How Troove CEO David Hurwitt grew Troove 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...