Growing Going Merry from 5,000 to 125,000 students in under a year.

Millions of scholarship dollars go unclaimed every year. Not because students don't need them. Because students don't know about them, and the process of finding and applying is genuinely exhausting. Going Merry was built to fix that.

The product existed. A manually assembled scholarship database, transcribed from PDFs and documents, presented through a basic web app. Useful in concept, but rough at the edges. No personalization, no growth hooks, no real reason to come back after your first visit. Seed funding was running out. The runway was under ten months. The company needed active, engaged users fast enough to show investors the idea was real.

I came in to own that problem as Head of Growth Product — accountable for the number the next funding conversation depended on, leading design and setting what the team built. I was also the only member of the team with a public school education and direct ties to the communities Going Merry was trying to reach, which shaped the strategy more than any framework did.

Before touching the product, we ran focus groups at inner-city Philadelphia public high schools. With students. With counselors. With the people this thing was actually for.

We wanted to know what they understood about scholarships, what they planned to do for college, what they might consider if they thought they could actually afford it. The conversations were genuinely affecting. Students who had written off college would shift when they understood that money they didn't know existed could change the math entirely.

A few things became clear quickly. Students didn't apply because the process felt impossibly hard. They didn't share scholarships because it felt competitive. And most had no idea that scholarships existed for things as specific as their neighborhood, their sport, or their hair color. That specificity became the product strategy.

I structured the growth strategy as three stages, each feeding the next, and used it as the prioritization filter for the whole team: if a proposed piece of work didn't strengthen one of the three stages, it didn't go on the roadmap. Getting students in the door was only valuable if they actually did something. Getting them to do something was only sustainable if it brought more students in. That model is what let five people move a metric 25x — not because we worked faster, but because we stopped working on everything else.

Everything below shipped inside a ten-month window with a team of five. Nothing here was picked because it was interesting — each piece earned its slot by strengthening a specific stage of the loop, and a lot of good ideas got cut on exactly that basis.

In under ten months, the platform grew from 5,000 to over 125,000 active students across the country — the traction the company needed to raise, and ultimately part of what made it worth buying. Going Merry was acquired by Earnest in 2021.

What I shipped against the loop: a rebuilt registration experience, personalized landing pages at school and city level, no-essay scholarship categorization, a scholarship and loan repayment calculator, an early AI essay writer, and a substantially rebuilt in-app experience centered on personalization and matching.

The number I care about more is the other one: millions of dollars in scholarships reached students who wouldn't have found them otherwise. Growth work gets a bad reputation for being indifferent to what it grows. This one wasn't. That was the whole reason to take the job.