Thousands of students struggle with scholarships every year. During my final year of high school, I remember searching for hours for the right scholarship, while ignoring the hours it took to actually complete the application.
Recently, I had the privilege of meeting Tomiwa Ademidun, the founder of an edtech start-up. Tomiwa is an HBA and software engineering student who took a year off to build Atila: a start-up that helps students automatically find and apply for scholarships in one click.
What motivated you to start a company?
The three main reasons I started Atila.ca were frustration, freedom and impact. I realized that after graduating from my dual degree program, I would have over $50k in student loans. I was really frustrated with how hard it was to find and apply for scholarships. So, the engineer in me thought, “Why not just build something that makes this process easier?”
Starting a company also gave me the freedom to solve the problems that I found to be most worthwhile and interesting. It gives you financial freedom because your compensation is tightly correlated to the amount of value that your company creates, and tends to be more meritocratic than other options.
Finally, starting a company is, in my opinion, one of the most effective ways of directly impacting the change you want to see in the world. Especially working in the technology space, your product is able to scale rapidly and help a large number of people.
What surprised you about being an entrepreneur? What challenges did you face?
There’s a great quote which answers this question perfectly: “first time founders focus on product, second time founders focus on distribution”. As this is the first real company I founded and because I love coding, I think that I spent too much time making the product “perfect” and not enough time thinking about how to get people to care.
I was definitely surprised by how competitive the fight is for people’s attention. The challenge was creating and executing an effective marketing strategy. I think the key takeaway here (such an Ivey word!) was that I had to put on different hats and learn new skills very quickly. As a result, I think we are in a much better position now, having a more thoughtful strategy on how to get our users’ attention and attract amazing people to join our team.
What projects are your main focus right now?
My projects are usually split between developing technology, marketing, and distribution.
On the technology side, I am currently focused on developing our machine learning and neural network algorithms to learn what types of scholarships, blog posts and forum topics our users like to read. Over time, the algorithm will be able to recommend increasingly relevant and useful content to our users.
On the marketing and distribution side, we recently launched a media company focused on education, career and life advice. We have an interview series called Atila TV where we interview people about their life story. We’ve interviewed everyone from Bain consultants, product managers at Facebook, university dropouts, Google software engineers and plan to expand to even more diverse guests in the future. We’re also developing for different platforms such as the YouTube Channel, Podcast and even looking into launching an Alexa skill!
How do you come up with ideas for projects and businesses? Is your thinking spontaneous?
Great question! I ask myself this a lot. I think coming up with ideas is like picking an apple tree. The apples on the trees are the universe of possible ideas and the apples in your bucket are the ideas that you have. You can fill your bucket by picking from the tree one by one or by placing your bucket under the tree, shaking the tree and having many apples fall at once.
Shaking the tree is the equivalent of doing intellectual tasks like reading books and articles, talking to people, studying technical papers, etc. These activities get your brain fired up and ideas subconsciously swimming in your head. Then when you check the bucket, those ideas go from the subconscious part of your brain to the conscious.
There is also the multidisciplinary approach to knowledge by Charlie Munger, which basically means that you learn from forming connections between different related fields. To bring it back to the apple picking analogy, this is equivalent to increasing the number of buckets that you use when picking apples. So someone who only studies technology will have one bucket, while someone who studies technology, psychology, and economics will have three buckets.
For example, when I am working on the technology aspect of Atila, I read a lot about technical concepts like cloud computing, neural networks, and databases. When I am working on the marketing aspect, I think more about human psychology, copywriting, and customer acquisition costs. Something I learned about microservices will unexpectedly impact how I run a marketing campaign. Or something I learned in human psychology will impact how we build our neural network algorithms. This happens a lot more than you might imagine and can be a very effective way of coming up with new insights and ideas.
Having the opportunity to hear Tomiwa’s thoughts was an incredible experience and I couldn’t be more appreciative. If you would like to reach out to Tomiwa, you can contact him through his website https://tomiwa.ca/. If you would like to learn more about Atila, click the following link https://atila.ca/.
As always, if you have any questions about this article or about me, I’d be happy to answer any inquiries at dspragu4@uwo.ca.