"One more email."
That was the line Amanda DoAmaral repeated to herself as she watched her back account dwindle down to near zero.
In the winter of 2018, the founder and CEO of Fiveable, an interactive student tutoring platform, found herself—and her company—at a crossroads. Living in Philadelphia and having already invested $20,000 in follow on funding to build out the business, DoAmaral made the risky decision to close out her retirement fund.
There was nothing left to give after that.
“I was trying to find opportunities,” DoAmaral, 30, explains in a phone call. “I was thinking, ‘How can we stay alive?’ Let me throw my hat in the ring. Any opportunity that comes my way, I’m going to do it.”
By March 2019, she received the call she had been waiting for. Following several nail-biting interviews, Fiveable had been accepted into gener8tor’s 12-week accelerator program. Over the next two weeks, DoAmaral sold everything she owned, packed up her Toyota Corolla, and made the 14-hour trek to Madison with two of her team members to join the next cohort.
“That’s where the transition happened,” says DoAmaral, who had never visited Wisconsin before getting accepted into the accelerator program. “It took us from this idea, this startup idea, into an investable business.”
Fiveable provides live-streamed discussion, on-demand video lectures, study guides and academic support for 15 AP courses. To encourage student accessibility, the company uses a “freemium” monetization model, starting with a $5 per month subscription option.
“I’m a broke millennial—I was never going to be able to bootstrap this for very long."
Earlier this month, Fiveable announced the company had raised more than $673,658—entirely from Wisconsin-based investors—including $615,000 in a seed funding round led by Northwestern Mutual’s Cream City Venture Capital. DoAmaral, who was one of Wisconsin Inno's 2019 50 on Fire honorees and Inno Blazer winners, plans to use the funds to hire content developers, build out the Fiveable platform and “build capacity in every corner,” she says.
As a woman of color, DoAmaral’s achievement is rare. According to Pitchbook, women receive just 2.8 percent of venture capital dollars, and women of color receive less than one percent, but DoAmaral says she isn’t focused on beating statistics. After a rollercoaster year, she’s just happy to have a shot.
DoAmaral launched Fiveable after teaching AP World to high school students in Oakland, California. After experiencing dismal passing rates, DoAmaral and her fellow AP colleagues worked to develop a curriculum to empower students in the classroom.
“It was obvious that students weren’t being pushed to their potential,” she says. “When you give students the ability to learn content through different mediums, discuss the content, and then [provide] a lot of practice, students thrive.”
Soon, more than 70 percent of students were passing AP and begging to be in her classes. Unfortunately, DoAmaral says she could no longer afford to live on her teacher’s wages.
After five years in the classroom, she headed back home to Boston to work on a congressional campaign and figure out her next move. When she received an email from a former student who requested study help, it sparked the idea that would become the nexus for Fiveable and she began live-streaming.
“I knew what they needed to do to pass AP history,” DoAmaral says. “And I was thinking, ‘What can I do tomorrow to help them?’ I knew if my students needed it, then other students would need it.”
DoAmaral got the word out by posting links to her live-streams in Facebook groups, Twitter and Reddit. Within a few months, more than 2,000 students had logged on to her online classes. Soon she was accepted into an accelerator program in Salt Lake City to help take her idea to the next level.
“I’m a broke millennial—I was never going to be able to bootstrap this for very long,” DoAmaral says. “My background is not in tech. I knew I needed people and resources. The more important piece for me was the students. Since then it's been about creating and innovating,” including developing content, strategic networking, and an aggressive SEO campaign to bring more than 100,000 visitors to the Fiveable website.
Since participating in the gener8tor accelerator and receiving a $100,000 investment, DoAmaral has participated in a number of area pitch events, including at Summerfest Tech, where Marcus Lemonis personally invested $10,000 of his own cash into the company.
The event gave Fiveable some much-needed visibility, but DoAmaral says additional commitments fell through. It wasn’t long before Fiveable returned to square one.
“It was dramatic,” she says. “There were so many moments where I was asking myself, ‘Where am I going? Is this something worth building?’ I needed some kind of win. So, I said ‘Let me just send one more email.’”
One of those emails resulted in bridge funding to help keep the company afloat. Being funded was a relief to be sure, but it was the validation that kept DoAmaral moving forward long enough to launch a successful seed round.
“The biggest challenge is learning to trust yourself and be confident,” she says. “To be able to feel this included in a community this fast is a testament to the community itself. It’s because of the people here that send me opportunities. Anywhere else, and I don’t know where we’d be.”
