Lydia Fayal built Admitsee from wireframes to 10,000 users by writing a 50-page business plan, recruiting users on campuses, and raising a $250,000 convertible note from Michael Baum. She skipped law school to go all in on the startup and got accepted to Imagine K-12.
Chapters
If you are not a technical co-founder, it's really important that you know how to build mockups, that you know how to wireframe, that you know how to sketch everything out. You need to do a lot more upfront, because developer hours are sacred. These are our first wireframes. We put together— this was, I think, 30, 40 pages of wireframes. We did this, you know, 2013. It was a while ago. Or 2012, 2013. We also did a lot more research about the market and the space and wanted to really test the value proposition. We decided, okay, we're gonna put together a business plan and enter it in the Wharton Business Plan Competition. That seemed to work for companies like Warby Parker, and hey, I love their glasses, so why not? Let's do the Wharton Business Plan Competition as a sort of way to get organized. We spent, you know, we had 50-page We had a 50-page business plan that we submitted to this. We went a little bit overboard. Did a lot of sort of market research. Looked at everyone else out there. Surveyed hundreds of people about what we were doing. So we actually sent out surveys to well over 1,000 people. Had at least 400 or 500 responses in the first round. Kept doing this, asking them about their experience in the application process, what they used, their willingness to share their materials. We were excited to kind of see, okay, in the Facebook generation, the younger people we surveyed, they were much more willing to share their full details and application history. From there, I personally built a Wix page where I uploaded some of my friends' application files, showed it to people, and again surveyed, asked more questions, met with people one-on-one, figured out what are we doing. You want to do a lot of research up front. Writing a business plan, it can kind of feel like mental masturbation. Just this ideas and the philosophical debates that go nowhere. But as first-time founders, I think it's a process worth going through. It will help you understand the value proposition. So back to where are we? We're in our final year of law school. We were also doing sort of other programs like the Wharton. I ended up doing the Wharton Certificate in Management, and she had a program in Hong Kong for an LLM and another. different Wharton certificate. We did not stop. Barely slept. In August 2013, we started traveling around to college campuses to recruit users. We had Admitsy-printed sunglasses, and we were handing them out in exchange for email addresses and to get people signed up for our internship program. We figured, OK, if we can recruit interns, they can recruit their friends. So, hey, that's what we did. We got dozens of interns at all the top I ended up moving to New York to be closer to our tech team, and then was commuting down to Philadelphia 2 days a week to finish up my degree. We started charging for beta access in January 2014. This is when we also submitted our final business plan to the Wharton Business Plan Competition, which goes on all spring, and there are a bunch of different levels. Not that important, but it helps you get organized. So, May 2014. This is when it started to get to decision time. We had law school exams. We also started applying to angel groups and to accelerators to figure out, okay, how can we do this? When we graduated, we were supposed to study for the New York bar exams. We both had offers to practice law in New York. What did we have for Admitsee? Well, at this point, we had an MVP up and running. We had around 10 customers. 10,000 users. We had some money, but not that much. And it wasn't really anything to brag about, really. It was still mostly vision. Do you take a risk? Or do you go the easy route, the— that pays very well, of going into corporate law? We had to make a decision. We were scheduled to spend 10 weeks in bar exam prep classes. These are classes that your law firm pays for, and you're stuck in them from like 8:00 AM until 6:00 PM every day, and you're doing homework. All of our classmates were in these bar exam prep classes. We decided, you know what, screw it. We're gonna fundraise. We're gonna go out and we're going to get enough money and enough traction and enough investors interested in this that we can do this full-time. So instead of studying for the bar, we bounced between San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, New York. We went to the South by Southwest EdTech conference in Las Vegas. There was a lot of bouncing around. I also was invited to go to the Founder.org event in Paris 2 weeks before the bar exam. Again, probably should have been studying. I remember my then-fiancé said, you know, this is ridiculous. Don't go. This whole thing is a boondoggle and you're an idiot for going. Needless to say, that relationship did not work out. What did work was the Paris trip. We got our first money in, $250,000, in the form of a convertible note. And it also, this is good because it came from Michael Baum, who is the founding CEO of Splunk. So it was really establishing that network and getting people serious about this idea. So, we get back from that. We did spend one week cramming for the bar exams. We watched all the video lectures at like 2 and sometimes 3x speed, 'cause we just We didn't have time. We should have failed. We didn't, but we definitely should have failed, and we kind of assumed we did. So we're done with that. We have 2 days of hell, the bar exam. Everyone leaves to go on vacation. We immediately went back into fundraising mode. We did not stop. We kept pitching. We kept meeting with accelerators. We ended up getting invited to go out to San Francisco to interview for the Imagine K-12 Accelerator. This is known as the Y Combinator of ed tech. It shares one of the partners with YC. It was founded by Tim Brady, who's the first employee at Yahoo, also the CEO of QuestBridge. So it was very established in our space. And we thought, okay, if we can get into this, we're golden. I mean, this is gonna be an amazing opportunity. So we flew out there, did an interview. 24 hours later, we were invited to join. Great. But, okay, we're still living in New York. We still haven't told our law firms that we're not showing up to our October start date. So we'd have to turn down those cushy salaries. We'd have to refund tens of thousands of dollars in the prepaid classes and stipends. We'd actually have to write our law firm checks. And we were broke. So that sucked. Oh, and we'd have to bail on leases and move cross-country. We didn't hesitate. This is a photo of my co-founder bungee jumping. I mean, we didn't just Figuratively go and take a giant leap. I mean, this is actually— I don't know. I thought it was cool. But yeah. My biggest regret is not doing this sooner. I think the longer you hold on to a Plan B, the more it muddles up your Plan A. Go all in. If you have a good idea, if you have good people around you, take that leap. The earlier the better. You're only gonna have more things later on that slow you down.
