🔎 Student Startup Spotlight: ForagerOne
How did this team of recent Johns Hopkins alums ideate, build, and launch a pandemic-driven solution for universities ... in just one week?
I’m kicking off a new series for Coach’s Corner called Student Startup Spotlight. With this type of post, I’ll be interviewing and recapping conversations I have with either current students entrepreneurs or recent alums who are making their way in the entrepreneurial world.
For this inaugural iteration, I’m spotlighting Ansh Bhammar - Co-Founder and Co-CEO of ForagerOne. Ansh and I recently had a chance to catch up when he spoke virtually with the Johns Hopkins University Fuel Accelerator cohort last week. We covered a wide variety of topics - such as the process of making their first sale into JHU, how they’ve built a brand new platform within the first couple weeks of the pandemic, and how the Co-CEO structure works within ForagerOne.
For future student startup spotlights sent directly to your inbox, just throw your email down below (if you haven’t already.)
After the ForagerOne spotlight, keep reading to find some prime student summer internship opportunities with big names and up-and-comers alike. And if you missed my March 2021 preview, which includes student funding opportunities, university entrepreneurship news, and much more, you can check it out below.
Let’s dive right into it.
ForagerOne: Undergraduate research made easy … er.
Ansh Bhammar arrived to Johns Hopkins University his freshmen year, eager to get a foot in the door of the university’s storied research ecosystem.
How hard could it be to find a fitting opportunity at the largest research university in the country?
As it turns out … pretty hard.
Ansh, along with co-founders Yash Jain (Co-CEO), Nitin Kumar (Chief Technical Officer), and Michael Ashmead (Chief Product Officer) sent hundreds of collective emails in that first semester, each trying to find the perfect opportunity for them. The response rate was horrific. And even the responses they did receive were not too promising. It took over two months before they even got an interview with a faculty member.
They realized that there was a huge mismatch between faculty who were ready to take on student researchers and students who were looking for opportunities. And this could be easily averted if there was a one-stop shop to facilitate these matches.
Ansh found himself thinking a familiar thought for most soon-to-be entrepreneurs: “There has to be a better way to do this”.
So he and the ForagerOne team set out to build one.
Below I’m including an excerpt of a conversation we had on March 4th when he took the time to speak to Johns Hopkins’ Spring 2021 Fuel Accelerator cohort.
We cover a wide range of topics, from acquiring their first customer (Johns Hopkins), launching Symposium after a week-long design sprint, the process of deciding if/when to raise, how the Co-CEO model works within the company, and the impact of the MassChallenge Accelerator on its growth.
Enjoy!
So tell me a bit about the MVP for ForagerOne. It sounds like it was primarily a Google Sheet that you and Yash aggregated while trying to find your own research opportunities?
Ansh: So that was something that we shared with a few of our peers at first. We started like scraping the information ourselves for like 100 to 200 different faculty profiles, specifically like biology, neuroscience, and anything related to life sciences, which valuable to a lot of people within Hopkins.
And then that's how we came across Mike and Nitin, our technical co-founders, because we thought there's got to be an automatic way to scrape this information.
So our first version of ForagerOne had nothing to do with actually faculty members, student users, or admin. It was just a bunch of scraped information that our two technical co-founders had made the scripts for and we just made a giant database that, between the four of us, we just got like 300 of our friends to check it out.That's basically the first version.
What kind of feedback did you get from your friends in the early stages? Were they able to make any connections that they wouldn’t have otherwise found?
Ansh: I think it was a valiant effort, but there were two things we learned from that process.
One, when you're aggregating data, the quality of the data depends on the source, so people were kind of frustrated and told us “Okay - you guys have collected all this stuff but, how useful actually is it?”So we thought “Okay, we need to find ways to augment this data from either the Faculty users themselves, like either opting in or opting out to accepting apps.”
And the second piece of feedback that we got - and this was something we experienced ourselves - was that we still have to email these faculty and we don't know what information to include.
So we thought maybe we can build out this database and make it an actual application or platform where there's another party that's receiving the requests. Then there's a guided application flow to get connected with the faculty in a standardized way rather than doing a cold email.
So what form did an MVP of your first platform take? Did you need university buy-in at the beginning to even launch a Beta of this?
Ansh: We started off as a third party, totally unsanctioned. We got a group of students together as the initial users to get a grassroots effort off the ground.
Honestly, we didn't really know what the journey was going to be. We were just doing it because we thought [the scraped spreadsheet] was cool and other people had told us that it'd be cool if we could have other people using it as well.
Word got out and we eventually got a meeting with the Vice Provost for Research at Hopkins. We explained our issues with the process of getting involved in research at this time. Like, this is the number one research institution in the country … why is it so difficult to find actual research opportunities?
The VP for Research said that they were going to open up an undergraduate research office and were thinking about the concept of a web platform … but it will be a while before they can get behind something like this.
So that was code for us saying that you guys will probably be graduated by the time Hopkins like is able to move resources into ForagerOne … so we just said screw it, we're going to go and build this and see if we can get enough students on the system that it pushes some faculty adoption.
We knew that faculty are the more resistant group to get involved on an unsanctioned platform, so at first the students would be able to use the database to essentially apply to a faculty member, which in actuality would send an email to the faculty members. So the application was initially just disguised as an email.
So the students were like the first node in the network, and then we eventually got a couple hundred faculty on the system over time.Hopkins just couldn't ignore it at that point.
Let’s talk now about Symposium - a virtual forum to curate and share research and creative projects - which your team built in a week last April. Was the concept already in the product roadmap or was it a total response to the market you were seeing in the wake of COVID?
Ansh: It's such a funny and weird story and it's still hard for us to process today.
With the pandemic, starting in March of last year, we were working with about 10 institutions on our first system. And ForagerOne - the product itself - it's a very enterprise product, so it takes a long time to implement it.
As we were talking to our partners, we realized a lot of these admin were complaining about how there wasn't a good tool to host these new virtual events, so they were using Blackboard, Canvas, or some other LMS system. Some were using Twitter and some were trying to like build their own sites. It was an absolute nightmare.
And when we end up hearing all of these events were being cancelled, one of my co-founders was reading on an university educator forum where someone asked “Have people thought about how they're pivoting their events from in person to virtual for these big showcases?”So I thought, “Huh, wouldn’t it be cool if we could do something there?”
I started looking at how big of a demand it got in the forum and thought we could generate a lot of brand awareness in the space [by building something to solve the problem].
Our co-founding team basically had a week-long hackathon to build a really dirty, quick, free system that just helps these events be hosted so that they don't have to be cancelled.
And we posted on that forum asking, “Who's interested in working with us to host their events?”We heard from 150 different colleges and universities and became the most active thread on that forum and the entire history of that entire organization, which is really overwhelming. We weren’t prepared for that kind of response, but we worked with about 50 universities and colleges to host their events in April and May.
What ended up happening was two things.One is the COVID crisis became way more extended than any of us could have predicted, so our institutions that we are working with told us, “This is going to happen again for our summer events for our fall events and for even now we're in the next spring, for the spring events as well.”
And then to a lot of the institutions that we're working with on that system said, “Hey, a lot of these virtual and hybrid components to higher education are going to be here to stay.”
So they told us “You guys should not dissolve symposium … you should make it into an offering of its own and we’ll pay for it.”
You and the ForagerOne team have done such a fantastic job of taking advantage of the opportunities in front of you, and from my point of view, one of the most impactful opportunities you had came in the form of the MassChallenge accelerator up in Boston.
Can you talk a bit about what your time in MassChallenge meant to you?
Ansh: Our entire team got so much out of the MassChallenge accelerator.
It wasn’t necessarily the instruction and seminars - though those did provide a really good foundation for things like developing a sales pipeline, and operations/management.
I think we enjoyed MassChallenge because it was more of a community as you’re going through this startup journey, trying to find product market fit.
It was really fun because there’s a lot of different companies at a lot of different stages, and its nice to know that some of the issues you’re facing are also an issue for other companies, and you can work through them together.
You can be in the same room as a founder that’s raising a Series C or has already exited multiple companies, or vice-versa with younger companies who are just starting out.
It’s this nice sense of feeling like you’re supported and you belong within an accelerator space, no matter where you are in the journey, and I think that was the most unique part of MassChallenge.
You mentioned something about being in the same room as founders who’ve raised a Series C, but you consciously have not raised any dilutive capital when - in my opinion - ForagerOne could definitely be a venture-backable company. What were some of the considerations that you think of when trying to decide when - or if - there’s a right time to raise a round?
Ansh: I think there was a little bit of a thought when going through MassChallenge, “Should we be raising? Everyone else is raising”. So there was an internal discussion about what we should be doing and when.
There are so many narratives around investment and entrepreneurship, and there’s this glorification of raising money, even in the accelerator space. MassChallenge does this, Techstars does this, pretty much everyone does this, where they will put out figured about how much money their companies have collectively raised.
It does speak to something, but it seems to be THE metric, which was bothersome.
As we were going through the program, we were landing deals and figuring out our landscape, we wanted to see how much revenue can we generate, not how much time we can spend working with investors.
If I went to raise a round, I would be spending my time on my investor pipeline instead of my customer pipeline. So we consciously decided to take a very customer-focused approach.
Eventually if we get to the point where we want to take $1 million in ARR to $10 million in ARR, and we’ve created the infrastructure to do that, and all we need is capital to hire out a sales team, then we’ll definitely raise.
But I think trying to raise to figure stuff out is - in my opinion - is not necessarily the most productive way to spend your time instead of trying to achieve product-market fit and building out your customer base.
Ultimately raising is a decision that typically comes down to the CEO of a company. And I think it’s really interesting that ForagerOne has a structure that’s not unheard of, but is definitely rare: Co-CEOs.
Two questions. 1) What made you and Yash want to go down that route, and 2) how does the Co-CEO model play out in day-to-day operations?
Ansh: Really cool question, and definitely something fueled by the fact that we haven’t raised any investment. There are some expectations that investors have [in terms of team structure] and we didn’t have those pressures.
So we decided that what we feel right is what we’re going to do - we don’t care about the models that have been created on what titles should be.
We originally had two separate roles where Yash was the President and I was CEO. But we realized that we each have our own unique strengths.
I love working with customers, I love leading demos, and I love developing relationships. I’m very extroverted in that sense.
Yash is much more strategy-focused. He loves to test, iterate, and run campaigns.
What we ended up finding is that, while we could split up the roles with titles, we were very much working in sync. But we also realized that it was incredibly beneficial to have two people that were viewed by the external world as equal.
And that’s a huge advantage you don’t think about when it comes to Co-CEOs. Even though Yash and I don’t overlap a ton in our day-to-day roles, if there’s ever a situation where I can’t make a meeting I’m supposed to - Yash can (and vice-versa). That person still feels like they’re meeting with the number one of the organization, which is a very tangible benefit.
And that’s just an extended snippet from my conversation with Ansh Bhammar - Co-Founder/Co-CEO of ForagerOne!
The future of ForagerOne is shining bright, as they continue to roll out their flagship research platform offering as well as Symposium to universities nationwide.
Interested in seeing if they could provide a solution for your university? Learn more via the link below!
☀️ Student Summer Internships
Still looking to find an internship for this summer? You’re not alone, nor out of luck!
You may find an interesting fit from the list below, primarily curated via the Accelerated Newsletter by Justine and Olivia Moore (which is definitely worth a sign-up).
Human Capital - Delta Fellowship (Remote) - $50k for student founders
Atom Finance - Finance Intern (Remote, NYC)
Kyte - Finance / Business Ops Intern (Remote)
June - MBA Summer Intern (Remote)
Box - Education Intern (Remote)
Pitchbook - Research Intern (Seattle)
Plastiq - MBA Partnerships and Strategy Intern (SF)
Uber - Marketing Intern (SF)
Silicon Valley Bank - SVB Capital Intern (Menlo Park)
M13 - MBA Investment Associate (LA)
Komodo - MBA Corp Dev Intern (NYC)
Appdrop - Multiple Internship Positions (DC/Remote)
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