A new startup with a mission: Improve the college admissions process.
This startup makes it easy and affordable to get relevant peer-to-peer guidance on college admissions.
Great startups often begin with entrepreneurs who fall in love with a problem worth solving. In the case of Klustur, the co-founders fell in love with a problem they had experienced themselves first-hand: the college admissions process is daunting!
The co-founders of Klustur, Rajesh Bhusa and Thaw Zin Aung Gyi, were childhood friends who went through the college admissions process just a few years ago. Rajesh ended up going to the University of Chicago, ThawZin went to Brown (and then Oxford for grad school). As they were going through the admissions process there were plenty of expensive private college counselors available (for families with money), but what they really wanted was to talk to current students at the universities they were applying to.
As Rajesh says “I kept thinking that if only I could ask someone already enrolled at a particular university about my essay topics, that’d be great. Why doesn’t that exist?”
So after graduation they built and launched Klustur, an on-demand platform for high school students to get 1-on-1 college admissions coaching from current college students.
It’s a peer-to-peer marketplace, so the college students get paid for each call, and the high school students get affordable admissions counseling. The college kid makes some extra money, and the high school kid gets meaningful advice from people with actual recent experience. Winning, all the way around.
High school students can book calls anytime, and they can search by major and by college. So they can find a lit major at NYU to have a call with, or a film major at USC, or a computer science major at Harvard. Whatever best aligns with their interests and the colleges they are interested in.
For me, the best thing about this new startup is that they are not only solving a customer problem, they are also solving a social problem by making access to meaningful college admissions counseling more affordable for all.
That’s a pretty big win.
