Hidden Gems: Meet Connie Zhang of Mocaa

Today we’d like to introduce you to Connie Zhang.

Hi Connie, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Let’s backtrack to the pre-career phase. Like every other student, the pre-career me believed that a top higher education will ultimately give me a “great future” – a dream job with an impressive pay. But a “great future” is not guaranteed by a degree from a top university, and I’m here to share my lessons.

Growing up with a family of entrepreneurs, I wanted to follow the legacy and ambition to start my own business. To reach that goal, I had my dream schools planned out. In high school, I played three varsity sports, started a scholarship foundation in China, took as many AP exams and SAT prep classes as I could… The list went on. All of these were to boost my chance of being accepted into a competitive college. Eventually, I got into my dream school – USC. While I was very confident and excited for my future, my parents began to worry that their success may have become a distraction to my future. Thus, before inviting me to join the family business upon my college graduation, my family asked me, “do you want this for us or for yourself?”

This one simple question disrupted my whole life’s plan. I began to rethink my long-term goals. Took me a while, but I eventually figured out I had the love and skills for marketing, especially when promoting for a special cause. I joined an advertising agency to help Fortune 500 corporations correctly target and communicate brands to Asian Americans. Yet a part of me still yearned for entrepreneurship and remembered my parents’ question.

I then decided to apply for graduate school, hoping to clear the fog further on my career path. While at Cambridge University, I met my co-founder Kerry, who shares the same passion for entrepreneurship with a different set of skills. We initially joked about how much of a pain it was to go through school applications again, but then I realized that we could improve the application experience for all students and parents. So we started designing a web platform, which is today’s Mocaa, and eventually started the business.

Looking back, my family was partially right about their influence on me. I wasn’t ready to take on a business until I gained some experience first. And the “great future” didn’t just fall in my laps by completing a degree from a prestigious university. My future and passion were realized through many career changes and learnings. If there was one thing I could redo in my past, it’d be to sit down with a professional advisor who could work with me on identifying my passion points and skills in high school.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The journey of an entrepreneur is quite bumpy and full of uncertainties, which creates such different challenges along the way. A lot of times as an entrepreneur, you have to embrace uncertainty, the work you produce and time you commit on a daily basis can be very stressful because the result could look very different from the original end goal. But that’s also part of the excitement of being an entrepreneur – you get to write your own vision and legacy.

Starting Mocaa took a lot more courage and effort than I had expected, especially in the midst of a pandemic. The weight of being an Asian female founder can be heavy and stressful. The responsibilities you carry make you think that there’s no room for failure. But two lessons I learned are: 1) Fail fast and learn fast. However big the challenge is, if you could solve it then you are one step closer to the goal. 2) Remember to save time for yourself. Maintaining good mental health is the best fuel to achieve success faster.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Mocaa stands for Marketplace Online for College Admissions Application. The ideation phase began at our alma mater, Cambridge University, in 2020. During the pandemic, we realized the school application competition has spiked and, consequently, students’ mental health has become alarmingly unstable. From our own experience as students, we understand and resonate with the pain of going through school applications. The process is complicated and stressful. But we want the start of a new chapter to feel exciting and less intimidating for students. Thus, Kerry and I began validating this business idea by building the framework with help of the Cambridge network (professors, industry professionals) and understanding more precisely the user pain points through hundreds of surveys targeted at our potential users.

Today, Mocaa is a Pre-Seed stage startup that’s successfully gone from Beta to the official version with more than 500 members in our community. By carefully vetting our Advisors (with only 100 selected from 800 applications last year), Mocaa can offer students and parents a more affordable, personalized experience than an expensive, standardized service from a consulting agency. We adopted the “online matchmaking” concept to our envisioned college application flow to better pair up students and advisors. We are also the first-to-market search platform to allow Advisors search for prospective clients. While you are searching for the right advisor, your advisor could also be searching for you. As former students, we found it difficult to find price and service transparency in admissions consulting. And the U.S. consumers are also very behind on leveraging the admissions consulting service compared to other international college applicants. Therefore, as a platform we strive to provide transparency on both sides of the industry so such services can eventually be accessible to the mass consumers in the U.S.

What matters most to you?
Contribute in making the world a better place. It’s a core family value to always help others when you can so that together, we are stronger. It’s why I decided to enter the education market. Knowledge is wealth and a legacy to pass on. I believe if the next generation could have more clarity on their future, they would make greater, positive impacts to this world and become more advanced leaders and mentors for the younger generations. It’s a cycle that I hope we could improve on.

Pricing:

• Free for B2C users

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: mocaa.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.mocaa/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mocaaeducation/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mocaaplatform
• Other: https://linktr.ee/mocaainc

Image Credits
Mocaa Inc.