Two months ago, Gregory Waldorf and his mother, Toby, began a start-up whose time, they hoped, had come.
The company, Destination-U.com, helps high school students identify the colleges that might be best for them. For $39.95, students fill out a 10-minute questionnaire that focuses on matching their personalities with colleges and also considers grades and extracurricular activities. In seconds, the students receive a list of about 15 four-year colleges they might want to consider.
In devising the questionnaire, the Waldorfs relied on three things – the expertise of Ms. Waldorf, a longtime independent college counselor for high school students; interviews with some 18,000 college juniors and seniors; and the insights of eight college counselors.
Mr. Waldorf, a venture capitalist with an interest in businesses that provide Web-based matching services, says the company, based in Menlo Park, Calif., can take advantage of overlapping social trends: the fluency of teenagers in using the Web and the competitive frenzy among students to get into the best colleges.
College-bound students have long been a lucrative market for businesses that can help them get into the schools of their choice. Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, the test-preparation pioneer, paved the way when the baby boom generation began jostling for spots at the nation’s most prestigious universities.
Now, with the children of baby boomers seeking admission to the right college, a new generation of entrepreneurs has begun focusing on advising students on the application process.
Most of the companies rely largely, if not entirely, on the Internet; many focus on niches in the application process. Thickenvelope.com in Chappaqua, N.Y., for example, assesses the chances of a student’s acceptance at specific schools, while Yesletter.com in Princeton, N.J., provides a way to communicate with Ivy League freshmen.
Why all the new start-ups? As more high school students apply to college, including an estimated 1.7 million in the coming months, navigating the admissions process has become more difficult, and not just for students who hope to land a spot at Yale or Stanford.
With the average ration of guidance counselors to students in public schools at 477 to 1 compared with the 250 to 1 recommended by the American School Counselor Association, most students must fend for themselves.
Filling that void is the Internet, which allows companies to design services that are speedy and easy to customize and to market them in a forum familiar to their potential customers.
Many specialists said that for small businesses, getting the attention of college applicants is the tough part, particularly for companies marketing directly to students. The customer base needs to be replenished every year.
For several companies, the answer is in the fortuitous overlapping of a clientele that depends on the Web and a business model that uses the Internet as its delivery mechanism. "It’s the normal way for 18-year-olds to communicate," said Bruce Weinberg, associate professor of marketing and ecommerce at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass.
Other companies, like College Coach in Newton, Mass., focus on corporations. Started in 1998 as a provider of outside college consultants, College Coach markets itself to companies that offer the service as a benefit to employees. Its staff includes former admissions counselors from universities, providing a mix of Web and in-person advice.
Another company, ConnectEdu in Boston, uses a similar approach. "By going business-to-business, you are guaranteed repeat customers, and those companies can, in effect, become your distributor," said Jeff Sloan, co-founder of Startupnation.com, a small business advisory in Birmingham, Mich.
Founded by Brian Niles, a former admissions director at LaSalle University, TargetX helps admissions offices devise e-mail campaigns to recruit incoming freshman.
Mr. Niles develops long-term strategies for about 200 colleges. In some cases, he has pinpointed appropriate students starting as early as their freshman year in high school, sending ninth graders advice on selecting the right schools, then following up two years later with reasons to choose a particular institution.
Carving out narrow specialties in a limited market is obviously a constraint on growth, and most of the recent start-ups report modest sales. IvyEdge, for example, expects revenue of half a million dollars this year; TargetX, about $1.5 million. College Coach says it is doing "less than $5 million," though it says it has doubled in size each year since it was started.
But Brian Niles of TargetX says companies like his were doing what too many colleges were not. "Colleges need to do a better job reaching students online," he said. "That’s where they spend most of their time, anyway."
