Author: Kayla Michele / Source: Forbes
You don’t wake up one day and choose to be an entrepreneur. You don’t choose to embark on a journey full of anxiety and stress, with an inkling of hope and unforeseeable returns. It chooses you. For me, it started when my cofounder, Chisa Egbelu, talked to his best friend and roommate who was so passionate about music that he decided to hone his craft by attempting to transfer from Rutgers to the Berkelee College of Music.
Little did he know, this choice would become a crippling financial decision that would inspire us to re-think how education is funded. And it all boiled down to a draw-dropping question: “Why isn’t there something like Kickstarter for college?”That’s how Chisa and I started PeduL, which is a platform that helps students raise money for college. Right now, we accomplish this through crowdfunding. It is the only crowdfunding platform online that protects sponsors by sending all of the money students raise directly to their institution. At first, it seemed too perfect to be true. Chisa was curious why this kind of platform didn’t already exist. Once he determined there was no established competition in the space, he began recruiting teammates to join his journey. Since we both majored in Journalism & Media Studies and had a ton of classes together, he knew I was the queen of the humble brag—and more importantly, already had some experience building and selling a business before graduating high school. But when he pitched me the concept, I wasn’t fully convinced.
We sat for hours and discussed the core reasons he wanted to pursue this idea. I knew why I would. I turned down five Division 1 golf scholarships to attend my dream school only to find out I would be $40,000 in debt per year if I went. I was stripped of an opportunity—not because I didn’t deserve it—but because I couldn’t afford it. But relating to this problem wasn’t enough to pursue a Kickstarter for college. Through countless conversations with students—our potential customers—and our team of five, at the time, we pinpointed the heart of crowdfunding’s greatest downfall: access. Crowdfunding, whether you want to admit it or not, is innately elitist because it almost always requires the fundraiser to have access to a well-endowed network. Not everyone enjoys the luxury of knowing people with money. We can’t control what family we’re born into or the economic bracket we’re in. But what we can do is fight for and create equal access to academic and professional opportunities.
With this realization, we decided to brainstorm ways to provide students with capital beyond their personal networks. We reflected on the large companies and organizations that we’ve received scholarships from, and we decided that we would try to partner with corporations, influencers and foundations that would award scholarships directly to our competitive talent pool of entrepreneurial-minded students running crowdfunding campaigns.
This was in January 2016. We didn’t know where to start or how to begin pitching enterprise clients, so we stuck with what we knew. We put our corporate model on the back burner,…
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