1️⃣📄 OnePager: Getting founders and funders on the same page
How Co-Founder/CEO Adam Hardej's personal fundraising journey out of college inspired a tool to dramatically improve the process for the next generation of student founders
Below is a snippet of an interview with Adam Hardej - Co-Founder of both Open Scout and OnePager. As a student-turned-adult entrepreneur, Adam founded these two ventures based on the experience he had trying to fundraise without an established network. He has a lot of wisdom earned through the ups and downs of his entrepreneurial journey and has channeled that knowledge into tools that can help the current generation of student entrepreneurs along their own path.
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Let’s say you start a side hustle in your spare time at a summer internship.
It quickly gains traction, to the tune of tens of thousands in pre-order revenue, and you’re able to deliver your MVP to a happy audience. There are clear opportunities to scale and you decide to work on it full-time after graduating.
Then you walk across that graduation stage (or logged on to a large Zoom call) and wave when your name gets called.
Now your “college side hustle” has turned into “adult full-time job” and the pressure to grow is on. You need to fundraise in order to support yourself and scale the business, but getting VCs to take a chance on a recent college grad with no history/connections turns out to be tougher than anticipated.
That was the experience of Adam Hardej - then the Founder/CEO of Tiger Bed Rentals.
After working on Tiger Bed Rentals for over 3 years post-graduation, Adam found that if you don’t have an “in” in VC, it can be nearly impossible to get your foot in the door. So after winding down Tiger Bed Rentals, Adam has launched two interrelated ventures aimed at the problems he experienced as a recently-graduated entrepreneur: OpenScout & OnePager.
If as you’re reading you start to think “Huh, this OnePager thing is a pretty cool. I wish I could give it a test drive to see if it actually works…” well, you’re in luck!
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Kevin: So let's start with your own journey as a student founder. Could you talk a little bit about what it was like getting your start as a student founder and especially about what the transition was like from working on Tiger Bed Rentals as a student compared to being a “real adult” in the post-graduation world?
Adam: When I started Tiger Beds at Princeton, I never I wasn't in the world of entrepreneurship, like I wasn’t thinking about the word “founder” or raising VC. I had grown up with my parents running their own small business. And so I've kind of seen it happen, but not like a VC backed way, but in a you provide a service that people pay you for and it allows you to make a living.
Tiger Bed Rentals came from an idea I saw on other campuses, where you could rent your own big bed for the academic year as opposed to the tiny Twin XL they give you in dorms. So during my junior year I had an internship with a lot of free time so I figured this would be a low risk thing to test out. When we launched it, people started hitting us up all over the internet and then all of a sudden it became this real thing. People are going to pay us $350 for this service and now I thought “We got to deliver”. It went from being a fun side project to a real business quicker than I expected it would.
I think college is such a great environment to try things like startups and entrepreneurship. A lot of times it’s about experimenting and just seeing what people are going to react to. And in college, you have this safety net to try things where, if it doesn’t work out, you’re not out on the street or stuck.
Kevin: So after you graduate, you’ve got some initial success under your belt. And you know that in order to scale this thing, you’ve got to fundraise. So I'm curious - how did you approach the fundraising process and what did you come to realize about fundraising, especially as a first time founder right out of college?
Adam: Well the first thing I did is I asked for way too much money because all I had ever done was read TechCrunch articles. When you read TechCrunch articles, it makes it sound like everyone raises $2 - 3 million dollars immediately.
I learned early on that the founder’s background and history is incredibly important. Not where you went to school, but rather have you raised money before and gotten people their money back? Or if you haven’t done that before, did you do anything close to that? It’s more about the founding team at that stage over so many other variables.
And I learned that the hard way - we had over a hundred thousand dollars in revenue with pretty straight line plans of how to grow. I’m lookin at companies that don’t have any revenue and thinking that it should be straight forward - but that’s not the right thing to be comparing. Those founders that raise pre-revenue typically have some sort of track record.
Then the second thing that I ended up learning was about fundraising is a sales process. Unless you have sales experience coming out of college or you have sales experience in general, I think it's hard to understand what types of conversion rates are standard.
All of a sudden you get into this position where you're a salesperson and you need to get comfortable with what a funnel is. 200 phone calls or emails will turn into 50 initial meetings, turning into 10 follow-up meetings, turning into just one actual check. You just have to get comfortable with that grinding process that every first-time founder goes through.
Kevin: So you definitely experienced that grinding process first hand, which in a way led to what you're doing now with OpenScout and OnePager. So can you tell me a little bit more about how both of those are leveling the playing field for young founders trying to fundraise for the first time?
Adam: Let’s start with Open Scout, which is a non-exclusive scout program.
VC scouts typically are attached to a single fund and they're on a campus and they're looking for investment opportunities for the fund that they're a scout for. I experienced that as a first time founder. I talked to three different scouts for three different funds, went to the last round of each of them and got a “no” for all three. I thought to myself, “OK, but there's only three of them. Where do I go from here? How do I fill this sales funnel?”
And so that was the original thought that came into Open Scout. Why not put a scout in a position where they can report back to 100 investors, 200 investors? It's actually now up to 1,100 investors. Fundraising has such low conversions from initial pitch to actual check that if we want to give founders a chance at success, we need to get them in front of a lot more than 2 or 3 investors. We're proud to be on over 100 campuses now, and we're constantly looking to make that process more effective for them.
Kevin: That makes a lot of sense to me. But how did you go about actually creating a system where these college students scouts can actually report back to investors in a more streamlined way?
Adam: And that's where the story of OnePager comes in.
Once we started having a lot of scouts and a lot of investors and we're passing through a lot of different companies on a regular basis, you can imagine that trying to manage an email inbox gets pretty messy. It's really just a lot of information to put together.
When you’re a founder trying to present to investors, you can't jump on a phone call with 750 investors all at once, but you can send them materials for them to go through and then they can decide if they’re interested. This typically comes in the form of a pitch deck, but we were finding there was a way to make that more efficient. PDF pitch decks don’t give the founder a lot of insight into what was going on, and it was hard to bring in more personal context around a pitch deck in a way that’s easily digested by the investor. Who is the founder? What have they been up to in the past, or are there any relevant links that can give helpful context? You've got to bring the story together in a way that someone can get through quickly and get excited about.
So we built OnePager to do that. OnePager is a vehicle that allows a founder to bring all their materials together so it can be easily passed along to a scout and then to a big network of investors. Founders could also use OnePager to access the network that they already had around them - in this way it acts as a sales tool and a storytelling tool more generally. This is why it's exciting to me. We consolidate all of this into one thing rather than an email with 10 different links in it.
Kevin: I agree, I love what you’ve built to consolidate and democratize access to funding for nascent student entrepreneurs. So if I'm a student founder, a student interested in scouting, or even someone who works at a university entrepreneurship center - how can I get involved with OpenScout and OnePager today?
Adam: On the scout program side we’re always looking to help founders get in front of the network that we've built. So if you’re a student looking to become a scout, or are a founder yourself, you can check out more information and apply through this notion page:
The second thing is a little bit more hands on. If you have a community that you're trying to build out a network for … maybe you're running a pitch competition, a demo day or you're leading an entrepreneurship community in general, you can use OnePager as a tool to make that network stand out.
A new tool called Boards was built to bring together multiple OnePagers, and we’ve already had the Harvard-Yale pitch competition use OnePager and Boards. We've had bigger firms like GSV use Boards for their startup bootcamp. It's really a great tool for any kind of community organizer to help the founders within their community to get more exposure.
Kevin: Thank you so much for your time, Adam. One final question before you go - and I like to end on this note a lot. What are you proudest of so far in your entrepreneurial journey?
Adam: I'm really proud of the founders that we've helped fundraise.
To be able to have someone we don’t know at all sign up for OnePager and then all of a sudden they’re able to get exposure to our investor network, pitch a bunch of investors, and find the capital they need … it’s exactly what we set out to do and I’m always excited to see it happen.
The other thing is just building software that people actually use. That feeling that I had back when we first launched Tiger Bed Rentals and people started paying us for the service was really special. It doesn’t sound crazy or anything, but when the money actually comes through and it’s real - from something that was just an idea not that long ago - it’s really exciting. And now on the software side, to see the constant usage and new stream of sign-ups … it's just a really great feeling to have people use the stuff that you build.
And that’s all from my interview with Adam Hardej of Open Scout and OnePager!
If you’re interested in giving OnePager a try yourself, you can sign up through the link below and enter CoachCarter100 give 100% off OnePager Premium for 3 months after your free account is made.
Revisit my January 2022 newsletter to learn about over $2 million in open funding opportunities for collegiate entrepreneurs.
In order to make sure you don’t miss any future interviews, funding opportunities, or student entrepreneurship news, please drop your email in the listserv box below.