Why Getting Press Does Not Guaruntee a Company's Success | Lydia Fayal

So press. One good thing about getting money from a lot of seasoned investors is you get cool TechCrunch articles like that where they're like, yay, seed funding from Silicon Valley heavyweights. And we're like, woohoo, that's a cool title. People always want to know about press, because we seem to get a lot of it somehow. How important is it? Honestly, it's not that important. Press isn't going to help you raise money. It's not a measurement of success. But press can help improve other KPIs, key performance indicators. It helps build brand awareness and establish you as a thought leader in your space. So the way that we've gotten a lot of press is that we systematically release data to journalists through PR and through a very cheap publicist. people can understand what we have that we can put out there, and what sort of insights we have into the college process and career process and differences there. That's my awesome co-founder Steph on Fox News. She usually does these speeches. I hate public speaking. Press, though, is something to kind of stay aware of, is that there's also bad press. So when we were releasing all these data points, one thing that we looked at with the tens of thousands of application files in our database is students who applied to Harvard and Stanford, how did their applications differ? And we noticed that some essay topics tended to do better at Harvard and some tended to do better at Stanford. And we looked at tone and said, okay, what are the words that are more formal and what are the words that are more informal? So a lot of people mentioned their parents. We said, let's look at essays that refer to their parents as mother and father versus essays that referred to their parents as mom and dad. And we saw the students who referred to their parents as mother and father were more likely to get into Harvard and rejected from Stanford. And the opposite was true if they referred to their parents as mom and dad. So we put out that data and just were like, hmm, hey, look at this. It's cool. This is what resulted. I mean, it's just— we didn't come up with any of these titles, but it drew a lot of crazy attention last summer. Where my favorite is, if you got into Harvard, your college essay was probably pretty sad. It's like, bummer. It's like, I guess none of my kids will ever go to Harvard now with this attached to my name. But yeah, so interesting press, interesting press. It also attracted a lot of criticism from college consultants who are one of our main indirect competitors. College consultants fear Admitsy as a market disruptor. They worry that all the data that we're sharing could push them out of the space the same way that travel agents were replaced by data aggregators TripAdvisor and Kayak. They've come after us in a few other articles. They've even claimed that colleges were going to shoot us down based on plagiarism concerns. So we were like, oh crap. I don't know. I don't think they will, but let's find out. We started talking to college admissions officers. What we learned from them was actually they were more worried about students plagiarizing off of the college consultants, having the consultants write the essays for them. And what the colleges wanted to know was how can they use our company to connect with potential applicants and candidates. So we started exploring this and realized, hey, this is actually a much bigger market. I mean, we Forrest Gumped our way into a $5.2 billion market that we didn't even know existed. the college recruitment side. So we started working with colleges, you know, and it's still very early on there, but we are helping really modernize and democratize the way that students find colleges and also colleges find students. As we grow up with our users and we get more into the career readiness side, we're also helping candidates find employers and employers find employees. So, Tim,