HKEC’s FOUNDER STORIES: Vaishnavi Lakshmanan, BoxEDu
“Anybody can be an entrepreneur by making use of the resources around them.” That is the message that April’s featured founder, Vaishnavi Lakshmanan, has for students at The University of Texas at Austin. “Don’t think too much. Don’t think about your background or your circumstances, just identify a problem and work to solve it.”
Vaishnavi is a junior Public Health major at the College of Natural Sciences. She is currently involved in multiple science honor societies and spends her time doing research on campus. Before starting at UT, Vaishnavi recalls having very little entrepreneurial experience. She identified her interest in product management and passion for health, and entered college with a more science-based background. “I don’t recall specifically wanting to get into entrepreneurship. I have just always been a person who can identify problems and ways to solve them.”
“My first entrepreneurial experience at UT was getting told that my idea wasn’t viable,” Vaishnavi recalls. This brutal honesty led her to realize that if she wanted her idea to be successful, she would have learn not take feedback personally, but rather grow from it and modify her ideas as she went. This newfound outlook propelled her to join HKEC’s Forty Acres Founders Pre-Accelerator (FAF) program in the spring of her sophomore year.
“Forty Acres Founders gave me the support I needed by connecting me to peer and community mentors. Since it is a pre-accelerator, I felt comfortable coming from a science background with no business experience,” Vaishnavi recalls. She spent her time in FAF finding an applied market-fit for her product, BoxEDu.
BoxEDu is a subscription-based test prep product for standardized tests, primarily the SAT and ACT. Vaishnavi envisioned the idea while going through the college prep experience in high school. “I went to a Title I school school in Austin. Title I means the majority of students are under some sort of socioeconomic distress. I noticed that, especially among my peers, there was a focus on getting a job to help out around the house, but not a lot of focus on college prep, and specifically preparing for standardized tests,” Vaishnavi recalls. “Outside of school, I was an ACT and SAT instructor for the Princeton Review. When I asked the kids I tutored what was preventing their friends from joining them, most replied that their peers lacked financial access for test prep. That’s when I realized that accessibility equals affordability.” Vaishnavi’s BoxEDu solution is not only curated to send customers personalized test prep, but it’s also significantly cheaper than a typical course or tutor, and is curated and paced for each user with a customizable subscription method of delivery.
After completing FAF with the top prize in the end-of-semester pitch competition, Vaishnavi has focused on growing her network, and further tailoring her product for her intended market. In the summer of 2020, she was able to bring on a team of interns to help further develop her solution. “Since it was the summer of COVID-19, there weren’t a lot of professional development opportunities available, so it was really easy to find people who wanted to work on BoxEDu with me. I recognized I lacked the technical skillset to code and do web design, so they’ve been a big help with that.” In addition to talking to potential customers and schools, she’s been able to develop a physical prototype of the box and its material, which she touts as a milestone on her entrepreneurial journey so far.
In addition to FAF, Vaishnavi has attended HKEC events and utilized entrepreneurship resources across campus. “I have attended several HKEC Startup Coffee Connects, which were super helpful because everyone was in different stages of their journey, and I could use the room as a sounding board for ideas I was working on,” Vaishnavi recalls. In addition to HKEC Startup Coffee Connects, she is a TA for the CNS Inventor’s Program, and is involved in the Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute. When asked if she thinks getting involved in entrepreneurship while a student was beneficial for her academic career, her answer was “100%. It made an even bigger impact than I would’ve gotten elsewhere because I come from a traditional science background, but I’ve gotten all this exposure to the tech and business side of things,” Vaishnavi explained. “It has pushed me to have a sense of self-motivation that carries through everything else that I do. I really think that transition has helped me overcome obstacles on campus.”
Vaishnavi says her next move with BoxEDu is to get her prototypes in the hands of Title I students to gather more feedback. “We want to see if and how we improve their score, and how we can better improve their score. After that, we want to grow to even bigger batch sizes and work on scaling up.” She is also pursuing a career in product management, specifically with a startup, and wants to have that experience under her belt before making the leap. While she doesn’t yet consider herself a full-time entrepreneur, she says that the word is a lot scarier than what it actually entails. “Being an entrepreneur is just making use of the opportunity around you. People don’t realize how much is available to them at UT, especially for free. Go to events, put yourself out there, and seek feedback. That’s how you learn and become an entrepreneur.”
