How ScholarshipOwl CEO David Tabachnikov grew ScholarshipOwl to $10.3M revenue and 22K customers in 2024.

scholarship owls helping large Brands like Samsung connect with college students or around the college student age he also helps 20,000 college students generate and get access to over a million dollars of scholarship Revenue that's what they paid out last year alone processing over 150,000 signups per month right now they got a robust engine we're thrilled obviously that he used founder path for some non-dilutive Capital as he's grown totally bootstrapped to over 6 million bucks of Revenue up from 3 million back in 2020 hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan ladka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal best seller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer all right let's jump into the interview hey folks my guest today is David abach nikov He is building scholarship al.com which helps connect consumer Brands to gen Z he's got over two decades in Tech including roles as R&D manager and Engineering at Google and ways and he specializes in bootstrapping companies and excels as a remote team expert he travels a he's got a passion for data matching algorithms and AI development long before it was mainstream which complement his Keen interest in gen Z and content creation David you ready to take us to the top yeah nice uh all right you gotta you have to back that statement up so you said you were in AI long before it was mainstream were you doing any sort of AI stuff at Google or ways back in the day so we did a bit at Google and ways we did it quite a bit in scholarship all as well for a few years now I mean we leverage a lot of AI to to to do efficient matching and kind of like extract intent from uh kind of our audiences in the most efficient way so we've been doing quite crazy AI algorithms in scholarship power as well now if you guys listen to my last interview with David which is all the way back in 2021 you will know that scholarship owl is helping folks so you know kids that are maybe juniors seniors in high school looking to go into college it helps you quickly apply for different scholarships but he's built a massive engine where there's tens of thousands of students doing this and then and then obviously brands on the other side I.E schools and institutions trying to meet those consumers but because David of the updated bio you gave in this in this uh podcast interview I'm going to guess maybe you're not only working with schools anymore is that accurate so actually the majority of our customers are not schools at all uh so I'm I'm GNA uh correct you on a few things first like we're talking about at this point a scholarship power has over 150,000 students um well College Bound genes basically um every month right they sign up every month yes wow so it's not only like high school students actually a lot of people who are already in college are looking for ways to you know pay for the next year or even things that are outside of tuition itself things like how do you buy you know gas money to get to campus or like buying a laptop that you need for school and all those things that are kind of School adjacent let's call it that way um and today the majority of of our customers on our B2B side like we we launched scholarship alha business about um a year and a half ago which is basically a platform that uh helps businesses PIV like private consumer uh companies name one or two so Sam Samsung is a customer of ours uh we work with better help we work with quite a few uh big companies we work with Samsung and better help yeah M girl Hill is a customer of ours um what does Samsung want from you what are they willing to pay for so Sam Samsung are looking for brand ambassadors so they're kind of recruiting brand ambassadors to promote their cell phones on campus or like among genes in general um so many companies are using um kind of our platform like the product we call scholarship campaigns which is kind of like the best of a scholar ship and an at campaign in one to do some of them do it for lead generation some of them do it as market research they generate ugc with it like we have identified kind of four different main business objectives that companies and brands are using scholarship campaigns to achieve um and so how do you charge don't tell me what Samsung specific pricing is but what do you charge Brands like Samsung to access your your student base so um the the charge is basically uh cost per application so it's a result based uh cost depending on how precise it is how Target it is and um you know like what are the actions that uh the consumers need to do in order to to apply so it kind of ranges roughly between like um dollar 20 to $30 per application depends on on various metcs and so on and part of that of that budget goes towards promoting the campaign itself and part of it goes toward a scholarship that goes to the students so kind of that that is split um and we take care of like the whole process of earning the scholarship like we have um our own kind of 512 fre entity that helps make it tax deductible I mean when was the last time you heard of a marketing campaign that actually gives you tax benefits right yeah sign me up I'm ready to go this is incredible so how many Brands like Samsung Better Health now pay you on a monthly basis to get at least one application so uh on a monthly basis we're talking about 50 Blends but on a yearly basis goes like to 400 uh because like some of them are seasonal some of them are throughout the whole year uh depends on the on the goals that the brand is trying to achieve how do you manage I mean that's a big flux though how do you as you're building a company and a remote team and I'd love to hear how many full-time employees you have today I mean how do you manage sort of hiring scaling up or down based off cash inflows from brands that are very seasonal well we don't like it doesn't change that much right I mean at the end of the day we still have a pretty stable ARR and we have two Revenue sources right we have the premium tools for the students like a subscription business on one side and the other side we have the B2B side which generates revenue from uh the bands and the companies what's the split is it 50/50 Revenue split uh um it's uh today more more of it comes from the consumers but it's quickly catching up like evening out and what do students pay to use your subscription tools so on the on the consumer side on the student side we basically offer many tools that help them um kind of highlight where the highest chance of winning a scholarship is like optimizing the application process adding a bunch of spency into that they pay $15 a month um for the usage of the of our premium uh features so like things like uh they know like an applicant count like they know exactly how many other people apply to specific scholarship so they know to invest their time where they have the highest chance of winning uh we give them a lot more um kind of tracking over the application post itself so they know that the brand on the other side actually review the application and actually you know accepted it or who who is the winner we make sure they know that there is a winner right like in the scholarship space there's quite a bit of like scams and lack of transparency and all of that so we kind of our premium product takes away all of that you know exactly what happens what are your chances you you have predictable like we make the whole process predictable transparent yeah Nathan you applied for the Samsung scholarship there are 983 other applicants the winner is going to be announced on March 25th I get an email March 25th it says congratulations or un congratulations you didn't win but here's the link to Samy's LinkedIn profile Samy won from Samsung boom go click here to apply to other scholarships exactly but more than that we actually optimize the application process itself so one of our features on the consumer side we call it kind of like the Netflix of scholarships right when you apply to a specific scholarship some scholarships require quite a lot of different like the application process maybe an essay maybe like a social media post maybe like a video submission so we analyze all of that and we find other uh scholarships that you know you can apply very quickly and easily to as well and then we can badge them together and apply you to many different scholarships at the same time um and kind of you know we basically um with triple kind of the time that it takes you to apply we kind of um bump the efficiency like to three times more right like the same you invest the same time so not only we kind of find all the scholarships that you you can apply to that are perfectly match to you and that's where AI comes in right we use a lot of matching a lot of algorithms to extract a lot of this data on So when you say there's 100 when you say there's 150,000 applicant or or consumers signing up each month could one person count multiple times...