LaunchVT 2017 Finalist
MajorWise

Describe your business. 

Did you know exactly what you wanted to do when you graduated from college? Students who use MajorWise do. MajorWise is an online platform that shows different projects and career opportunities for university students, allowing students to try out different industries, build experience, and make money.

Tell us about your team - why are you the right people for this venture? 

We started MajorWise (as BeaconVT at the time)  in December of 2015. We were college roommates at the University of Vermont, and both of us were having troublefinding local jobs for the summer related to our majors. I (Peter) ended up getting a digital marketing internship in Boston, and Max was a waiter in Cape Cod. Neither of us could believe there were no local jobs we could find. So, we started investigating where all these jobs are. It turned out most of the companies in Vermont are small, as in less than 10 employees. These businesses don’t normally hire students for internships because internships often require too big of  a commitment. They do need help executing marketing strategies, making graphics, and communicating with customers, but they can’t afford that for 30 hours a week. Figuring this out, we created a simple job board based on smaller projects called BeaconVT to help Vermont students find local jobs, internships, projects, and gigs.

Why Vermont? 

Vermont has a big issue that our platform solves - brain drain. Vermont has a large amount of higher education organizations, including UVM, Middlebury, Champlain, and dozens more. However, when students graduate, less than 30% stick around in Vermont to work. This is partially due to the lack of job exposure to students. With our platform, students find better jobs in state, improve the local economy, and reduce brain drain.

Why should you win LaunchVT? 

With the support of LaunchVT, we will accomplish great things for all of Vermont. We’ve shown to have an incredibly capable team that has brought us this far, and in order to scale we need to reinvest in their talents and hard work by allocating all winnings towards growing our team and keeping them happy and paying their skills.

In order to keep the momentum up, we will reinvest every dollar we win back into our team. With the help of LaunchVT, we can grow a scalable software company and hire graduates from Vermont universities.