Startup Spotlight: Scholarships360 raises $250,000 to scale platform that helps students pay for college

CHAPEL HILL – Scholarships360 has closed $250,000 from four investors in what the company’s co-founders called a “pre-seed round.”

The funding will boost the company’s technology platform, which provides guidance to college students and prospective college students on scholarships and resources, enabling the company to invest in additional personalization features, the company announced in a statement today.

The company was co-founded by brothers Brian and Will Geiger, who told WRAL TechWire in an exclusive interview on the funding and the company’s history that they founded the company inspired by their own experiences as first-generation college students.

“Whatever background a student comes from and whatever paths they are considering for their future, we want to help them make smart, data-driven decisions and successfully navigate the new education landscape,” said Will Geiger.

From concept to fundraise

“Brian and I are both first-generation college students and had to DIY much of our admissions and financial aid process,” said Will Geiger in the exclusive interview. “As millennials, we looked to the internet for answers. Unfortunately, we were met with a ton of bad information.”

Geiger told WRAL TechWire that there are three primary challenges for prospective college students who would become the first in their family to attend an institution of higher education.

Will Geiger, co-founder of Scholarships360. Image provided by Scholarships360.

Brian Geiger, co-founder of Scholarships360. Image provided by Scholarships360.

First, no one else in their household graduated, noted Geiger. That matters because there’s a lack of practical help, but also because it’s hard to provide assurance to first-generation college students that they’re on the right track, Geiger observed.

Then, first-generation college students are more likely to be low-income students and come from homes with lower wealth, and first-generation college students are “more likely to attend high schools with insufficient support resources,” said Geiger.

Furthermore, said Geiger, data is not collected on first-generation college students, which can mean that understanding the challenges and potential solutions is even murkier than would otherwise be observable. Making it more complicated is that the very term “first-generation” is not well-defined, as one researcher defined that the range of who could be constituted as a first-generation college student is wide, 22%-77%, depending on definition, Geiger stated, noting a study reported on by the New York Times.

“Finances are obviously one of the big reasons that first generation and low income students don’t attend college,” said Geiger. “This has been exacerbated by rising college costs, student loan debt, and economic hardships that many families have experienced due to COVID-19.”

The two brothers set out to change the availability of resources for first generation college students, and for students interested in gaining more access to scholarships and resources.

It was 2010. Will Geiger was an admissions officer, and Brian was going through the college admission process.

“We were shocked that there was nothing out there that actually vetted scholarships and provided high-quality advice on how to pay for college,” said Will Geiger. “There were a lot of resources out there, but none of them seemed designed with students in mind.”

So they built one, launching what they call “V1,” a blog built on WordPress that profiled a new, vetted, scholarship option daily.

“We ran the site like this for a number of years, eventually adding advice on admissions and financial aid,” said Geiger. “It was very much a side project that we did for fun, never something we expected to become a full-time business impacting millions of students.

Then: a global pandemic that disrupted everything, including education.

“Out of everything that the pandemic impacted, it disrupted education in perhaps the biggest, most significant way and we wanted to be there as a resource for students,” said Geiger.

Going all in

When schools moved to virtual educational models following concerns or guidance or mandates due to COVID-19, something important got left out of the educational experience of students, said Geiger.

“We saw that students were missing essential in-school support and saw more interest in our online resources in 2020,” said Geiger. “These concerns turned out to be valid as there was an unprecedented drop in students going straight to college from high school.”

And, low-income students were disproportionately impacted, said Geiger, noting research conducted by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

“The pandemic also put a microscope on the importance of acquiring in-demand skills as the economic impact of COVID-19 hurt low-wage workers the most,” said Geiger. “This means that students, especially low income and first-generation students, have so much to gain through a post-secondary education.”

“This really underscored how important it was for us to help students find and fund a high ROI education,” said Geiger. “Definitely the primary factor was the urgency of the problem.”

So they went all-in on the company, quitting their full-time jobs to work on Scholarships360 full time.

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What’s next

The two co-founders put full-time work into their company, and began to hire additional writers to work on content for the platform, once making the decision to go all-in.

“We realized that it is possible to build a company in an efficient, risk-adjusted way,” said Geiger. “It’s not like we just decided to quit our jobs one day to start building this startup from scratch; we had years of experience in this space and a large, growing audience.”

The company also began to test additional technical platform concepts, noted Will Geiger. That included a newsletter, which then became the minimum viable product for the company’s technology platform. It also included an off-the-shelf platform to gain important datapoints on website visitors, enabling the company to provide more of a personalized experience, said Geiger.

Prior to 2020, the Scholarships360 website received about 10,000 visitors a month, said Geiger, or roughly 120,000 per year.

In 2020, following the investments the company made in its content operation and its data analysis and personalization, it reached more than 545,000 people.

“At this point, we were generating revenue, but only enough to pay ourselves, our editor, and our team of writers,” said Geiger. “Capital became a constraint and to successfully build this platform and pivot to becoming a data company, we knew we had to raise outside capital.”

They began to fundraise. But they quickly learned that they wanted to raise “just enough money to build the platform and make sure it was something our users actually wanted,” said Geiger.

Scholarships360 website. Image provided by Scholarships360.

The result: the company has raised $250,000 and converted the company from an LLC to a C Corp. The co-founders also brought on three advisors to guide the company, Will Geiger said.

The funding came from an angel investor syndicate and three other investors, and Geiger noted that the lead investor in the syndicate group and the three individual investors have each founded at least one company themselves.

“We had a bunch of misconceptions about fundraising and assumed it would only be an option if we were raising millions of dollars or willing to give up a big chunk of the company,” said Geiger. “We soon realized that this wasn’t the case and we’d be able to approach the process in an intentional way.”

Now, the co-founders will use the money to build a data platform to enable personalized recommendations and advice for its student visitors.

“The rationale was that a small fundraise now will allow us to execute on the platform, allowing us to raise on even better terms in the future once this is proven,” Geiger said.

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It’s about money, but also about more than that

“Paying for college is going to be expensive, but the process is also confusing, stressful, and at times, opaque,” said Will Geiger.

He noted that the company’s team of research interns, who vet potential scholarships for inclusion on the company’s scholarship database, reject about 80% of all researched scholarships.

Why? They’re either outdated, charge application fees to apply, or are being offered by disreputable organizations, said Geiger.

There’s also the fact that there are now more options, or the allusion of more options, for students to consider.

“Today’s students have never had so many options, which can add to the stress,” Geiger explained. “They can consider thousands of four-year and two-year college, but also can consider bootcamps for coding, UX design, cybersecurity, and sales, as well as apprenticeships, certificates, and even working for employers like Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Starbucks that will pay for college.”

And, of course, notes Geiger, access to help is essential for students to navigate these options. “Most students attend a high school with insufficient college counseling,” said Geiger, referencing one study that found this number to be 80%. “Most students can’t afford a private college consultant.”

The result?

“Students, counselors, and parents are not equipped to navigate this new landscape,” said Geiger. “We want to help them navigate this increasingly complicated landscape and figure out which pathway makes the most sense for them and their goals, experiences, and interests.”