Like many other ESOs, our previous system was a home-grown mess of different free, cheap, and paid software products to handle every single part of our enrollment funnel. We'd use Calendly to schedule an initial workshop with a potential student-founder to see if our program was a good fit, then we'd manually add the ones that were interested in applying for the program to Monday.com for tracking, then we'd manually pass them off to our Financial Aid Coordinator so that they could either start the WIOA scholarship process, find an appropriate scholarship, or get the startup on a payment plan to handle tuition.

Every week, we'd have to hunt around in 3 to 4 different systems to try and find out how many students we expected for the next class and figure out if we needed to make a big marketing push or get creative.

1. Manual Entry Invitations

As mentioned above, adding new startups manually is a simple way to get a startup into your ecosystem quickly. The only required fields for the invitation form is the name of the startup, the name of the founder, and the email address of the founder. We also provide an option to let you specify the job title of the founder and a Cohort to assign that startup into.

This form also has a checkbox that will send you a copy of their invitation. This is strongly encouraged, as it will also provide the unique invitation link that the startup will need to log in to their account. This box is checked by default, so only turn this off if you are confident that it won't be needed.

Payment Options

This form also provides a mechanism to automatically enable a scholarship for that company invitation (if your ESO account has any available) or to activate their account with your organization paying for the license (if your organization is handling all license fees for your entrepreneurs).

Warning: While these features are provided, we encourage you to only use these in situations where you have complete confidence that the startup you are inviting is definitely going to enroll in your program and work with your organization. Selecting a payment system in the invite process will enable that payment method for that company, even if the company chooses to not go through your program. It's much safer to provide a scholarship or pay for an account when you are certain that the startup will be using your program.

2. Primary Startup Application Form

The Primary Application form is available to all CofounderOS ESOs, regardless of package level or other features enabled for your account. Each ESO can define the questions that they require each startup to provide as a part of the application process, and these answers are designed to make it easy for your team to evaluate that startup for acceptance into your program.

Application Form Quickstart

When you first log in to your new CofounderOS account, your Primary Startup Application Form will be inactive and will not accept new applications. But activating your Primary Startup Application Form is incredibly easy and can be done in just a few clicks.

First, click on Application Form in your side navigation menu. From there, you can:

1. Click on the Add Default Questions button to add the 20 basic questions necessary for Workforce Development Funding startups
2. Use the Duplicate Existing Form selector to import questions from one of the other CofounderOS application form templates.
3. Go your own way and ask the questions that you want to ask in your organization's Primary Startup Application.

Each question also provides you with a few optional features to ensure your Application Forms meet your needs. While the options like Required are hopefully self-explanatory, it's worth mentioning how a few of these question options work in relation to the type of question you've selected.

Company Facts

Inside of CofounderOS, our system is constantly aggregating a collection of useful data-points about each startup, ESO, and Super-ESO inside the system. We use these facts to perform AI-powered analysis of the organization and use these facts to provide ESOs with Economic Impact Reports.

Some of the facts we collect can be captured as a part of the application process, so we make this functionality available to you as you build out your forms.

As an example, if you want to capture their cell phone number as a part of the application process, you can select the Phone Number question type, and then select the Company Phone # company fact from the drop-down to link your Phone Number question to the official Company Phone Number Fact.

Any startup filling out your application will already find their Company Phone Number populated in their business location information and won't have to provide it a second time. And if a startup that already uses CofounderOS applies to join your ESO program, we'll automatically insert the Company Phone Number into their application answers and won't require the applicant to type it in.

3. Pitch Contests are your Secret Weapon

We built the Pitch Contest application purely to function as a tool to manage individual startup Pitch Competitions. Once that application had launched, we realized that we'd built something that was powerful beyond measure and served as a primary application management system for our own ESO efforts.

Unlimited Funnels == Unlimited Flexibility

The beauty of the CofounderOS Pitch Contest application is that it uses a lot of the same great mechanisms from the Primary Application Form. Every single Pitch Contest you create gets its own unique application form URL and can track and segment startup applicants into separate buckets.

Pitch Contests also come with some additional functionality that the Primary Application Form doesn't provide:

1. Automatically assign applicants into a specific Cohort
2. Separate dashboard tracking widgets for personalized CofounderOS usage
3. The ability to assign a "Stakeholder" to the Cohort the startup is sorted into
4. A unique interface for evaluating startups in large quantities by a team of evaluators
5. The ability to automatically assign startups to different CofounderOS courses

Because the Pitch Contest app is a combination of other useful CofounderOS applications, many of our ecosystem partners are using the Pitch Contests as the primary application entry-point for startups to join their ESO. Instead of directing all of your users to a single Primary Application form, you can use separate Contest Application Forms for different audiences, different types of startups, and use them at different events.

This flexibility is great if you have a large entrepreneur support program with a lot of different options for the startups in your community.