Vireo Labs

We started Vireo Labs back in 2015 with the help of a few angel investors and an advisory board of technology and education leaders -- all of whom got behind the idea to try to bridge the gaps between students, careers, and education using technology. Like every startup, we hit countless pot holes along the way but we did everything we could to persevere, pivot, and learn. When we finally launched our MVP of C'reer, the three of us poured some bourbon and pushed out our first customer generation tactics. While we had a great reception in the media and within select customer populations, we just didn't have enough resources to make product and engineering changes to get the traction we needed to survive to another round of funding. Looking back now, it feels surreal that we got product to market not once, but twice. It feels like a lifetime ago that we were on the pavement across the country trying to raise money and release the next product update or fix for a little startup in a town no one outside of the Southeast had heard of. What a ride. What a rush. We learned so much -- as entrepreneurs and people. We wouldn't change that experience for the world. Alas, the world has changed. Very rapidly. Education technology has all of a sudden become sexy and very competitive as emerging companies as well as Goliaths have doubled down to solve some of the problems we had identified in 2015 -- and then some! It is with a heavy heart that we announce that Vireo Labs LLC is shutting down operations by the end of 2022. Without the dedicated human and capital resources to iterate on the product, we simply cannot bootstrap our way to growth in the very crowded education technology space. Our heartfelt thanks go out to our investors, advisors, supporters and users. Without you and your support there is no C'reer or HBCU Chat. Lastly, a very special thank you to our friends and families for their support, understanding, and patience over the years.

Just dropped: our first intelligence brief of the year!  We crunched data from 2 million tours on VisiTOUR to look for yield and performance trend lines as it relates to the enrollment funnel. Click the link in comments section below to see the full post. 👇 😊 Yield on! #HigheredMarketing #Admissions #Enrollment #VirtualTours

I remember my first time - it was at work. Sending email, that is. 🤣 The first email I sent was in my first real job at a boutique advertising and PR firm in New York City in 1991. As memory serves, it was on a DOS machine where I had to hit Alt+F5 to make a character bold. Since then, email clients and CRMs have made it easier to send emails at scale, which is why about 350 billion are sent and received each day globally. Higher education certainly contributes its share to that mix. Despite all the prognostications about social media or SMS killing off email, it remains a viable channel to connect with prospective students and parents. In fact, it's the primary way to actually enroll in a college. Just try registering for classes or paying a deposit on a university platform using a social media login. Email is dead. Long live email! Check out my latest post about email and comm flow below. 👇🏾 #highereducation #emailmarketing #relevancematters https://lnkd.in/g6ENzUB3