.png)
Over the past eight years, we've transformed Young Founders School from an idea into an organisation that has reached over 11,000 students through our courses and experiences. Despite facing two near-death experiences, we've emerged stronger than ever. While success stories in startups are often highlighted, we want to share the challenges we've encountered as we scale YFS to become the largest high school entrepreneurship program in the world.
Reaching Students: A Tough Nut to Crack
Connecting with students is no easy feat. Schools protect their students from distractions and are bombarded by numerous companies, making it hard for us to get their attention. Even when we do, finding time to connect with students is a challenge. Their lives are packed with tuition, sports, and school, leaving little spare time.
Communication is another hurdle. Students treat email marketing as just another FYI, Facebook conversion rates are dismal, Instagram is too noisy, and we haven't nailed TikTok yet. This makes marketing via third parties our go-to strategy. Raising awareness of our work among students remains our biggest challenge.
The Lifeblood: Our Mentors
Our mentors are crucial to our success. Our bootcamp programs heavily rely on mentors, whose quality is unparalleled. They feel inspired and excited by their time with these young creative minds, but our mentors also want to achieve a sense of accomplishment. While we offer mentor training, we aim to do more.
Developing a pathway for mentors to upskill and building an active mentor community where they can learn from each other is key to enhancing their experience. We didn't focus enough on this initially, but we will moving forward.
Teachers: Building Long-Term Relationships
In the early years, we experienced a high churn of schools as teachers with whom we had strong relationships with left their schools. They were our cheerleaders, and their departure impacted our connections. Institutionalizing our brand by offering multiple products, involving more teachers, providing teacher training, and building deeper relationships with schools has helped move the needle but we still have a long way to go before we can say we have solved this.
Volunteers: A New Approach
Initially, volunteers let us down, not out of bad intentions, but because they couldn't be held accountable for key deliverables. They have their own busy lives and own work KPIs, we can’t rightly except them to take on ours. We decided early on to rely on salaried staff for core business functions and use volunteers for mentoring, event execution, and advisory boards. Giving our volunteers narrow goals has proven to be more successful than asking them to run the business.
Finding a Sustainable Business Model
For eight years, we relied solely on donations. While it allowed us to survive, thriving would have required us to create a fundraising machine, which we simple weren’t in a position to do. Our donors have been generous, but during COVID, I had to fund YFS from my own pocket, which was painful as they didn’t pay us what was promised. I vowed then to find a revenue model to cover our costs.
Today, our internship program provides that a pathway to achieving donor independence. It is the first time we have found product-market fit, and its only taken us 8 years to get there! We hope our internship programme will grow to cover all our fixed costs, allowing us to do more good in the world. We call it our Robinhood goal.