This education startup got a huge boost from a viral AMA

When you’re first trying to draw attention to your startup, few things are more important than luck. Sometimes it’s a retweet by an industry leader, or a work event that unexpectedly attracts a big crowd. Other times, as the co-founders of one Shanghai startup learned, it’s a sleep-addled Reddit AMA that goes viral.

Mentorverse is a Shanghai-based education startup that pairs eager students-to-be with mentors who have experience in undergraduate and grad school admissions.

Co-founders Nelson Ureña and Sunil Pticek-Damle both worked as admissions counselors in the past. Nelson worked for two years in admissions at Cornell, and Sunil spent time at as an education consultant in Shanghai, helping local teens get into American colleges.

The admissions process can be dauntingly opaque, and any insider information about how to get into the college of your dreams is potential viral gold online – as Nelson found out when he decided to do an AMA for the Reddit community Applying To College.

Sunil (top) and Nelson (bottom), Mentorverse co-founders

Ask me everything

One night in early August, Nelson had just got back to Shanghai on a redeye flight from Hong Kong. It was about a month and a half after the website launched, and Mentorverse had been getting steady traffic of a few hundred hits a day, but it was still in its infancy.

“I was just getting home and ready to go to bed; I had been up for more than 24 hours,” Nelson says. He checked his email before going to sleep, and was hit by that oh-crap-I-forgot-about-that feeling. There was an email from the subreddit moderator, asking when he was going to start his AMA. He considered rescheduling, but decided to login and field a handful of questions before getting some shuteye.

“Before I knew it, it was like 3 am,” he says. “I took a nap, woke back up, and I spent about 24 hours just answering questions.”

The AMA was titled “Hi I’m Nelson Ureña, I am a former admissions officer from Cornell and currently an admissions counselor,” and featured a link to the Mentorverse website and a brief bio. The AMA got dozens of responses – not enough to hit the Reddit frontpage, but enough to draw the attention of a reporter at Business Insider.

“Former Ivy League admissions officer reveals how they pick students” read the headline of a Business Insider piece posted the day after Nelson’s AMA began. The post – which also included a link to Mentorverse – got nearly 120,000 views in the span of a few days. The website followed up with two additional articles highlighting specific tips and quotes from Nelson’s AMA and got about 60,000 additional views. (Protip: If you’re applying to Cornell, it’s a big boost if you’ve worked on a farm.)

“I was freaking out at this point,” Nelson says. “I said some things that were pretty candid and honest. Stuff that the admissions offices wouldn’t admit, because it’s not good PR for them. Was I going to piss anybody off?”

Quite the contrary. Rather than pissing anyone off, the AMA was a huge boost for Mentorverse. The website was flooded with traffic – so much so that it saw sporadic crashes for three straight nights.

Carpe trafficum

Looking forward