Founders Feature #045 - StandOut Search
Making high school students stand out through internships
Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Estelle Reardon, Co-founder of StandOut Search, an internship matching platform for high school students based in the US.
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Here’s what StandOut Search is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
It’s extremely difficult to find an internship as a high school student. If your family isn’t well connected, and you don’t have the means to spend thousands of dollars on a private matching consultancy, there are only very few competitive programs to apply to, or you are left with cold outreaching, which has very low odds of success.
The Solution:
We are building an end-to-end platform matching high school students with internships at early-stage startups, across all kinds of roles. We have recruited 200 early-stage startups so far, and their main pain point tends to be around social media and design, skills in which GenZ high school students are often highly qualified.
The Team:
We are two co-founders, myself and Lauren. I studied Economics at the University of Chicago and have spent some time working at VC funds in the US. Lauren worked at the University of Chicago Admissions Office and previously ran a non-profit student organisation helping high schoolers apply to college. She has also worked at the Global Entrepreneurship Network, one of the largest global accelerators. We have also had over 20 high school interns work with us in various positions over the past two years.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
I have ADHD and dyslexia and always struggled with standardised testing in high school. What helped me more than anything else in high school was doing internships. I heard from a friend who went to a private school in New York that their school helped them find internships. So, I started looking into that and I spent a year compiling a spreadsheet of opportunities and cold emailing and applying for the programmes before I finally found my first internship. My internship host was the first person who really made me realise how you can succeed in the real world without the time limitations of standardised tests. Throughout all my internships, my internship hosts supported me and believed in me in a way that my teachers didn't. I applied to the University of Chicago because they also didn’t require test scores in their admissions process.
While at college I became more and more interested in Entrepreneurship and ended up doing two internships in venture capital, and really fell in love with startups. At the end of one of those internships, the fund invited me to their two-year programme for student entrepreneurs, with the expectation that I found a startup while in college. So, I thought about what problems affected me the most, and I fell on the difficulty I experienced finding internships compared to some of my friends at private high schools.
That’s how Standout Search started, and my love for startups made us focus precisely on placing high school students with early-stage startups. We started out trying to sell to public high schools in New York, but the K-12 education system made this incredibly difficult. The people we spoke to who committed to us verbally weren’t able to actually get the system onboard and find the necessary funding. So we eventually pivoted to a B2C approach, hoping that one day we can still break into the public school system.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
University admissions rates have been declining since 2015, and we are slowly moving away from standardised testing as a nation. For example, the University of California system, and many other universities are test-optional now in their application process. What remains is a super competitive application process, but where students now have to shine even more through their resumes, rather than their test scores alone. An internship as a high schooler can really make you stand out in this regard, which is why creating opportunities to find internships is becoming more and more important. Current players in the university internship market aren’t well positioned to go after this market because they would have to essentially invert their revenue model: At university level, companies are willing to spend much on recruitment, while at high school level the willingness to pay lies with the families and students and less with the organisations.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
We took part in the University of Chicago New Venture Challenge and won second place in the finals. I’m very proud of this, especially given that we’re the second all-female team in the history of the programme to win a prize. I’m also just generally proud of all the progress we’ve made and not giving up, especially after having to pivot our business model over the past year.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
I think a major struggle being a student-founder is balancing building the startup with being a student, and never being able to commit full-time to one or the other, without dropping one. It makes you feel like you’ve been working on something for so long, but only progressing slower than you’d like.
Something else that’s been a challenge for us over the past few months is figuring out how to pitch something you have spent so much time with and understand so inherently, in a way that is understandable to others within 10 minutes or less.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
I wish I had known how hard it is to sell to schools, and that the K-12 Education Sales Cycle is not a good place for early-stage startups. Thus, I wish we’d started going B2C directly, but I guess that’s the nature of things, wishing you had started with wherever you pivoted to.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
When you’re starting a company, think about all the ways it could fail and test those things in order of highest probability of failure first. Don’t be afraid to go out and test the things that will make you most likely to fail.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Venture Capitalists usually invest in the best companies with the most impressive track records and the highest probability of success. However, to get to that point as an early-stage startup, you have to learn to not look at yourself like that and not judge yourself by the same metrics. It can take time to grow and reach that point, and it’s important to not give up too early in the process.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Your product has to be based on what the customer wants, from not only customer discovery, but actively testing new iterations on customers and seeing how they react. Especially if you have experienced the problem you are solving yourself, make sure to not base every decision around what you want or what you think is best. You are just one potential customer, so remember to loop in other customers too.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
I was very lucky to be paired with an incredible mentor, Kate Volzer, while at university. She started an education company, Wisr, and also worked at the University of Chicago Admission office. She has been incredibly supportive, jumping on regular calls with me, helping me think through my assumptions from another perspective and just helping me realise that being an entrepreneur doesn’t mean working yourself into oblivion. I am very inspired by her.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Disciplined Entrepreneurship - Bill Aulet