How We Are Changing The Way College Entrepreneurship Works Through Our Community

Bobby Housel

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Published: April 9th, 2023

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Bobby Housel

Founder, Entrepreneur Power Hour

$1K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Entrepreneur Powe...

entrepreneurpowerhour.com

from Ann Arbor, MI, USA

started September 2021

$1,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Note: This business is no longer running. It was started in 2021 and ended in 2023. Reason for closure: Shut down.

Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

My name is Bobby Housel and I’m the founder of Entrepreneur Power Hour. I love to bring people together and unlock the potential of the universe by introducing the right people to one another. I love to build things and tell stories.

I started my first company in high school and founded Entrepreneur Power Hour during my sophomore year at the University of Michigan in 2021. We are changing how the best entrepreneurs and founders at college meet each other and build relationships.

We are building out a full suite of resources to change how college entrepreneurship works completely.

We are over 300 entrepreneur founders across two college campus communities at the University of Michigan and Stanford. We are growing like lightning and are soon expanding to universities across the country.

We are dead set on reinventing how the best college founders meet and grow together, and if you’re building the future at a college (or dropped out) in a big way, we would love to talk to you.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I came to college knowing that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I founded my first business in high school and knew that my life would include a series of startup ventures. When I got to college, I learned that there were more entrepreneurship outlets at the university than I knew what to do with.

I spent the entirety of my first year of college running around campus trying to learn about all these entrepreneurship resources and all the amazing people that frequented them.

Throughout my first year, I made some of my closest friends by chasing down the university’s most talented builders and founders. Just as I was building a series of intimate relationships with so many entrepreneurs, Covid struck, and I took a gap year from school.

In the fall of 2021, when I came back to school after my gap year, I was missing my entrepreneurial founder friends more than ever. I started hosting meetups so I could catch up with groups of my entrepreneurial friends all at the same time.

I was shocked to learn that many of these entrepreneurs had never met each other, and I was seemingly one of the only points of connection. It turned out that the world of college entrepreneurship was hyper-fragmented, and the best founders were building in isolation, not meeting each other, and feeling lonely.

It was incredibly exciting to watch some of the school’s most talented entrepreneurs build meaningful friendships and brainstorm together, all because of some meetups I was hosting.

Those small meetups went from 5 entrepreneurs, to now over 300 at the University of Michigan and Stanford. We are on a quest to change how the best founders at college meet each other and build relationships through our community, Entrepreneur Power Hour.

For me, the biggest moment of realization happened when I was hosting these meetups after coming back from my gap year. I couldn’t believe that all these entrepreneur types, building similar-oriented companies, had never met each other.

After hundreds of conversations with student entrepreneurs across the US, it became abundantly apparent that universities across the country were not doing a good enough job of building a community for student founders. Not only that, but the education they provided was often lacking, and the people leading these institutions were sometimes not even entrepreneurs themselves.

Shockingly, it wasn’t just a problem at Michigan, even the schools most renowned for entrepreneurship, like those at Stanford and Berkeley, seemed to have the same problems as Michigan. College founders are fractured and isolated, increasing their feelings of loneliness, and pushing them further toward drop-out culture.

I’ve thrown tons of unique events and parties in which I synthesize some of college’s most fascinating and innovative world changers. I have a way of getting people to follow me and I love putting on events. I have a love for startups and ventures, so naturally, it was exciting for me to start connecting the dots among all of the University’s top founders.

My financial situation was, and still is, that of many college founders - I am working hard to bootstrap my business with the limited capital I have access to.

With that being said, we are trying to break down the barriers for our student founders to raise capital, specifically from angel investors who have long been excluded from investing in college founders, and this is yet another entirely different aspect of what we are building that I’m incredibly excited about.

If you are excited by the prospect of investing in the top college founders, learn more about our syndicate fund.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

The first step to building our community started with rallying the University of Michigan’s best entrepreneurs. I spent my entire first year of college learning about how all the different entrepreneurship outlets worked together, and who the key players were. We began by hosting informal meetups amongst founders who were building in similar verticals.

I have always believed that doing anything other than in-person meetups when you’re surrounded by the brilliant people you want to meet, is a complete waste. We started IRL and we’ve stayed IRL, and we’re very proud of that. We started by inviting all of our most talented entrepreneur-type friends to these group meetups, and things expanded organically with almost no marketing efforts on our part.

As we continued to hold these meetups, we saw more and more interest in joining our community without ever doing any kind of marketing. Word of mouth was a powerful growth hack for us, and soon enough, we had entrepreneurs from all over campus coming to meet one another through our community events.

We soon defined ourselves as the de facto social setting for the best college founders to meet and support one another. We took the traditional college entrepreneurship organizations’ structures and turned them upside down to create something new and innovative that met founders where they were at.

If you’re going to dedicate a lot of your life to building a company, you need to make sure that that company is in a space that you truly care about.

Weekly social events, education led by our founders, all-expense paid weekend retreats, sponsored trips, and co-branded partnerships with venture funds, startup law firms, and the world’s best entrepreneurship outlets were accelerating our growth and community excitement big time.

First-ever entrepreneurship retreat weekend

First official venture capital-sponsored event

Describe the process of launching the business.

Building this organization has been like sailing a boat while making it. We’ve been figuring things out as we go since the beginning. This organization has grown in ways we never thought possible, and keeping up with the rapid expansion has been a real challenge.

Our big public launch came in advertently, like so much of our success. We were too busy to be thinking about public-facing announcements or press releases - instead, we were focusing on building the best community possible for college founders.

Inadvertently along our journey, we found ourselves on the well-known entrepreneurship podcast My First Million. In the episode, a handful of our entrepreneurs pitched their startups and we spoke about the community that we were building.

Within a week it became one of the topmost viewed episodes on the channel, with over 60,000 views on YouTube alone.

For over a month we had constant inbound of student entrepreneurs and investors wanting to get involved and support our mission. I’ve learned that in life we often find the things that we most desire when we’re too busy to be looking for them, and that has truly been the story of Entrepreneur Power Hour.

We’ve been building this rocket as we’ve been flying it, and things have been going albeit hectic and crazy at times, amazing. Before going on the podcast, we had been growing completely organically by word-of-mouth.

After the podcast release, we scrambled to create our first website, giving a home to the beautiful community that we were building. We worked with a talented student designer as well as some offshore freelancers to create our first two websites and had tremendous success working with both. As most things do in the startup world, it took twice as long and three times as much money as we anticipated, but we are quite happy with how everything turned out.

We’ve always bootstrapped this business out of our own pockets and have learned so much because of it. One of the key takeaways I’ve had was learning that to grow your community, you need to focus on what’s most important. The other secondary factors will fall into place if you're working with the right team and chasing the right mission.

Our costs and expenditures are not glamorous, but they are the small things that keep us up and running. Mainly they have come from hosting events, administrative and legal fees, and various software subscriptions. We have worked hard to keep our costs low and have been rewarded by being as scrappy as possible.

One of the first iterations of our website, but this top feature of the landing page stuck with us even today.

A picture of our Founder’s Cupid syndicate fund website:

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

What’s been most impressive about our community is the loyalty of our members.

Because we’ve redefined what a college entrepreneurship organization looks like, we found our members engaging with our community in ways that they traditionally had not with other types of organizations.

We have no expectations or requirements for our entrepreneurs. Instead, we invite our founders to engage with the community how they want to and we build our offerings around that. Because of that, we’ve seen incredible community member retention and extremely low churn rates.

Because founders don’t feel pressured to come to every event, they come when they can and want to, which already frames their participation in the best way possible.

As we continue to grow the community, we’ve found great success in being more public about telling our story. We are active on Twitter and looking to do more media partnerships, as well as grow our media production arm to help tell the stories of our founders.

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While growing our startup, we’ve often felt like we were in a dark room, unsure of where to go next. For a long time, we were stumbling around with the lights turned off, trying to figure out what our next move was. Then, finally, someone would help us “turn the lights on” and illuminate our path forward.

Even when you don’t know where exactly you’re headed, we’ve learned that you need to focus on your key differentiating factors and what you and your co-founders are the absolute best at doing. We are a person-first community, but as we’ve expanded, we found the utility in creating the best online communities for college founders too.

As we expand to new schools, we know it is essential to not only bridge the divide between entrepreneurs and their home schools but also connect entrepreneurs from other schools to one another. It’s been challenging to find those master entrepreneurial connectors at new schools to help us expand, but it’s been incredibly rewarding searching for them.

Introductions have truly been everything for us as we are constantly being introduced to new student founders at different schools working hard to build the future. Twitter, Linkedin, and podcast exposure have also been huge in helping us find our next set of Power Hour killer founders.

When the best college founders in the world have zero friction to meet one another, the amount of innovation that will come out of universities will be 10x.

The thumbnail from our podcast episode with My First Million:

More screenshots from the video here

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Entrepreneur Power Hour is only one part of the equation. We are building out a full suite of resources to change how college entrepreneurship works completely. Here’s the breakdown of everything that we’re chasing.

Entrepreneur Power Hour has begun expansion at Stanford and is working alongside a team to scale this community to universities across the country.

There are three key components of our expansion.

1) Entrepreneur Power Hour: Our soon-to-be nationwide communities support the best founders on college campuses. Here’s how to get involved.

We are actively expanding to new campuses as well as searching for sponsors and partners who are looking for unprecedented access to the next generation of amazing student founders. If you are a student entrepreneur building the future or a brand or venture fund that services amazing college founders, we want to hear from you.

2) Founder's Cupid Syndicate Fund: Right now, if you are successful entrepreneurial or venture-minded alumni of many universities nationwide, there is no route for you to directly invest in the next generation of future college founders.

We are empowering alumni and those interested in college startups across the country to support the next generation of college founders through our syndicate fund, powered by Sydecar.io, a competitor fund product to the popular site AngelList.

We support the best college founders in the world through our community Entrepreneur Power Hour - now it’s your turn to support them through our syndicate fund and mentorship program.

3) Media Arm for College Founders: We are working on building out our own media arm to tell the stories of college founders, “in the weeds,” building their companies. We know that these stories are fascinating to so many, and there are lots of investors, companies, and philanthropists that would love to learn about what is getting built at college.

We know that empowering our founders to keep refining their stories with a nationwide media brand will be immensely helpful to all parts of our business model. Right now, there is no clear way to learn the stories of college founders until they get picked up by the biggest funds and investors in the US. We are determined to change that.

4) Power House (Bay Area Summer Founder House): We are building our first-ever founder house this summer in the Bay Area to support our Entrepreneur Power Hour College Founders. If you or your brand/company are interested in partnering with us in this venture, we’d love to talk.

For brands and sponsors, we’re offering an amazing opportunity to build relationships with top student founders and a plethora of investors and builders across the Bay Area this summer. If you’re a student builder and interested in living with us this summer, please reach out!

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

One of the biggest takeaways I’ve had since starting this company is that in life, there’s always going to be a reason to not do something.

There will always be a better time and a more optimistic future in which the stars are promised to align, and everything will work out perfectly. In truth, if you want to build a successful startup, you need to start somewhere and stop waiting.

I also learned the importance of founder-idea fit. I’ve tried and failed at starting several companies in the past, not because the ideas were bad, but because I was the wrong person to be solving them.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t muster up the skills needed to solve the problems, but rather that I simply didn’t care enough about the pain point I was addressing.

If you’re going to dedicate a lot of your life to building a company, you need to make sure that that company is in a space that you truly care about.

If you want to build the future, you need to start building, but you also need to make sure you know what you stand for and what you care about first.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

The most influential book for us has been “Make No Small Plans'' by Elliott Biznow and the founders of Summit. This book dives deeply into how Elliott and his co-founders built one of the most thriving communities for world changers and innovators.

It’s been hugely inspiring and has given us a lot of things to think about when it comes to community building and event planning.

Some other books that have been essential to our progress have included

“The Four-Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss, “The Third Door” by Alex Banayan, and “Venture Deals” by Brad Feld.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

My biggest advice for entrepreneurs is to make sure before they start building a startup, they fundamentally understand what matters to them. Until you understand the things that matter to you most, and the changes that you want to drive in the world, you’ll never be able to build a successful startup.

I came into college knowing that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I wasn’t sure what kinds of problems I wanted to tackle. As I grew older, and as I explored more of the things that excited me, I began to understand how I wanted to change the world.

Once I realized what I stood for, it became incredibly easier to identify the pain points that aligned with my values. Although you should not get caught up in “analysis paralysis,” and wait too long to try and build something, you’ll be well served to spend time discovering yourself and your values before you start implementing.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We are on the lookout for inspirational students to help us expand our community to schools across the country. We’re looking for master connectors, community builders, and inherent leaders that need no title to inspire.

Additionally, we are building out our syndicate fund in which we connect the world’s best angel investors to the top college founders. If you invest in startups and believe in the innovation that college founders are building, we would love to hear from you.

Lastly, we are looking for sponsors and partners who want to gain access to the world’s most talented college founders. We’re offering a chance to build relationships and sincere brand recognition with over 300 entrepreneurs, early, before the world finds out about them. We want to help you become the de facto name that helps support college founders in your area of expertise.

Where can we go to learn more?

To learn more, you can:

Check out the Entrepreneur Power Hour website here.

Check out the Founder’s Cupid Angel Syndicate Fund website here.

All of Bobby’s social media can be found here.