Nobody should have to figure this out alone.
Running Start connects students to mentors who were accepted to top universities last year — and who hand over the real application that got them there. We started it because that help existed for some families and not for ours.
We built the thing we needed and couldn’t find.
Ameer and Alisha started Running Start in high school, for a simple reason: nobody would tell them how any of this worked. Not which classes actually mattered. Not which activities were worth four years. Not what a real application looked like when it was finished. The information existed — it was just sitting with people who had no reason to hand it over.
The families who could pay found it anyway. A private counselor runs three to ten thousand dollars, and what you are buying at that price is mostly access to someone who knows. Everyone else gets a school counselor with roughly 380 students on their caseload and a few minutes a year.
So we asked the obvious question: the students who just got in still have all of it — the essays, the activities list, the mistakes, the things nobody warned them about. What if they passed it down instead of moving on? Alisha and Ameer were both accepted to UC Berkeley. Every mentor since has handed over their real application and sat down with the next student the way somebody should have sat down with us.
Our mission
End the gatekeeping. Every student — not just the ones who can afford it — should get the advantage of someone else’s experience: what to do, what not to do, and what it actually looks like when it works.
Show, don't tell
Every mentor hands over the real application that got them in — the essays, the PIQs, the activities list. Advice is cheap. Evidence is the thing families can never get.
Recent beats credentialed
Our mentors got in last year, not last decade. They remember what the reader was looking for because they were just read.
Priced so it isn't gatekeeping
$200 instead of $3,000–$10,000. If the advantage only reaches families who can afford a consultant, we haven't fixed anything.
260+ students served · $31K+ in mentorship delivered · hundreds of thousands reached through the founders’ platform.
The help was always there. It just wasn’t for everyone.
We didn’t make these numbers up and we’re not going to soften them. This is the market your student is walking into.
of applicants get in
Recent admit rates at Harvard, Stanford and MIT all sit below five percent. Nearly every student in the rejected 95% also had the grades.
University-published Class of 2028 admissions data
the odds at a top firm
Attending an Ivy-Plus school instead of a strong public triples a student's likelihood of working at a prestigious firm, nearly doubles their odds of an elite graduate program, and raises their chance of reaching the top 1% of earners by 60%.
Chetty, Deming & Friedman, Opportunity Insights (2023)
students per counselor
That's the national average caseload at a public high school — against a recommended 250. Even an excellent counselor has minutes per student per year.
American School Counselor Association
Your student is not competing against the other kids in their class. They are competing against tens of thousands of strangers with the same GPA, the same AP count and the same list of clubs — and the file that wins is the one that reads like it was written by someone who knew what the reader was looking for.
What we believe about applications
Piano and violin and fifty clubs is a student performing impressiveness. One real thing, gone deep on, is a student an admissions officer remembers. Most services never teach that difference — they hand over a finished essay and call it help.
“The first time I applied, I threw everything at the page and hoped for the best. The second time, I built one thing — and got into Berkeley.”
The application gets submitted either way.
The only question is whether it’s the one your student could have written, or the one they did. Four sessions. $200. Start with a free 7-minute call and decide from there.