How Troove CEO David Hurwitt grew to $120K revenue and 12 customers in 2023.

guys true dot me is trying to help students find that perfect College easier not just get in but also get out with a great job a great experience Etc got started coding the company or building the company uh in 2020 right before coven now to date he's got 12 customers signed up about to get active here after Labor Day and their first cycle of recruiting each customer paying on average ten to fifteen thousand dollars per year he's just trying to get early proof points to start scaling from here a couple hundred thousand uh rays in a seed run from some angels as he looks to continue to grow and what I love about this is he's eating his own dog food he's building this because his daughter had issues with her College admissions experience hey folks my guest today is Dave hurwitz he's an innovator over the course of his career he's a little development and launch of new products and services from toothpicks to wind turbines that's gen that have generated well over a billion dollars in sales today he's launching a company called Running excuse me a company called truv.me which helps students match with their perfect College debut ready tickets to the top absolutely all right I almost said I had to turn this interview down because you're joining from a Charlotte and I'm a hokie there in Blacksburg so well well the the savior is it's Charlotte Vermont oh amazing there we go that's perfect okay nobody hates UVM all right so how did you I guess first off how did it had an executive like you end up in a company like true but it sounds like you'd have really done anything you wanted but you were selling whirlpools back in the day why not stay in that space yeah you know I spent my whole career developing new products and services and it's just kind of how my brain works I I look at how something is working how it's serving a market and I iterate around it um and I just can't seem to turn that off so when I came into the college admissions Market as a father I started looking at the the deficiencies from both the students died and the school side and just couldn't help myself this is a market in desperate need of of Total Transformation okay so you're just because you are the founder of the business and you launched from your own personal need correct okay that's great when'd you launch it what year uh 2000 right before covet started uh 2020 or 2000. I'm sorry yeah uh February 2020 yes you know about a cover that I don't know about okay launched in 2020. I think it just feels like it's been so much longer yeah so what was it a daughter son what daughter okay what was the pain Point like you were sick of paying 200 application fees I mean to help us understand the pain yeah no so you know she was a kid with within the system had relative privilege right she had two parents who'd gone to college um she had a decent high school guidance counselor at her public high school we hired her a private guidance counselor to help her through the process uh and we put together a list um we drove her out to the middle of nowhere in New York state to visit the first school and we drove on the campus and she said no no no no I'm not even getting out of the car Dad this is the wrong place okay so we'll know you're getting out of the car um but let's let's go tour and then let's talk about it right so we went and had the tour got back in the car I said all right tell you what you jump on Spotify and improve the mood here with a better song um and I'm going to jump on Yelp and we're going to find a great place to have dinner tonight we're gonna talk this through and Spotify and Yelp nailed it right um and it occurred to me that their matching algorithm is so much more sophisticated than how we were trying to make this quarter million dollar decision about where to go to college yeah so if you sort of go from there and say the biggest part of every school are the graduates of that school they are the people that have achieved the success that every incoming freshman is looking for and if you look at the statistics it's really the problem in America with college is not getting in it's getting out the average four-year the average acceptance rate is about 70 percent and I know that the you know the harvards and mits dominate the news at you know three percent but they are a tiny fraction of the total market and so for most kids the problem is where do I go because I can kind of get in where I want to go outside of a very narrow band but then if you look at the four-year graduation rate it's 45 percent um it's basically half of all students will transfer or drop out from the first school that they attend so we really wanted to refocus instead of this thing about getting in it's about getting out how can I find the place where I am most comfortable academically and socially because that's where I'm most likely to stick it out and be successful so that's what our software aims to do and how do you make money for the school pays you or the daughter pays uh no right now the model is the School Pace schools are collectively spending about 15 billion dollars a year on Advertising marketing and admissions uh costs and this is a system that is profoundly unequal right there there is significant advantage to the kids that have money who have family history of education and so I really there's a very much of a mission orientation for us to say how can we use technology to level the playing field not only for the students that don't have the means coming into the system but also for the schools that are sort of in that middle and lower tier of of access and of financial statement Dave what do the schools what do they pay they pay us a service fee in order for us to have them on the platform and to let them use our matching technology oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going 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upselling number of of kids placed something like that no right now um we have just said one flat fee um at kind of a crazy low price honestly to get started get some traction which is what um well I'd rather not get into the specific price uh just for you know competitive reasons but it is a it is a small fraction of an admissions budget um admissions you know typically the average fully loaded cost for one enrolled student um at a private college is about 27 2800 bucks to to enroll one student so you know if you're trying to school trying to enroll a thousand students as freshmen is looking at almost a three million dollar budget and we are a tiny fraction of that and we're really looking at it Dave this show is like heavy heavy on economics so I understand if you don't want to give a specific number but guide us a little bit with the range if you could just to get us in the right headspace sure yeah yeah we're we are probably in the you know ten to fifteen thousand dollar range um where we price it in a way that says per month or per year per year because if I if I look at that budget right now most schools spend about 10 percent of their budget just buying the names of kids and plugging them into their spam models yeah yep so that that model affords a certain amount of pricing as we progress the product we're going to be able to significantly raise that average price because we can displace all that junk mailing with better fit technology and maybe you're a pricing guy though I mean you've sold a lot of stuff from toothpicks to the the washing machines I mean are you cutting yourself off at your knees a little bit by charging a flat fee for every College when one college might only enroll 50 and another one might enroll 5 000 and they pay the same price um you know potentially but my biggest problem right now is trial uh there is a lot of incentive in the current system to just keep doing what you've been doing and so looking for early adopters I did not want and nor do I quite frankly need price to be a problem I don't need to squeeze every penny out I need to get as many schools trialing this as possible because there is a small fraction of any Market from toothpicks to turbines that are willing to go first so Dave why not make it free three why not why charge at all why not make it free um because we have to prove that people are willing to pay for it uh the ambition here is to to start out by building some of that product Market fit demonstrating that proving that people will actually write checks for this and they value it um and then turn around and probably do a raise of institutional raise in the next year or so okay and are you bootstrapped today or if you've already raised some pre-seed seed funding um we have we have only raised Angel Capital at this point so pretty tightly bootstriped we like Capital efficient so what raised under 200 under 300K um a little bit more than that uh okay but you know we've we've we've done a good job with that but we you know we need to build the product um and we are three and a half years into it we've got about a dozen schools signed up this point um we are they're trialing or they're active they're active oh that's great okay so so I mean can we Define active as you've placed at least one enrolled student at those schools well for most of them they've they've signed up in the last few months and so they're heading into the enrollment cycle that's about to sort of kick off generally speaking after Labor Day so we're getting those guys in place um and the the thing they get from us is the ability to use our matching quiz right so we we help we administer their our quiz with their recent graduates that helps to build their specific school code they then use the quiz in their marketing so they're out there sending email messages to prospective students saying find out you know how much of a hokie are you how much do you have in common with um the Tar Heels um and and you can take this quick quiz and it'll return to you some data about your social fit and your learning culture fit um with each specific School understood what what made I mean that's a long time to work on the MVP 2020 2021 2022 first you know customers being on board and now what made this so difficult to build uh well covet didn't help um and actually well actually actually why did covet hurt you it should have helped you because people don't want to go do the in-person visits anymore shouldn't a virtual app like what you've built help in covid yeah from from a market standpoint um it definitely the I think everything has been leaning and continues to lean in our favor I mean affirmative action changes um there's some other privacy changes happening with the SAT that that lead in our favor as well so yeah the market trends definitely continue to work on a favor um how it affected us uh raising Capital um not being able to do that in person um being able to put together a team of Engineers we outsourced a lot of that um and just to be able to how many are full-time today uh we only have three full-time today that's great okay so low cost base how did you find the agency to trust with the early code um one of our investors um so you know Burlington Vermont's a fairly small tight Community the the most successful SAS company out of Burlington is a company called dealer.com um and so I went in search of dealer.com folks um within Burlington you're only a few degree degrees of separation from any one of those guys um so I was able to uh meet um and build a relationship virtually with uh one of the the co-founders of dealer.com which went on to exit for about a billion dollars initially he was their CTO who turned into their CEO um and he's led the product development side of the business not technically as a Founder but he has put money into the business uh and your soul founder right besides this guy correct correct yeah okay yeah so that's from it from a you know speed standpoint it's definitely had an impact the fact that I don't come from the college admissions business I'm not a coder I needed to build all that expertise really sort of make sure that I was having us build this on a solid foundation of customer needs and so I had to get to know the students the schools the independent counselors the high school counselors there are a lot of voices that needed to be heard in this process to make sure we weren't just building something that some guy um from outside the industry thought was a cool idea well Dave how did you I mean look there's a lot of folks in there you know I'm I'm guessing your age there's a lot of people in their 30s and their 40s and I appreciate that 50s but yeah 30s and 40s but they're going man I can't start a company I've got kids I've got expenses Etc you've managed effectively to have no revenue for two and a half years um and still take a risk on the business I mean what advice would you give to others that are sitting in a cushy corporate job really wanting to leave and launch their own thing how should they think about their risk profile well it depends on what your priorities are right um You can either get to my age which is you know just past the 40s um but where you say look I I live well within my means this is something that's important to me I have a very supportive uh spouse so we communicate clearly about that um and and this is something honestly that I've been talking about for a few years and she finally said look you need you have to do this or you have to shut up and it's not talk about it anymore and so we we definitely prepared financially we definitely uh have pushed a lot of chips to the center of the table and be willing to take that bet um but I am sort of an eternal optimist I'm a glass half full kind of guy and and I believe this is going to work and if it doesn't work I will have had an amazing journey and learned a ton and built relationships and we'll go figure out what's next but but I'm highly confident that we're on to something special here what do you need to see in the next 12 months for you to go yep I'm in it for the long haul versus I gotta kill this thing it's just not going to work um you know we're trying to get to you know 30 40 kind of schools at that point I think there is a healthy market for an Institutional capital so that is 300 400 000 in Revenue something like that yeah probably um and I just I think at that point we have enough critical mass um and and I'm not I'm not going to sit and just wait because there's no I think that's an important Point too there's no rule book there's no sort of these are the rules of the game and says if you get to 30 customers or 300 or 400 000 Revenue you're guaranteed the next step right there's no sort of we give you the key to the next step in the in the game here it's not that way I just think that if we build enough momentum we get through enough of those early adopters and start to get other people and some momentum coming to us there is incredible opportunity to move even further into this where we actually kill the entire junk mail model and and disrupt that whole side of it which which gives us access to an addressable Market that's multi-multi billions of dollars that is essentially the gateway to the trillion dollar higher education industry so there's a there's an amazing opportunity and it's really accelerated in the last nine months I would say with with AI yeah both generator and and predictive that that impact us and and so I'm excited about proving that we have something special that people are willing to pay us for it and that there is actually even better stuff ahead that just requires a different Capital basis than I have right now all right they will not know we're out of time let's wrap up here with a famous five one where answers if you can number one your favorite book uh I would say where you go is not who you will be it is a book about college admissions number two number two is there a CEO you're following or studying um not one person in particular no number three what's your favorite online tool for building truth um that's a great question I you know honestly I think um I'm gonna say tick tock tick tock has been incredibly helpful because it helps me get in touch with what the kids are worried about number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night I'm not a huge sleep guy my wife keeps preaching to me about it but I'm probably a five hour kind of sleep guy fair enough and uh well you just said wife so married and how many kiddos three but they are wow they are they're they're all grown and flown and doing great that's awesome okay and you just said past the 40s are you fearing your 50s 51 I am uh just about to turn 55. oh wow okay great last question then something you wish you knew back when you were 20. go ahead and take the risk um you're it's it's not a big risk and take don't see it as a mountain see it as one step on that mountain you got to take next guys true dot me is trying to help students find that perfect College easier not just get in but also get out with a great job a great experience Etc got started coding the company or building the company uh in 2020 right before coven now to date he's got 12 customers signed up about to get active here after Labor Day and their first cycle of recruiting each customer paying on average ten to fifteen thousand dollars per year he's just trying to get early proof points to start scaling from here a couple hundred thousand uh rays and a seed run from some angels as he looks to continue to grow and what I love about this is he's eating his own dog but he's building this because his daughter had issues with her College admissions experience so we'll see what happens next Dave thanks for taking us to the top thank you Nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal 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