves. So one of the learnings we created was that there's no kind of cool brand of the college market. There's no place that is synonymous with going to school besides the college you go to. We said, what if we can be the career platform that students actually love, that get them their first paid experience that connects them with brands they love. And through that we really built a foundation of trust with students through that product testing and focus groups. And then what really emerged was our core product that we call the gig, which for brands we call Gas Gen Z Access as a service. And that was our initial product. We really rolled out in 2022 after we raised a little bit of friends and family and strategic capital and then from there have scale, scale to really build this end to end large tech solution that Fortune 100 and 500 brands and small startups also use to really reach that audience.

Wow, okay, this is very impressive. I want to know a little bit about fundraising and how that's kind of been a part of your story.

We have been a revenue generating business from the beginning. So the way that we make money is that companies pay home from college to use our platform. It's typically an annual or a monthly subscription. And, and all opportunities we create are paid for students. So there's always two pieces. It's never a paid product for students. We believe that it should be fully accessible. So in terms of financing, we made a decision to be the type of business that can create, you know, revenue generating moments from the beginning. So we didn't have this nervous relationship with financing, which I think is, I mean, as a female founder, we all know it's very challenging to get funding, but we knew that that would be a power lever that we would be able to pull. The early financing we raised was from a number of strategic players in the media space who had brand connections, some friends and family, and that was enough to build an initial proof of concept where we generated, I think a little under a million dollars maybe before we raised a seed round. And that gave us the leverage to then raise a larger institutional round. And our lead investor is Google Ventures. They're amazing. We raised around a $6 million round for our seed round, but it gave us a lot of leverage because we had a substantial amount going on before we went to raise a larger round.

Can I ask how old you were when you started this?

I was 23.

How did you know how to raise money?

I did not. I definitely did not. But one thing I do know how to do is build relationships and that has been my secret sauce. I think in a lot of these successful moments where people, maybe the person sitting in front of you is not going to write you a check today, but they really could in the future and if you do your part in building relationship with them. I got a piece of advice from someone that said even if you get a no now, every three to six months, send them a note, send them an article, send them something that you've done and be top of mind because you never know when it will come around. And the Google Ventures investment actually happened because we got a ton of inbound from investors and we were actually pretty far along in a process. And then I got a DM from a partner at Google Ventures on LinkedIn and I had met him at a different fund multiple years ago and within like two weeks we raised the round. So that is because of relationships.

So when you were like 23 or 24, you'd hit a million in revenue.

A little under.

Yep. Wow, this is very impressive. I was not doing that at 24. I don't know what I was doing.

You definitely were doing something amazing and impressive.

Definitely not that I want to know how you got those first customers and by Customers, I mean both your, like Gen Z community, your students, but then also the brands who are coming on to advertise in the platform. Because that's where your revenue is coming from, right?

Yes. On the brand side, we. So I am definitely a salesperson. I am historically known for selling things that don't exist and calling someone and saying we need to make this happen. And is my co founder happy about that? No. But it has been the reason why been successful because it has pushed us to the next level instead of just selling what's directly in front in front of us. And if I had one piece of advice for people who are nervous about their first customers, it would be to make something and sell something that maybe doesn't exist, but that could be in the realm of possibility. Because if you can share a vision that people can get excited about, they'll trust you to figure it out.

Like what kind of. What's an example of that? That's like, that's a, like, I love that idea. Tell me how you've done that.

So we have. We're actually rolling out a new product that integrates with Shopify and we work with Liquid Death and Poppy. And what continued to emerge is brands want to sample products with college students at scale and get the data of who are these people getting the products and are they going to create content around it and are they actually my ideal customer and where can all that data live? And I had no idea how to actually think about creating that. But I had a number of conversations with both Liquid Deaths and Poppy about creating a fulfillment opportunity through the back end of our product. And we said this doesn't exist today, but it will exist and it will exist in X period of time. And of course it takes longer than you think it will. But when you can get them to be excited about the investment with you, then you have a partner along for the journey to help actually give you feedback as you're going. So now that product exists, Poppy sends thousands and thousands of cans of product through our back end. And that was something that we just had an idea around that we said, okay, think it's in the realm of possibility. Let's go for it.

Wow. Okay. I need more advice from you on selling it is not my strong suit at all. And so I'm always just so envious and also like curious about people that that's just innate for. Because I think it's such an advantage.

I think it's not one size fits all, which is interesting because we have 10 salespeople and even training them on our product and how that works. Everyone has their own shtick. It's really interesting and I think it's about harnessing your superpower. So something that I do pretty much on every call, not even unintentionally, is complimenting someone immediately. Love your earrings. What's that background? This weather's crazy. Something that is just a neutralizer where it says, we're friends and I'm not trying to take your money right now. And then everyone feels a little bit disarmed. And ideally, if you can find the person behind the sale and what makes them tick and what's most important to them in their daily lives and what will. And you can even directly ask, like, what is your biggest focus right now? Or what's your biggest pain point that you know relates to this topic? And then you can define your pitch to that, which is so helpful. But I think you have to meet the audience where they are. If they're giving you a hard no, take the no and move on. So I think it's knowing your strengths and leaning into that even if it doesn't feel like a sales tactic and then knowing that your strengths are going to be different than other people. So don't try and compare it.

Okay, so that's one side of your marketplace. Talk to me about getting the college students involved. How do you reach them?

When we first started, we threw up a landing page and said, we're building the home for career for college students. Sign up basically as just a wait list. We had a series of strategies that were not intentional strategies. I have a number of relationships with collegiate influencers and this happened to be around Covid when no one knew what to do with themselves because everyone felt helpless. And specifically people who had platforms like influencers during that time didn't really know what to do to help. And what we ended up doing was having them put a link in their bio to home from college and people would sign up. And I would say, in the first two weeks we had over 10,000 people just sign up. And then I think the best thing that we did was involving that audience in the decision making of our business. We would host weekly focus groups with thousands of students and just show them different concepts and ideas and branding. And we made them feel like owners in the business so that what we were doing was a more authentic to that audience. But B, they felt an investment in having it be successful. And that created this really organic word of mouth growth loop. And to this day, we don't spend money on marketing to Students. We have hundreds of thousands of students across every college campus in the US and that has fostered a really trusted environment because not only do we talk the talk, we walk the walk. Because every feature within our product, every element promotes the lack of imposter syndrome and paid opportunities and being okay to be who you are. And if we just said that and didn't have our product show that, then we would be getting canceled. But I think continuing to have that gut check and that Gen Z, you know, voice in your head and actually Gen Z advisory panels and support has been the reason why we've been able to build that authentic relationship.

How do you get people engaged enough that they're going to turn up like thousands of people turn up to an advisory board? Like, that's insane.

Insane. I wouldn't say that that could necessarily work today at the same level. I think it was. There was a lot going on in the world. But what we do have is a Gen Z advisor group that we meet with on a monthly basis and we made it a thing. And for brands who are doing this, I would definitely recommend we branded it as though it was like truly like you got on an advisory board as though you were late stage in your career and you're on a public board. We have like 75 students and I would say 90% of them posted about it on LinkedIn and 90% of them have that on their like actual bio where it says Gen Z advisory panel, like board member. And I think creating that branding and storytelling for them to grab onto, to have that level of investment and being your loyalist is the way to do it.

How much of the, like, branding and the direction or not even just the branding direction, I guess like the features and the decisions that you make come from you as like the founder and what, what your vision is versus what's coming through the community. And this advisory board, I'm interested in that balance because we're thinking about, like, me personally, I'm thinking about redoing the website and involving the community in that. And I'm like, how much of it should be me versus letting the community lead that?

With any community, I believe you need to have really thoughtful guardrails because people get paralyzed by decision paralysis and not. If you're saying, hey, what should our landing page look like? It would be probably better to say, these are the three copy options for headers. Which one do you like best? Or these are three ways that we should, you know, have a call to action. Would this resonate with you? And giving options is Always good rather than keeping it open ended. So we typically will not bring the Gen Z advisory panel anything until we've done at least three rounds of internal and then we'll gut check it with them. And that process both on company and student.

I want to talk about some ways that businesses, the brands and the community people who are listening, how they can work with college students to move their business forward. So we've, I think the most obvious one that people think about and I often send people to home from college for is that like oh, I need a content creator. And that's kind of the first thing and you have plenty of people who can do that, but what else?

So I think there's three buckets that we talk about hiring, which is more labor intern type of work. So this could be your researcher, your salesperson, your copywriter, your UX designer, your anything that you would hire an intern or an entry level employee for. Then there's acquiring which is more of the marketing side. So this could be ambassador programs, decentralized sales teams on a student by student level a lot of grants will come in and say I'm launching a new app and or I'm launching a new product and I want my first 5,000 customers or I need people to download this app. What could that look like? They'll create mini student led sales teams to get their peers and friends on the app. And you can create incentive structures as well. So you can do bonuses, you can do referral links, you can do promo codes. That's a really great way to do it to drive actual business impact with students. And then I'd say the last piece is more insights. So focus groups, product testing, research reports, any like package design, all of these types of things or even like Amazon reviews, really common use case for brands.

Amazing. And what kind of when brands are coming to you, like what kind of budget are they working with to see if people are ballpark who are listening to this thinking this all sounds great, can I actually afford to do this?

So the way that it works is the lowest price point is $49 a month, which is to use the platform, list the gigs and essentially run your program on it, then the compensation and what you pay students to be involved is totally up to you. So if you're like hey, I only have $200 to work with, you know, 10 students and I need an Amazon review and maybe a piece of content, you can set that rate and if you're not getting the level of applicants that you want, then you can increase the rate so, so the starting point is totally up to you in terms of the talent. But these students are early and eager and they want to make an impact, but it doesn't need to break the bank.

Julia, I'm so interested in you and like how you've been able to grow and uplevel and become this founder and business leader and you've got a team of 20 something in such a short amount of time. Like, what are the things that you've done intentionally to be this version of yourself?

I think it's really easy to let comparison hijack you totally. It's horrible. But I think what we have done really well is slow and steady wins the race. When we started our business in 2021, there was maybe four competitors or five competitors that had raised much more funding than we had. And we kept our head down and we said, we know what we're gonna do, we're gonna take our time, we're gonna do what we can actually control. Rather than hire a million people out, build 10 different types of products and trust, try, you know, to launch products that may not work and then re pivot and reorient the whole team, we said, no, let's be small, let's take it slow. None of those businesses exist anymore. And I think that is a beautiful thing to learn, that you don't need to be moving at a rapid pace to be successful and that actually if you can take more strategy and thought to make it happen, you're probably going to win.

I want to ask you, we've spoken about fundraising, but I'm still, I'm still curious about this. Like, what do you think? Is it that the investors saw in you or saw in the business that made them want to want to invest?

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I had a very specific mindset about this fundraising and this fundraising round and I tell my friends this all the time. Who are going to raise. You need to be. Can I curse? Yeah, hot shit. Like, you need to walk in being like, you need me. And you are lucky to be having this conversation because there are other people waiting and if you don't take this, bye. And if you can't get to that headspace, don't raise yet. And I walked into every single conversation like that and I said, hey, you know, I have 25 minutes, I have to go. We have another call after this, but it's really lovely to meet you. And I made every conversation that I was interviewing them as much as they were interviewing me because inevitably, if that's true or not, it creates a power dynamic that is way more balanced because you're asking them for money. It's so weird. It's like, when does that actually happen in your life? It's like asking your parents, can I, you know, have money to go to the mall as a little kid? And they're like, like, no, you can't go. And now you're stuck. But this is, this is your livelihood, this is your baby. I think it's really important to create that power dynamic, to feel really even I, I think you can talk about metrics and what you need to be at, but I do truly believe it's how you show up in those conversations that creates FOMO and where you're playing the game as much as they are.

Love that. Julie. The last thing I want to ask you is for some resource recommendations, stuff that's been helping you grow and build and that you think other people who are interested in this space should go and check out.

So there's two things. One, I am part of a female founder book club and we meet every month and I think it has been one of the biggest game changers in the last year in my career. One, because it gives you a support system that is so refreshing and like minded. So if you have an opportunity to join a book club. Highly recommend. The second is the book that I'm currently reading, which is what's Mel Robbins book?

Oh, let them.

Let them tell me.

I haven't read it, but I've obviously watched all of the TikToks about it.

So I'm an audiobook person and her tone is just the most empowering thing. The let them theory, obviously is about you can't control the world. It will exhaust you to try and do it. But just let them do what they're going to do, but let you make choices that make your life better. And I think in the world of startups, when there's so many things that you can't control, I think finding the things that give you a little bit of peace to know that people are gonna do what they're gonna do, people are gonna say what they're gonna say. It is incredibly liberating. And that has been something that I've definitely.

Okay, I'm gonna download it. I also love an audiobook, especially when the author is reading it and she's.

A badass and her tone is super, like, inspiring. So I highly recommend.

Okay, amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you for having me.

And congratulations on everything you've built. I think so impressive.