An unrealized obituary of a startup

When we founded Vireo Labs in 2015 we had a vision for building a solution to help millions of students find their way to a career and college education.

We had a really strong co-founding team with experience from e-commerce (Amazon, eBay), social media (LinkedIn), and higher education (SCAD and others), but ultimately it wasn't enough. For two straight years it was 100% of our personal focus and easily the most fun I've had working nonstop.

We launched C'reer in 2017 as a native mobile platform that helped students identify their career interests and matched them with the best colleges and universities for those fields. Students could then connect with admissions representatives from those schools via chat.

The hypothesis was simple: We believed college bound students would search for schools through career interests using a mobile device. Unlike some of my prior startups we really planned out the product market fit -- even going through a favorite marketing convention of mine: the corporate obituary.

As I completed the paperwork to shut down the LLC with the State of Delaware on the same day we released the episode of "Master's of Fail" where I talk about all of the lessons learned in that fail, I couldn't help but pull up that obituary and share it verbatim here because it's still one of the most clarifying exercises I've ever gone through in my career.

It's more than a bit spooky to see that we projected its end (exit) to be about a month from today. We were right about one thing at least!

Section 1: Who are you?

The future obituary for C’reer

OBITUARY

June 15, 2023

Students, parents and school counselors mourn C’reer

C’reer, the mobile app that has matched millions of people with careers and college programs, has made its last recommendation as the Charleston-based company closed its doors on Friday.??Vireo Labs designed and launched C’reer as a free service in 2016 to help anyone, anywhere find out what they want to be when they grew up. The founders took the idea on a napkin through its early bootstrapped days to over $425 million in revenues and 110 million users last year.

The initial version of C’reer was given to a small group of high schools in Savannah and Charleston in late 2016 – with zero dollars left in the bank – and adoption grew quickly from the Southeast to New York and San Francisco which helped the three co-founders raise some venture funding to scale the business.

“Ian and I started the company with the objective to help people thrive – which landed us in the career and education space,” said Jose Mallabo, co-founder of C’reer.

He explained that the company has exceeded many of its early expectations and has helped match tens of millions of people with career fields and colleges in the U.S. and internationally.??Some investors have wondered why management would exit the business when the international market was just starting to get traction but the company explained that they want to individually focus on the larger issues facing higher education.

Mallabo continued, “C’reer was first and foremost designed for students of all ages, but we knew it would help colleges improve their enrollment marketing processes. Now I want to take what I’ve learned about student needs and interests and apply it to helping higher education overall.

Three years ago the company rejected an acquisition offer by Microsoft for $4 billion – citing on its blog at the time that “our objective is to help our users find their way, not the shareholders of other companies.”

May C’reer rest in peace but let’s hope its spirit lives on.

To get the full view of the lessons learned from founding an education technology company before COVID, you can listen to Episode 5 of Master's of Fail where I channel my inner MTV Unplugged.