It’s YOUR time to #EdUp
In this episode, recorded LIVE & in person from the InsightsEDU 2024 conference in Phoenix, AZ
YOUR guest is Athena Kan, CEO, Dreambound
YOUR host is Dr. Joe Sallustio
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Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to head up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. We're at Insights EDU in Phoenix, Arizona for the conference hosted by Education Dynamics. We're going to have a panel where I'll be talking about marketing and enrollment - all of the things needed to support online students. That's what we're here to talk about: enrollment, marketing, analytics, data. What's going to happen in the future for online learning? We don't know, but we're interviewing as many people as we can so that we can put the puzzle together on what the future holds. And we've got somebody special with us right now. Ladies and gentlemen, her name is Athena Kan. She is CEO and co-founder of DreamBound. Athena, welcome to EdUp Experience.
Athena Kan: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited.
Joe Sallustio: We're excited to have you. I want you to tell me what DreamBound is. So as I set this up, I want you to just tell me what it is you do and how you do it.
Athena Kan: DreamBound is a platform for adult learners to find career and technical training. Basically, what we've done is create a search engine where we've ingested thousands of schools all over the country. Someone can go to our site and type in something like an in-person welding program or an online medical billing and coding. We'll be able to show them the best school options for them, how long the programs are, financial aid options if they're available, or other payment options. We help schools grow enrollments too.
Joe Sallustio: Do you pull the information from the schools' websites and collate it?
Athena Kan: Yes, we use a lot of different data sets, clean them up because they're very disparate across many states. We go to many individual sites. We work with many schools and we put them all together in one easy-to-search platform.
Joe Sallustio: Where does the name DreamBound come from? Why did you select that name?
Athena Kan: DreamBound, I think it speaks for itself. We really want to help people achieve their dreams. We actually started out as a different name called Ladder. Then we got a cease and desist letter, so we had to change it. We had a whole naming session with a lot of our investors, employees, founders. And DreamBound was really the standout. We want to help people achieve their dreams.
Joe Sallustio: Tell me a little about how it works. I'm an institution and I want to work with DreamBound. Are you selling to the institution? Are you selling to the consumer? Tell me how the model works.
Athena Kan: We're a marketplace. We have about 100,000 students every month and growing that are coming to look for training. Schools can list themselves for free and then they just pay us per inquiry or per lead.
Joe Sallustio: So you're sourcing the student and you're going to the school saying, "Hey, school, this student's interested in biochemistry." So the school's buying a lead from you and then talking to that student. You're cutting down the marketing costs for the schools essentially, is that right?
Athena Kan: Exactly. We provide super high-intent students and we're mostly organic growth driven. So we can charge much less per lead or per inquiry compared to other channels like Google search.
Joe Sallustio: How is the site designed? Is it designed by program, by institution? Is it taking the student on a journey to figure out what they might need or want?
Athena Kan: We have a part of the site for every single type of student. But the main one on our site, if you go on, there's just a search bar and you can search by a specific program that you're looking for, like a medical assistant. After that, a student can see all the different medical assistant options. They can sort and filter and rank by whichever criteria they're looking for. And then if they find a specific program at that school, they can fill out a form to learn more, and we send that over to the school.
Joe Sallustio: I'm fascinated by entrepreneurship. Can you tell us the story behind DreamBound? How did you come up with the business idea?
Athena Kan: I think a lot of things were behind the reason for DreamBound, but one really big formative moment for me was when I was a kid and my parents were looking to hire an electrician for our house, but it was going to be very expensive. My dad decided to become an electrician himself. He studied nights and weekends, took the test, and I think he got like a perfect score. So I was like, "Wow, I didn't know you could get it done so quickly." So then I went and got some certifications myself.
Joe Sallustio: Are you an electrician?
Athena Kan: I'm an apprentice plumber and a few other things too.
Joe Sallustio: That's so cool. That is amazing. So that was the moment where you said, let me create something for others to get these skills that they may not know where to look?
Athena Kan: Yeah, it's challenging for people to find a job that they really love and one that can provide for themselves and their families. A big barrier is just that they don't know about it. For there to be some website that's like, "Actually, you can start a whole new career and it only costs you maybe $300 to start" - that can be the way that a student actually ends up making that change. I talked to a student once who said, "My gosh, that's only like three days of door dashing. Let me just go do that and totally change my life." And I was like, "Yeah, you should."
Joe Sallustio: Is part of the problem that the degree is so formalized and time-heavy that there has to be another way for people to skill up, but it's not as prominently displayed as a degree? We get degrees, we know associate, bachelor's, master's, doctoral. It's structured, it's been hundreds of years, we get it, it's organized. What's not organized is this skill and that skill and how this moves and how that moves. Is that a problem that DreamBound solves?
Athena Kan: Absolutely. We see the number one most important thing for students is the cost of a program, and cost is directly tied to how long the program is or whether it's self-paced or has a class date and time. And then second after that is whether there are online options. And then third is very clearly the length of the class. So we try to offer as many options as possible for people if they're looking for credit, if they're looking for a full associate's because they want that degree that no one can take away from them, or if they're just looking to get certified so that they can get their job. We just want to provide all the options out there for students to pick.
Joe Sallustio: You're here at Insights EDU. Who are you talking to? Are you talking to the school representatives that are here? Is that the key for you all to just say, "Hey, look, we can help you generate more inquiries"?
Athena Kan: Exactly. We love talking to especially directors of marketing, heads of marketing who are looking for ways to increase enrollments without raising costs, especially as the industry is moving more towards professional certifications or professionally oriented programs. That's where everyone's trying to grow right now.
Joe Sallustio: What are schools' budgets like? Is that a big concern when you talk to schools? Is it like, "Well, we've got a small budget, we don't do this, we don't do that," or is there money out there and schools are investing more in marketing and this is an alternative way that they're not thinking about?
Athena Kan: Marketing is really a revenue growth driver. And so if a school can figure out a way for a channel to be profitable, they'll spend as much money as they can.
Joe Sallustio: I wish that were always true in higher ed. I do, because I think sometimes you have to pick and choose what you're going to spend your money on. And a lot of times marketers don't have a high seat at the table as other roles. You always have your chief academic officer at the table, but your chief marketing officer, whoever that might be - by the way, CMO is not a common term in higher ed, it's usually VP of marketing or marketing is a lower-level director position. Sometimes the administrative staff doesn't understand that marketing is the biggest place that you need to invest in if you want to generate interest in your programs.
What makes this a successful conference for you? Why is DreamBound here as a sponsor at this conference? What's going to be successful for you coming out of this?
Athena Kan: We want to work with the best schools out there who are looking to get in front of students. For us, it's been an easy sell so far for our existing partner schools. They see the results immediately. They get insane enrollment rates compared to even Google ads or something like that. And for them, it's just increased revenue, increased growth.
Joe Sallustio: I've got a question. How in the world are you finding the students? I am fascinated by that. What is your secret sauce? How do you do it?
Athena Kan: We're actually mostly organic, which is hard nowadays. We get a lot of SEO because we have the richest data of any other platform out there in the world. And then we also actually get a lot of word of mouth. Students are seeing it's a much better experience than a 20-question form where they have to answer if they're a veteran, if they're a nurse, and then get programs that are not really helpful to what they're looking for.
Joe Sallustio: That's fascinating. That's amazing. Are you blogging? Are you guys doing videos? Are you on TikTok? I haven't looked you up, so I don't know.
Athena Kan: Yeah, we write a lot of content. It's for a specific adult student, looking at ages 35 and over. A lot of people are just trying to change their lives. And so being able to tap into that consumer psyche, especially adults, I think we're early on in targeting that segment. And so we've been able to get a foothold in and grow fast.
Joe Sallustio: What's your content like? What are you guys talking about in your content?
Athena Kan: Really everything. We help people choose different programs, especially someone who's looking for healthcare broadly - they might not know if they should become a medical biller or coder or if they should become a sterile processing technician because those are terms that most people haven't really heard of. But then they know generally they want to do healthcare. And so we'll write really in-depth guides on how to do that.
Joe Sallustio: Do you talk to employers? Do you have like an employer advisory board or something like that that says, "Here are careers we really need to find some schools to offer"?
Athena Kan: We get a lot of employer inbound outreach. We haven't formalized too much of it. But we have employers who are trying to get us to sponsor students so that they can basically build their own workforce. That's hopefully in the roadmap soon.
Joe Sallustio: What's in the roadmap? What's in your long-term roadmap? Since you brought it up.
Athena Kan: We definitely want to make our search better. Especially now with a lot of large language models - and we're all from engineering backgrounds, less so marketing backgrounds. This is what we want to do. A lot of the career coaching journey as well can now be personalized for someone who can get personalized advice on which specific career they should do and be able to see how much they actually get paid, especially someone working in their specific geo. A lot of employer engagement as well. Tuition reimbursement programs are coming up on the rise in our sector specifically. And so we want to bring employers into the fold too.
Joe Sallustio: Can you tell me what a successful conference looks like when you go home at the end of these three days? What defines success for visiting Insights EDU?
Athena Kan: We want to get in front of other heads of growth, the heads of marketing and be able to connect with those and for people to know that we're a resource out there for them to grow their adult learner enrollments.
Joe Sallustio: How long have you been around? How many years have you been doing this?
Athena Kan: About four years.
Joe Sallustio: You're a young founder. That's a compliment. But you are very sharp and smart. Starting a business is not easy. I just want to go back to that story just real quick before we let you go. Did you go to college? Did you get your degree?
Athena Kan: I did.
Joe Sallustio: So you got your degree, but you're also like an apprentice plumber. Right? So you're like this Renaissance woman who is doing skills-based stacking, getting a degree or degrees. Is this the modern way? Are you a representative of the modern student who does all of these types of things?
Athena Kan: Absolutely. Yeah. You know, if I can get all my friends to go become an apprentice plumber through DreamBound, that would be ideal.
Joe Sallustio: All friends out there, please contact DreamBound for apprentice plumberships. And how many other careers do you think you represent? How many other training pathways can I experience on DreamBound? A hundred, a thousand?
Athena Kan: I think we're at something like 85 right now.
Joe Sallustio: That's amazing. Well, that's pretty incredible. I got to be honest, and I'm very excited to learn about DreamBound. In fact, I don't know if you know this, but in my alter ego, I'm the chief experience officer at Lindenwood University. So we should talk because I'm always looking to grow my enrollment at Lindenwood. So we need to do that. We'll do that off of this recording and this podcast. Where do we find and connect with you? What's the best way to engage with DreamBound if somebody was listening to this and is interested?
Athena Kan: Yeah, dreambound.com. You can send me an email at athena@dreambound.com if you are interested in working together.
Joe Sallustio: And the cell phone number is?
Athena Kan: The cell phone number that you're only allowed to call between the hours of 12 midnight and 6 am. I'm a founder. I'll pick up any day.
Joe Sallustio: I like it. That's called service, ladies and gentlemen. She is our guest. Her name is Athena Kan. She's CEO, co-founder at DreamBound. Did you have a good time with us today here on the EdUp Experience podcast?
Athena Kan: I did. Yeah.
Joe Sallustio: You did? Thank you so much. Thank you for coming on. Ladies and gentlemen, you've just been EdUpped.