How Application Bee Started
If you don’t like suspense, I’ll get the short answer out of the way.
The idea for Application Bee came to me when I was a student at the University of Cambridge, and I built Application Bee because I hate writing applications.
If you want to know the longer answer, keep reading.
Hi! 👋
I’m Ted, the founder of Application Bee, a marketplace for real examples of successful applications to the world’s most competitive institutions, including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Goldman Sachs, M7 business schools and T14 law schools.
I’ve always been curious about the stories behind the businesses and websites I use. I think I feel more comfortable using them when I understand a bit about the founders, their motivations, their values, and their backgrounds. I assume many of Application Bee’s users, or prospective users, are probably similar. After all, using a new platform is a bit of a leap of faith. You want to trust the people behind it and know what they’re about.
So against this backdrop, I’ve decided to share how and why I started Application Bee.
Unlike the founders other businesses born in the dorm rooms of famous universities, I’m not a genius.
Far from it.
I started Application Bee because I struggle with what a lot of people find relatively easy: writing applications.
By “applications”, I mean personal statements, cover letters, CVs, research proposals, scholarship applications, statements of intent… you get the idea. Any piece of high-stakes extended writing where I have to talk about myself, my skills, my motivations, and where a potentially life-changing degree, scholarship, or job hinges on how well I’m able to express myself and convince the reader.
In early 2023, about midway through my degree at Cambridge, I was about to start writing applications for consulting roles at McKinsey, BCG, and Bain, plus a few other entry-level jobs in investment banking, government, and finance.
I had two problems.
One, I had no idea how to write good applications. What was I meant to include? To leave out? What structure was best?
And, two, I hated writing cover letters. They’re by far the most time-consuming part of the application process, and they never seemed to get any quicker or easier with practice.
If only, I thought, there was some way to read a successful application—the real thing, a document written by an applicant who had actually received an offer.
I tried Googling, of course, but none of the results were any good. They were either out-of-date, irrelevant, or useless SEO junk. YouTube was slightly more helpful, but the advice I found there was obvious: talk about why you want to work there. Talk about your skills. (Really useful, huh?)
ChatGPT was no help either. Everything it spat out was far too generic. There was no way it could produce something that would convince a hiring manager to offer me an interview over hundreds of other equally-qualified candidates.
So over the next six weeks, I spent dozens of hours drafting my CVs and cover letters. Dozens of hours. All because I couldn’t find a good example.
A few days after I had submitted my final application, someone cold messaged me on LinkedIn.
The messenger was a prospective Cambridge applicant. They wanted to ask me some questions about the degree I was studying.
“Sure, fire away,” I replied.
“Could I see a copy of your Cambridge personal statement? I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out what to write.”
I knew exactly what they were going through. The previous year, I’d spent three months on my Cambridge personal statement, drafting, re-drafting, and re-re-drafting it until it was perfect.
During those three months, I remember thinking to myself, “This would be so much easier if I could just read a current student’s personal statement.”
Not to copy, of course. For inspiration. To see what elements they had chosen to emphasize, what things they’d included and left out, how they’d crafted their narrative.
Getting access to one, of course, was impossible — or at least effectively impossible for someone, like me, who was deathly afraid of cold messaging. But if I had been able to read just a single example, that three-month process would have taken maybe two weeks at most.
I’ve always been fascinated by marketplaces. There’s something intuitively appealing about businesses that are so simple and yet create so much value.
I especially love marketplaces that do more than simply connect pre-existing supply and demand, but which create an entirely new market for a previously untradable asset. (I was a bad economics student, but good enough to know I’m not using “untradable asset” in the technically correct way!) These marketplaces enable swathes of people to sell valuable but “un-sellable” assets, while at the same time giving buyers access to a previously inaccessible product.
This fascination probably started with Grailed. I was one of the very first users of Grailed, and have been using it pretty much every day for over 8 years.
Grailed, like any successful marketplace, connects supply (owners of men’s clothes) and demand (buyers of men’s clothes). But it also does more than that. Before Grailed, the idea that there was a market for used men’s clothes was almost laughable (except, perhaps, to the members of a handful of “down the rabbit hole” menswear forums). There was literally no “supply” or “demand” to speak of. If you wanted to buy clothes, you went to a store. If you no longer wanted the clothes you owned, you took them to a donation bin or threw them away. No one was buying old menswear, and no one was selling it.
Grailed changed this. It did more than connect extant supply with extant demand; it created sellers and buyers. Now there’s now an entire culture devoted to trading and collecting archival menswear. Without Grailed, I doubt this culture would exist, and certainly not to the extent that it does.
After seeing the value Grailed unlocked for users on both sides of the marketplace, I started to think about ways I could replicate its success in a different niche.
For years, nothing happened. I had a few ideas, but none in which I had enough conviction to take the plunge.
That all changed a few days after that LinkedIn message.
As I was eating breakfast in my room (Weetabix, if you must know), I had an idea.
What if there was a marketplace that let successful applicants sell their old applications, and prospective applicants buy them?
To the best of my knowledge, nothing of the sort existed — or had even been tried. But I knew the space well and felt like I was on pretty solid ground.
My desperation to see a real MBB consultant’s cover letter, coupled with the LinkedIn message, had led me to the realization that there was clearly demand from prospective applicants to read successful candidates’ applications.
In addition, I knew from personal experience that this demand was strong enough that applicants were willing to pay for it. If I’d been able to buy a real Cambridge personal statement, or a real BCG cover letter, I wouldn’t have hesitated. I would have paid to read an example that would’ve enabled me to shave even a few hours, let alone a few weeks, off the painful and time-consuming process of writing an application. After all, time is the one thing you can’t buy more of.
OK, I thought. That’s the demand side. But what about supply?
This seemed equally promising. After all, once an applicant gets their offer, the document they’ve spent weeks or months perfecting lies in a folder or a drive gathering digital dust. Surely at least some offer-holders would prefer to sell their old application documents than have them sit idle, never read or used again.
By this point, the seed of Application Bee had sprouted in my mind.
Now for the hard part: actually building it.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of “How Application Bee Started”!
