This Dorm Room Entrepreneur Earned $200K From His College While Building 2 Multimillion-Dollar Startups

In any given semester, at business schools around the country, dorm-room entrepreneurs are pulling all-nighters to launch their platforms, side hustles, and – just maybe – a venture they can take with them when they leave. Emil Barr, a 2024 graduate of Miami University’s Farmer School of Business, did something most student founders can only dream of: Graduating with two multi-million-dollar startups while getting his college to pay him a net profit.

“There’s probably a story around me walking away with a couple of hundred thousand from the university when I graduated,” Barr, 22, tells Poets&Quants. “I kind of flipped the typical ‘go into debt’ narrative of a college degree.”

NETTING $200K FROM YOUR UNIVERSITY

Barr, founder of Step Up Social (now Candid Network) and Flashpass, says he netted $200,000 from Farmer and Miami University in four years. For the quants, here’s the math:

First, he started with a scholarship that paid about 80% of his tuition. He founded Step Up in 2021 from his dorm room and, by the end of his freshman year, it was valued as a million-dollar company. When Miami asked him to help promote their budding entrepreneurship program through press interviews, meeting with donors, and more – essentially a part-time job – he negotiated his scholarship to pay 100% of his tuition.

He earned around $20,000 in pitch competitions: For Step Up the first year and for Flashpass the next. When he tried to enter a third time, the university declined. “They told me, ‘It’s just not fun when you enter,’” Barr says.

A student accelerator and grant funding added another $20,000.

Finally, he convinced Miami University to be one of Step Up’s first clients and negotiated a nearly $4,000-a-month contract to run the school’s TikTok. Step Up was among the first agencies to target the platform, and Miami became one of the first universities to go TikTok viral. Eventually, other university departments signed on, bumping Step Up’s university income to between $8,000 and $9,000 per month, Barr says.

Q&A WITH A BILLIONAIRE IN TRAINING

All told, Barr negotiated about $60,000 in tuition and living expenses and made another $140,000 through pitch competitions, stipends, grants, and contracts.

That’s on top of the millions at which his two ventures are currently valued. One of his secrets is setting big goals that may sound ludicrous to other dorm-room entrepreneurs. For one, he plans to get his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business once Flashpass becomes a $100-million company. (He’s a deferred admit for 2027, so the clock is ticking.)

For another, he wants to be a billionaire by age 30.

P&Q recently connected with Barr, who majored in economics and minored in international business at Farmer, to talk about his companies and what it takes to build a fortune from a college dorm room. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with your background. Where did you grow up, and where do you think your interest in business originated?

I was born in Russia, but moved to the United States very early—when I was about three years old. I went to preschool and kindergarten in the U.S., so I ended up speaking English much better than Russian.

We lived in Chicago for a year, but I spent most of my life growing up in a small town near Cincinnati, Ohio. I was kind of a fish out of water; I didn’t really fit in. I had some eccentricities, I guess, if we’re being generous. I was the kid who wore a blazer to school. I was really into business from a young age and always said, “I’m going to be a businessman.”

That was interesting because neither of my parents had any entrepreneurial or business background. My dad worked at a large, publicly traded insurance company, mainly in risk management and data governance – very technical, mathematical work. My mom was a school teacher.

What was it about business and entrepreneurship that attracted you early on?

I’m not sure I knew right away that I wanted to go into business. At first, I thought I wanted to be a diplomat. I had this idea of traveling the world, being sophisticated, doing cool things.

But my first real experience with entrepreneurship came after I graduated high school, during that summer before freshman year of college. That’s when I got a taste of it, and it led me to add a business major. I actually started college as a diplomacy major in international studies.

Describe that first foray into entrepreneurship?

I graduated during COVID-19, and school shut down around January or February. They said we’d come back, but we never did. Around that time, I had grown up playing tennis. I wasn’t great at it, but I loved it. I worked at the local tennis club and a nearby tennis store. I had even bartered with the coach for free lessons in exchange for helping out, because I thought I might play in college. I never did; I just wasn’t that good.

But during COVID, I decided to start offering kids’ tennis classes. It started with my sister and a few of her friends as a fun way to get out of the house. Tennis was one of the few sports considered socially distant, so we could still play in Ohio, even though most clubs had shut down.

It was a simple business, but it grew fast through word of mouth. First, 10 kids showed up. Then 20. Then 30. At a certain point, we didn’t have enough courts. Parents just wanted to get their kids out of the house, and it was good for the kids to see their friends again.

Eventually, I expanded the business. I hired almost the entire girls varsity tennis team. They all had babysitting experience, and this was basically babysitting, just with rackets. At our peak, we were running camps in seven different parks around the city. It cost $10 to drop your kid off in the morning and pick them up by noon, or $15 for the whole day.

We had about 20 kids per court, and we were netting a couple thousand dollars a day. In those seven or eight weeks between graduation and starting college, I made about $70,000 in cash. I wasn’t 18 yet, so I didn’t have a bank account. When I finally turned 18, I brought the money to the bank in a trash bag. It was all tens and fives.

It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot. That was my first real taste of entrepreneurship. I kept going with business partially because I enjoyed it, but also because it didn’t make financial sense to stick with the diplomacy path. At the time, entry-level diplomats made about $28,000 to $32,000 a year. I had just made $70,000 in a couple of months. It got me thinking that maybe I should keep pursuing something entrepreneurial.

Had you heard much about the Farmer School of Business before you made the switch? What was its reputation, and did you consider other business schools?

I had no intention of going to Miami University at first. It’s a great school, but at the time, in high school, it felt like the school that was 25 minutes from home. I thought, “I’m going to New York where everyone wears suits.” That was kind of my mindset.

But the big determining factor was cost. A school like Columbia runs around $80,000 a year. I don’t think many American families have $320,000 lying around to send one kid to college, especially if there’s more than one sibling. That kind of expense just isn’t within reach for most people.
Miami offered me, I think, an 80% scholarship initially. Over time, I was able to negotiate that up and received a couple hundred thousand dollars from the school.

At the time, Miami was really one of the only affordable options. I toured the campus, and I was pleasantly surprised. Farmer seemed very business-focused, and since I was already thinking about entrepreneurship, it felt like a good fit. That tour is what pulled me in, especially compared to other in-state schools that were affordable but didn’t offer the same kind of business focus.

For the record, give me a quick list of the companies you’ve started.

There are really just two: Step Up and Flashpass.

Step Up Social was a social media agency I started while I was in school. We were one of the first agencies to do TikTok marketing for brands, which was pretty unique at the time. We found a niche there and started to grow. In our second year, we began acquiring other marketing agencies to scale the business.

We raised $1.5 million and used that to buy up smaller agencies. The biggest acquisition was Candid Network, which we did in July 2024. Candid was a much more established agency. They had offices in New York and were handling social media and content for big brands like Nike, Pottery Barn, and Alo.

Meanwhile, Step Up had kind of fallen into this image of being just a bunch of college kids running an agency from a dorm room. It wasn’t a strong brand. So even though we acquired Candid, we kept their name and continued the business under the Candid Network brand.

And Flashpass?

I started Flashpass my junior year, and it really took two forms. At first, it was just an online education business. There was a state grant that allowed people to take courses for free, with the state covering 100% of the cost. So we built online courses in things like Excel and social media marketing.

About a year ago, we decided to build a full software platform around that business and expand beyond the grant program. Our thesis is that AI is going to replace, conservatively, 25% to 50% of all jobs in the next five years. And we don’t think it’ll be journalists or software developers. We think it’ll hit manual, high-labor jobs, like warehouse operators, where labor is the biggest cost on the P&L.

So we built a platform where, if someone loses their job, they can get matched with tech skills and certifications. They can go get certified in Microsoft Excel or AI tools through partners like Intel and Khan Academy, and then find their next job.

We launched the app about a year ago. In our first year, we’ve done about $4 million in top-line revenue with only five customers. Depending on how you calculate it, our current enterprise value is estimated between $20 million and $30 million in our fundraising conversations. We believe it could be a $100 million business within the next 12 months, just based on the unit economics of the platform.

Who are your clients? If you’re at $4 million with only a few, who’s paying?

We work directly with schools. We sell it as a solution to higher ed institutions, specifically training centers, that can apply for state grants to underwrite the cost. Then they can offer the platform to their students and partner employers.

Right now, we’re in one state. But our goal is to expand to five or six states over the next two to three years. If we can do that, we believe we’ll have a $100 million company.

Let’s go back to your dorm room at Farmer, and launching Step Up Social in 2021. What is the origin story?

The idea was pretty simple at first. We thought we’d do advertising for local restaurants and bars around town. Our thinking was, “We look everything up on Instagram, and half these places don’t even have accounts.” But we quickly realized that was a terrible business model. There were maybe 15 bars total around the college, and they didn’t need marketing. There was already a line out the door every night.

From there, we started thinking more broadly. We noticed a lot of students were downloading TikTok and starting to post, so we thought: “What if we offered TikTok marketing?” We started talking about it, cold emailing people, getting introductions from professors.

Our first real TikTok marketing client was a huge break. At the time, they were a Fortune 500 company – maybe Fortune 1000 now – based in Cincinnati. We drove 45 minutes down there, went up to, like, the 43rd floor, walked into a big boardroom in business attire, and they asked, “Where’s your deck?” I said, “What’s a deck?”

But somehow, we convinced them to work with us on TikTok marketing. The company was Kao which owns a bunch of grocery store and beauty brands. It gave us instant credibility, and helped us land our first 10 to 15 clients. The business snowballed from there.

What do you think was the winning formula for Step Up? Why did it take off when similar ventures have not?

We ran it as a subscription business. I had read online that you’re supposed to aim for an 80% margin on what you sell – which is true for software – but I didn’t realize that agencies typically operate differently. Still, we stuck with that model and ended up making close to an 80% margin on all of our marketing services.

That gave us a lot of EBITA and way more profit than your typical agency, which meant we had money to reinvest into marketing, sales, and eventually acquisitions. That was a big factor in our growth.

The other factor was, frankly, probably sleep deprivation, but it led to decisions that helped us survive early on. That business shouldn’t have made it. At one point, I personally took out a couple hundred thousand dollars in bank and credit card loans in my name. My thinking was, “What are they going to take? My shirt?”

Looking back, it could have been a terrible idea – I was 19 years old – but it gave us runway. We always had a few hundred thousand in the bank, which meant we weren’t the kind of startup that couldn’t make payroll. It gave us time to figure things out and for me to learn how to run a business.

How many people did you have working for you in those early days?

We were really lean. I think we made our first full-time hire after we’d already passed $1 million in revenue. At any given time, we probably had five or six part-time college student hires.

We’ve now worked with over 1,500 creators. Every month, we work with a few hundred to make content. But in terms of actual headcount, Candid still only has six or seven full-time employees, even though we’re two to three times the size of a typical 20- to 30-person agency.

What resources at Farmer or Miami University were you able to take advantage of?

Entrepreneurship is inherently painful. Elon Musk described it as eating glass, and that’s accurate. In my first year, I gained almost 80 pounds and slept three and a half hours a night. It wasn’t a good place for me physically or mentally.

I got a lot of value from technical classes – accounting, Excel – but the entrepreneurship courses felt a little too insulated from reality. Where Miami did excel was bringing in people who had actually built companies. Those introductions changed my life.

There were three conversations, each easily worth over a million dollars, that happened during my time at Miami: Our biggest investor – he sold his last company for over $1 billion – taught a semester-long course at Miami. We built a relationship, and he ended up investing nearly $1 million into Step Up and Candid Network. That never would’ve happened without Miami bringing him to campus.

A guest speaker who had worked with a lot of celebrity brands had also run a social agency. I really wanted to get in touch, so I sent him 54 follow-up texts. He didn’t respond to the first 53, but he responded to the 54th. It turned into a nearly $1 million per year chunk of business. He connected us with two or three companies that became clients.

A guest professor and former government advisor helped shift our entire model for Flashpass. He gave us the idea to sell subsidized contracts to schools, rather than trying to sell directly to professors or instructional departments. Before that pivot, the business made less than $50,000 a year. The month after implementing that strategy, we brought in a few hundred thousand.

Why did you stay in college if you already had these businesses? Why stick it out and get the degree?

It’s a good question. I think it was a combination of things. First, Miami was exceptionally accommodating, more so than what I’ve heard from friends at Ivy League schools, where professors tend to be stricter. I definitely didn’t have a perfect attendance record, but I still graduated with over a 3.9 GPA.

More importantly, we were getting real value from the school: resources, meetings, introductions. It never felt like I had hit a point where I wasn’t getting anything out of being there. There wasn’t a clear moment where it made sense to walk away.

There was also a personal side to it. I originally went to Miami because it was the only financially viable option. But I had always wanted to pursue a master’s or an MBA at one of the top schools. I ended up applying to Stanford GSB and got in. And realistically, if you want to get into a program like that, it’s much harder to do it as a college dropout. So finishing the degree made sense.

Tell me why Stanford. You’re going in 2027 as a deferred admit, right?

Hopefully, assuming they don’t change their mind before then.

Flashpass will probably be a $100 million company within the next year and a half to two years. But I don’t think I’m necessarily the type of founder who’s best suited to take a company from $100 million to $1 or $2 billion in enterprise value. I see Flashpass as a $100 to $120 million opportunity in the short term. Then I’ll go to Stanford.

As for why Stanford, it’s the best. It’s very entrepreneurial. I remember the application asked questions like “What matters to you?” and “What businesses do you want to start?” It felt very different from other MBA programs. It was the one I was most excited about when I got the interview.

Candidly, my goal is to become a billionaire by 30. And to do that – at least in the way I want to – you need to be able to raise hundreds of millions, if not a billion dollars. Stanford gives you access to the venture capital world, the capital networks, and the kind of alumni connections that make raising that kind of money possible.

It’s a lot easier to do that coming out of Stanford than it is trying to pull it off from the middle of Ohio.

Why do you want to be a billionaire by 30? What’s the difference in buying power, really, between a few hundred million and a billion besides another yacht or two? Is it a symbolic number?

It’s a couple of things. First, I met someone who actually became a billionaire by 30. I worked with him pretty closely and still talk to him every week. He’s impressive, but not superhuman. He wasn’t a different species. That made me realize the difference wasn’t talent; It was the size of his goal. That stuck with me.

The second part is more long term. If things go well – and who knows, maybe they won’t – I’d like to use that platform for something bigger. I really believe we have the technology to reverse some of the extinction crises we’ve caused in the last 50 to 100 years. Companies like Colossal are already working on this.

That kind of science is going to be available in our lifetimes. And I think it’s essential to becoming a positive force for the environment because right now, we’re mostly just destroying it.

To do something that ambitious, you need credibility. It’s much easier to raise public and government support if you’re a young billionaire with a proven track record, rather than just some three- or four-time entrepreneur trying to get attention.

What do you think your story means for other college undergrads with an idea? What does it say about going all in as a student founder?

I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that it takes just as much work to do something big as it does to do something small.

People say, “Shoot for the stars, land on the moon.” Step Up was always talked about as a $4 to $5 million agency, and that’s exactly where we landed. That’s great. We bought other agencies, built real enterprise value, and are in the process of selling to private equity. It was life-changing.

But with Flashpass, we talked about it from the beginning like it was going to be a $100 million company. We only hit 20% of that in our first year, but that’s still a $20 million company. So even though we failed at hitting the big goal, the outcome was way bigger.

A lot of student founders I meet set goals even smaller than that. They’re thinking about side hustles, washing cars, making a little money on the side. My advice is: set a big goal. Talk about it like it’s going to happen. It becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. You attract investors, professors, and mentors who buy into your vision.

The second thing I’d say is: don’t expect it to be easy. It was painful. There were things I look back on as completely unnecessary, just self-inflicted torture that we’re not repeating with the next business. But I gained a wealth of real-world experience. Being an entrepreneur usually means doing the things no one else wants to do over and over.

Let’s say in a few years, you’re invited back to Farmer or another business school to mentor or speak to students. What advice would you give them if they wanted to be founders too?

Three things: First, like I said, it’s just as hard to do something big as it is to do something small, so go big.

Second, expect it to be painful. That doesn’t mean it won’t be rewarding. Building a successful company is deeply rewarding. No one feels sorry for the CEO of a successful startup. But it’s still going to be hard, and that’s part of the deal.

Third, negotiate everything. A lot of people assume certain things are non-negotiable – like tuition. But you’d be surprised. One of the things I’m proudest of at Miami is that I was the only student who got a faculty parking pass. I fought for that for nine months.

Well, this was fun. Maybe when you’re a billionaire, we can do it again. So how old are you right now?

I’m 22. I’ve still got eight years to get there.

DON’T MISS: THE 10 BIGGEST REGRETS OF 2025’S BEST & BRIGHTEST BUSINESS MAJORS AND 20 BIGGEST LESSONS FROM BUSINESS SCHOOL