Seth Godin
I came into school majoring in Bioengineering. I liked biology, didn't want a biology degree, and was ok at math so figured this was a good enough choice. So like most other 17-year-olds choosing a major, I had no idea what I actually wanted to do. The thought of combining business and engineering was cool to me. I felt like I would be a good person to take all the research done at higher education institutes and help bring it to market. I now know this is essentially entrepreneurship but back then, I had no idea.
Freshman year, I had absolutely nothing on my resume. Like really nothing outside of school and swimming. This is my actual resume from 2020 after my first semester in college. I was not one of those kids coming in from high school with crazy experiences, instead focusing on my athletics and doing a good job in my classes.
During my first year in college it was peak COVID and all my classes were online. I was so glad to be on the swim team at school as it allowed me to make friends and meet others during a time that was otherwise socially isolating. I joined the Biomedical Engineering Society as well as the Freshman Engineering Council as an attempt to begin figuring out what to get involved in on campus. Through this, I sold sweatshirts to other engineers and helped out with a few virtual volunteering events. I knew I was lacking in experience and began to look for a summer internship. I applied to a few, was of course denied, and ended up emailing a ton of biotech companies in my home state of SC, asking to work as a volunteer. I knew it was important to build my resume and wanted to learn through any opportunities I could find.
Dear xxx,
My name is Cara Bognar and I am a freshman at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying Bioengineering. I was doing some research into prominent Biotech companies in the Greenville SC area, and I came across xxx. I was wondering if you had any paid or unpaid internship opportunities within xxx for the summer. I am a quick learner with a strong work ethic and professionally would like to make the most of my summer hiatus. I have attached my resume and look forward to hearing back.
Thank you!
Best,
Cara Bognar
I ended up working for a company called Precision Genetics to develop a warfarin dosing algorithm for patients. It helped me realize the Bioengineering field was something that interested me but not what I wanted to work in after graduation. At the same time, I was coaching swim lessons back in my hometown over the summer. This was a great way to make money on the side. I thought it was funny that I had wayyy more demand after being named as a “college athlete” than back in high school but really thought nothing of it at the time. I also had 2 of my siblings helping coach and the scheduling and organizational sucked. It got so annoying that I told both my siblings that they owed me $20 for dealing with all of the infrastructure and texting everyone. This got me believing that there had to be a better way to deal with this and I spent a few days attempting to build a no-code site that would handle all the bookings online similar to how you book a hairdresser. I even bought the domain greenvilleswimlessons.com in preparation. In the end, I figured out that this would not work with the current no-code tools available (2021) and went back up to Illinois and school at the end of the summer. Back at school, the athletic department was buzzing as just that summer the new Name, Image and Likeness bill was passed. NIL for short, this allowed college athletes to monetize themselves based off of their own branding. While this created a new industry overnight and disrupted the face of college sports as we know it, it did not change anything for my swim team. We looked at it, thought it was cool but ultimately was not going to do much for most of us as we did not have a platform, were not influencers and had a grand total of 3 people who would maybe buy our merch (mom, grandma and best friend). This started the thought process of trying to figure out if there was a way to make this new bill accessible to everyone I started taking my very first entrepreneurship class, TE 250: From Idea to Enterprise with Professor John Thode. I have never been one who cared for classes. They were just something I had to go to to get a grade and eventually graduate. This one was different. ****On the first day, he sat us down and asked the class “Who has a mortgage on a home”. No hands raised. Then, “Who is married, Who has children, Who is paying insurance each month.” Still, no hands raised. Finally, he looked back at us and asked “What is the risk then of starting a company? You are at the best spot in your life to jump in and try something. The worst possible conclusion is that you end up getting a job like the rest of your peers.” This has stuck with me to this day. When I meet students who talk about the fear of getting started and taking that very first step, I always go back to John Thode and what he asked us on day one.
This class required everyone to pitch their ideas. At the time, I was workshopping the early versions of Top Tier Lessons.
<aside> ⚠️ The Problem: NIL is not equitable for all college athletes, especially non-revenue sports.
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I had a few solutions in my mind and the first one was not what Top Tier Lessons is today. I knew individual athletes did not have the current brand power to create large amounts of value but teams did. There was also no marketplaces online that sold signed memorabilia for college athletes. The pro-level had a few, but nothing with the trickle down effect. I had an idea that I could leverage the brand of the school and the entire team through a platform to sell items such as balls, jerseys and framed photos signed by the entire team instead of just one athlete. This way, we would leverage the branding of the team or the school instead of the individual and split profits across all players. After talking to a few customers, it became clear that this market was too niche and there would not be enough financial motivation after the profits were split, 10,20 or even 50 ways. I was also exploring the version of NIL where we operated adjacent to the market. Using the new legislation to create a platform but the primary service wasn't anything new. The new piece would be the supply, college athletes. Building off of my experience coaching and so many of my teammates, it made sense to create a platform like the one I had wanted to create over the summer but for all college athletes to teach lessons on their own time. This platform would not have been able to exist before NIL. This is the idea I decided to pitch in the class. I remember being so nervous to go up and tell others what I was going to do. It felt different to share something that you truly care about instead of a normal presentation where you are regurgitating some fact you found on the Internet. The idea ended up being selected as one of the 10 that would be part of the class for the semester and I was so excited. Each week, I would grab dinner on Thursdays with 2 of my friends from the swim team. We had a goal of trying all of the restaurants around campus in Champaign and would pick a new one every week. During this semester, I told them about this idea I had to start Top Tier Lessons (then called The Athlete Project… I know, rough). They were some of my earliest supporters, talking about it and iterating on what it could be every week. We would spend hours talking a little too excitedly about the vision and walking through all of the steps. It was through them, that I was helped to gain the confidence to start Top Tier Lessons.
At this point, I knew what I wanted to do, but had no idea how to do it. My next step was setting out and figuring out what did it mean to be a student founder and what does it actually take to start a company.