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Own a Problem & Find a Purpose: The right reason for launching a startup with Jessica Brondo of Admittedly

23 January 2014

Matt Lopez

If Jessica Brondo had taken her high school guidance counselor’s advice to heart, she wouldn’t have applied to Princeton University.

If she hadn’t applied to Princeton University, she wouldn’t have been named in the “Top 25 Most Influential Women at Princeton” and gone on to eventually launch a startup that is currently revolutionizing the way students select a college.

Well, she may have still done the latter. But regardless, Brondo was told that she wouldn’t be accepted to Princeton. Her grades weren’t good enough. But she applied anyways. She was accepted and she excelled.

She also realized that high school guidance counselors often don’t have time to develop relationships with the students they counsel. They meet them at the tail end of their high school careers and struggle to offer tailored advice at that point. The opportunity to adapt and improve a high school resume based on colleges of choice has often passed.

Admittedly seeks to solve that problem.

The engaging, game-like website allows students to build an avatar and answer questions about themselves to create customized results for safety, match, and reach schools. It provides options that might not be considered by guidance counselors who don’t have the time to truly know each and every student. It also evens the playing field for kids who can’t afford to hire private counselors to do that leg work.

Once the schools have been identified, Admittedly offers suggestions for ways to improve your resume. Do you need more extracurriculars to have a chance at your reach? Should you seek a leadership position at one of your clubs, or focus on improving your SAT scores? When students start using Admittedly, they can keep these questions in mind and focus their high school efforts for all four years.

Jessica founded Admittedly with Emily Cole in October of 2013 and the site has since acquired over 3,600 users. It recently opened a platform for parents to get involved, do research, and view their child’s activity. Eventually that capability will be extended to guidance counselors who can track their pool of students’ progress through the site.

Next up for Admittedly will be a campus visit planner and an application manager that will aggregate essay topics and identify which schools overlap on their requirements, making it easier to use the same essays for multiple applications.

Jessica spent ten years as a private college admissions counselor before launching Admittedly. She knows how helpful it is to have that one-on-one guidance when making a decision that could effect the rest of your life. But she also knows that the type of knowledge and support she offered her kids is not readily available to all students.  Jessica’s personal experience with nearly passing up a great academic opportunity,  coupled with her extensive background in admissions counseling, makes her intimately familiar with the challenges and frustrations that are inherent with this pivotal phase in young people’s lives.

As the allure of entrepreneurship has spread in recent years, Jessica, Emily, and their team are likely guiding plenty of future startup founders. With nine in ten startups reporting plans to hire in 2013, and more and more people gravitating towards the idea of self-employment over corporate environments, it’s a tempting future to aspire towards.

I asked Jessica what advice she could offer entrepreneurial students who hope to one day launch their own company, just like she did.

“Don’t start a company just to start a company. Have a purpose. You need to identify a specific problem that you’re trying to solve. There are so many entrepreneurs who start a business, just for the sake of starting a business. They end up floundering because there’s no passion there.”

Jessica and Emily saw a specific problem in the way students were searching and preparing for the college application process, and they’ll use that purpose to propel their startup forward.

Someday, many of their student users will likely be doing the same.

Check out Admittedly on Twitter and Instagram to keep up with this exciting startup’s progress!