After eight shots of espresso, Peter Silverman and Max Robbins were looking for jobs around Vermont. They hit a rut when they realized most businesses in Vermont are small businesses. To combat their difficulty, they created a platform to solve the missed market.

Silverman and Robbins, senior business majors at the University of Vermont, run Majorwise, a web-based program that connects students with local employers. This year, the company won LaunchVT, a statewide competition that awards local entrepreneurs and businesses. Founded in 2015, Majorwise is the first student-run company to win the competition.

Majorwise has clients from Boston to Nevada, with platforms launching next week for the internship programs at Harlem Village Academies in New York City and South Burlington High School in Vermont.

The Daily Orange: How did you first come up with Majorwise?

Peter Silverman: It was sophomore year at the University of Vermont, and I was hanging out with my roommate who later became my co-founder … We were just talking about how in Vermont there’s kind of a narrative that there’s no jobs. That’s our cultural identity, and it’s kind of sad because even as business majors, we couldn’t actually name a business in Vermont that isn’t a store or on Church Street, our downtown.

We went to networking events for probably about four months, and what we realized was pretty interesting. Eighty percent of businesses in Vermont were less than 10 people … Everything else was really small business-driven and highly entrepreneurial.

I started a small website that was $30 a month to post a job and we found about 500 kids paid jobs and internships in our first six months. In over a year of working 60-hour weeks on top of college I had made less than $10,000. When Fitchburg State and the UMass schools reached out they offered $6,000 a year per school, I realized the way to make this profitable is to sell the tech ecosystem and sell the website itself. Now we just sell it to high schools, and we’re actually the only ones in that market right now.

The D.O.: How has winning LaunchVT changed your business plan?

P.S.: It gave us $30,000 which was good because I could start paying people very consistently. It gave us the incentive to see that we have the traction to be a business in a year, but now we have to tie up all these loose ends. Anything that sounds like a college kid running a thing out of his dorm needs to stop immediately. It made us more legitimate.

The D.O.: How did that transition work from selling to colleges to selling to high schools?

P.S.: It was a little better in terms of sales, because there’s a general switching cost principle in selling software. The general rule is most people won’t buy it unless it’s 10 times better than what they’re doing right now … We were selling a really comparable product to everything else in the college market. The difference when we switched over to high schools is no one has anything.

The D.O.: What kind of success have you had with that so far?

P.S.: I just picked up client number 10 the other week. In the first year of Beacon, we had two sales. That’s pretty solid traction, especially for a company that has zero funding.

The D.O.: Have you had any investor interest?

P.S.: I’ve always had interest, but personally I don’t want investors … If I take someone else’s money I have to write constant updates of what I’m doing this week and how I’m doing it better. I’ve not taken money yet, but I have gotten around 12 offers. This woman just offered me $150,000 at a coffee shop the other day.

The D.O.: So you’re pretty headstrong about not taking investor money?

P.S.: I just think bootstrapping and doing it all yourself gives you all the power. If I make 20 more sales without taking any money, that’s way more impressive than if someone gives me $3 million and I make a hundred more sales.

The D.O.: What’s in store for the future?

P.S.: I’m raising a family/friends round of around $200,000 which gives us runway for another 18 months for me and my team. We got 10 clients this year within the first six or seven months, which is awesome, but I want to get that to 50 next year. It’s really just profits improvement, and if we can actually find different people in high school jobs, internships and places to volunteer, then we’re going to be the namesake product. And if we’re the only ones doing that, of course we’ll make all the sales.

Published on October 9, 2017 at 9:21 pm

Contact Jordan: jslazins@syr.edu