Founder Stories: Blake Mischley of MeetYourClass

Blake Mischley was eleven years old when he first mapped out his ‘life plan’. It was: ace computer-science at the University of Michigan, land a job at a big tech company, move to Boston, climb the corporate ladder. Simple. “I always felt like hustling,” he shrugs, “but I figured you had to get to college, take the right classes, then maybe start something.” 

This story should feel familiar to any Midwesterner who’s built a business here, while simultaneously watching talent sprint toward the coasts. But Mischley - freshly graduated at 22 years old - flipped the script. He and his co-founders recently came to the conclusion that their startup, MeetYourClass, which helps incoming college students find friends and roommates before move-in day, should keep their HQ in Michigan.

That HQ works well for  a remote team that is primarily Michigan-based but with others in Florida, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They’ve grown from three founders to nine employees without needing to raise many funds beyond a $120k check - and accelerator program - from Techstars Detroit.

“If we were a cookie-cutter B2B SaaS, maybe San Francisco makes sense,” he tells me. “But our customers are here. The community is here. Why leave?” 

From back-flips to energy drinks.

Mischley’s first ‘company’ was a middle-school clothing label inspired by a classmate who could do back-flips. In the 8th-grade, Blake even signed the kid’s yearbook, “Your CEO, Blake.” 

That prophecy seemed distant over the next few years; he worked through high school as a paid referee for youth soccer matches and in restaurants around his home town of Grand Rapids. In the restaurant business, he moved through various roles. From calling ticket timings as the ‘expo’, to line cook and then head of the line cooks. He believes those jobs taught him to make snap decisions under pressure, skills that he believes come in handy in a fast-growing, bootstrapped startup business.

His freshman year of college came during the hazy COVID period of 2020. Social life was basically frozen, but two things thawed fast: Mischley’s urge to build, and a chance encounter with other undergrads already launching ventures. “It was just a bunch of entrepreneurs who were my age, a year older, upper classmen and you know they were doing - in my mind - crazy things. I'm like: ‘they're my age and they're building businesses’. That’s when it clicked - I can start today,” he says. 

He soon teamed up with roommate Jonah Liss, now MeetYourClass’ COO, and high-school friend Kaleb Schmottlach, who is CTO. The three MeetYourClass founders now have more than 620,000 total sign-ups at 1,100-plus universities and were recently added to to one of Forbes’ eponymous 30 under 30 lists. 

But it didn't start here. Their first idea? A caffeinated beverage. Their marketing plan? Build Instagram communities at colleges, then slip the drink into the feed.

The only problem was that, he admits, the drink tasted terrible. The communities, however… they exploded. Students jumped on the chance for connection and MeetYourClass quietly registered thousands of sign-ups before the founders had even officially launched their drink. Suddenly, they realized they weren’t beverage hawkers, they were running a digital front porch for campus life.

It’s a crisis, but not as you know it.

University administrators soon noticed these communities taking off. Enrollment chiefs from large public universities to small liberal-arts colleges saw admitted students flooding these organic Instagram hubs, and figured this was a potential means for them to increase their ‘yield’. That’s the share of admitted students who actually show up, and in doing so they’d fight ‘summer melt’, the deposit-paying students who vanish by September. 

The three young founders had inadvertently stumbled onto an organic (and functioning) solution to an acute problem faced by colleges across the country: a looming ‘enrollment cliff’ in 2026. 

“In ‘09 there weren't as many babies and so that's catching up to higher ed… there's not as many people going to college” says Mischley. Demographics aren’t the only issue facing these institutions according to him. He believes the ability of almost anyone to find answers to almost any question, anywhere, has decreased the value of higher education in the eyes of his peers. “they're like ‘oh I can learn it (through) higher education… or on the internet’”.

MeetYourClass helps tackle these problems by providing higher educational institutions direct - and trusted - contact with students in a way that feels more genuine than some of their long-practised tactics. These include buying access to 100,000 names from standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, but “these top of funnel strategies aren't (as) effective because there just aren't enough students anymore” Mischley explains.

MeetYourClass is able to do this by avoiding being “another crappy social media” he says. That’s why it integrates with social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook and Discord, instead of forcing another app download upon users. New admits create a profile on the web and the system cross-posts to these social media channels. The platform is also integrated with the institution's enrollment CRM systems. If it helps them lift yield or cut melt by even a few percentage points, that translates into valuable tuition income for the institution. 

Techstars still runs in a snowstorm.

Like any good founder story, selling the vision of MeetYourClass isn’t just one of stumbling upon serendipitous customer needs. It also involves tales of grit. When the trio interviewed for Techstars in the middle of the Detroit winter, Mischley figured he had just enough time to make some money and get some DoorDash deliveries in before the call. But the conditions played their part and his car got stuck in a customer’s driveway. “so I had to do my interview from my car, waiting for a tow truck. But to them (I guess) that showed grit and hustle”

Techstars provided that first $120k investment, just enough to make one or two bets, keep iteration tight, and hire their first non-founder. The founders stayed salary-less for two years, living cheaply in Ann Arbor dorms while rolling the platform out to additional campuses. 

Today, revenue from university contracts covers modest paychecks and ongoing product R&D. They could hit profitability soon, Mischley claims, but would probably only raise capital if they believe it would help them move faster, not because they needed it to survive. “I think we are kind of at a point right now where… we really want to accelerate (but) does that come from traditional capital? Does that come from other sources?”

Why NOT stay in Michigan?

Whether they raise funds or not, the team is committed to building in the place they were founded. Mischley remembers a senior-year class of computer engineering students, where an instructor asked the gathered students who planned to leave the state rather than stay after graduation. The majority of hands shot up. But the same guy who had previously envisaged himself getting the ‘big tech’ job and/or moving to Boston, now sees things a bit differently. 

“I think it's a bit of that hive mind mentality,” he says. “I think if you have an idea… you don't need to be in person to network. Michigan is a great place to really focus on your business and not be distracted by external noise, because of vanity metrics (or) doing extra things.” He references one of the region’s great success stories, Duolingo, and a recent post by their CEO Luis von Ahn, stating that perhaps the language training business wouldn't have survived if they’d moved to Silicon Valley instead of staying in Pittsburgh. This struck a chord (and maybe lit a fire) underneath the young CEO. “Being outside the Valley lets you focus, not chase shiny objects” he says. 

None of this means they never considered moving elsewhere, even taking the opportunity to visit Alabama as part of a program called Birmingham Bound. Even though he seems grateful for the experience and the visit opened his eyes to another ‘up-and-coming’ city in which to build startups, it also cemented his desire to keep his business in the Midwest, “I wanted to be a part of a community that felt like I could grow with it” he adds.

Innovation and hustle in the Heartland.

Strip away the dashboards and admissions jargon though, and MeetYourClass still has some  that eighth-grade T-shirt hustle mentality: identify a small, human need and amplify it. Mischley’s restaurant nights taught him to time tickets; soccer officiating tuned his conflict radar; DoorDash shifts proved that hustle matters. The through-line is optimization under pressure, delivered with a genuine, honest demeanour and a Midwest work ethic.

His decision to stay is less a moral crusade than a strategic calculation: he thinks the Midwest’s quality of life doesn’t get enough attention, and perhaps his decision to stay can help highlight it as a competitive moat. Additionally, universities fighting enrollment decline are not necessarily being helped by the unicorn factories, which may view higher-ed as a slow-pay, low-margin dinosaur. That leaves MeetYourClass swimming in the waters of their own blue lake.

If Michigan - and the wider Midwest for that matter - wants to keep its brightest students and founders, we need more stories like MeetYourClass to be played on loop. It shows that you can raise smart money, you can hire and you can sell here. Maybe in the not-too-distant future, we’ll be able to add their story to the fact that can scale here as well. 

That way, next time a class - in one of the many great higher educational institutions that MeetYourClass serves - is asked who’s staying, more hands might rise. And if those students want proof that staying isn’t settling, they can log into MeetYourClass, built in the Midwest and built for them, to begin finding future co-founders… before the first class has even begun.

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