How did I start?
In the summer of 2025, I attended the LaunchX Entrepreneurship Program, a summer program where I met a lot of talented kids and fellow founders by the end of the program. During the program, I got close to Albert, Chase, and Kymi, who founded Step Up during the batch. What really drew me into it was their social mission to connect highschoolers with nonprofits and internships. Highschoolers are the most underused resources in the job market. And I believed if all the highschoolers volunteered and contributed to the world for social impact, I could make the world significantly better. After I finished the program, I decided to join their team to accelerate the growth of the company as a Chief Growth Officer.
Partnering with Organizations
The first thing I thought I should work on was onboarding as many company to our website as possible and make sure that we have a lot of company base before launching this to our customer, students. For this reason, the first thing I did was making partnership with companies. The listed below was all the companies we partnered up up to this point but it wasn’t enough.
My strategy was simple: cold emailing. Up to this point, I had experience with hackathons in partnership. There isn’t a more effective way of making partnership than cold outreach. I spent most of my times drafting this email, personalizing and sending to companies.
I’d say 90% of the emails aren’t responded. 10% respond and half of them denies. That only leaves up about 5% of the companies we email doing a meeting and little more than half the companies we meet partner up with us.
Reaching Out to Local Nonprofits
The first organization we targeted were local non-profits in the bay area. We spent tons of email and got replies from few of them. Check out below for some examples:
Most of them requested a short meeting and I had to wake up (due to time zone issue) everyday at about 3am-5am to conduct the meeting and go back to sleep. We sometimes had up to 3 meetings per day when we were on fire. This was our google calendar when we sent email the most.
This is the task we divided:
Growing Our Student User Base
Up to this point, we’ve made over 50+ partnerships with many great companies like Lumiere Education, California Journal, etc… Now, it was our time to get our customers! Our goal was to email more than 40+ schools club to ask if they are interested in this opportunity. In each school’s website, they upload their school’s club list with their leader’s email.
Then, I sent personalized emails to every single one of them. This is one of the emails I sent:
I repeated this countless times
This way, I onboarded many customers who will use Step Up to connect to their companies:
Building Discord Community
Another thing that I did was bringing users into our discord group. There are two ways. First is directly asking our users or friend and second is bringing users from schoolclicker. I decided to combine discord chat for step up with schoolclicker, since they share same customer base and also help students who are using schoolclicker to find an internship.
Contributing to (absolutely sickkk) website
I also contributed to the software side by making this nice slick UI:
Step Up is still active and we are continuing growing to make sure that more students discover meaningful opportunities for internships and volunteering and make sure that age is not a barrier to contributing to the society.
You can check out more at https://stepup-v11.vercel.app/.