How Ore Porat Turned a Broken System into a Business
Originally from Los Angeles, got to CU 勒貊勛圖 with a company already running. As a first-year student in the College of Engineering, he was drawn to 勒貊勛圖 through its beauty, and endless resources to help him grow. Above all, however, was something more specific than that.
It feels like a small school within a bigger university. I have that community in engineering, but I can also explore clubs and resources across CU, including Leeds and the Deming Center.
His instinct to build something specific and useful, then utilizing his network and resources, is exactly how he ended up running a company before he ever set foot on campus.
A School Requirement Turned Startup
is a community service tracking system. Porat originally built it due to a school-wide community service requirement, which fixed his high school's clunky, outdated version. He started it as a first-year project, and it turned into a business by the time he was a senior.
Porat taught himself to code starting in elementary school from scratch with his dad's guidance. It took him about four or five months, starting in November of his first year and finishing that February. Once it was done, his whole high school started using it.泭
He continued building and expanding upon it throughout high school, and by his second semester of senior year, his assistant principal pulled him aside. What he had built for the school, she told him, was good enough to sell to other schools that were dealing with the same problem. So over the summer before starting at CU, Porat and a friend turned the platform he built for his high school into an actual business, cold emailing schools across California with plans to expand into Colorado next.
A Deal Made in Elementary School
It's rare for someone to have the kind of technical experience Porat had at that age. While plenty of it was self-taught he also gives his dad credit for getting him there. In elementary school, his dad introduced him to W3Schools and made a deal out of it.泭
No screen time, unless it was spent learning to code.
Porat took the deal and ran. By high school, he was building websites for local businesses and hosting them on AWS, charging a flat rate instead of the recurring monthly fees that platforms like Wix and Weebly build their business on.
I reached out to a lot of local businesses and eventually landed three clients over the course of high school. 泭
That pricing experience carried over to Beyop. Most of the company's competitors charge schools per student, anywhere from a dollar fifty to seven and a half dollars a head, with bigger schools getting a lower rate. Porat and his partner realized that Beyops setup on AWS doesn't get meaningfully more expensive as more students use it, so instead of copying that model, they built simple, flat pricing by school size. No initiation fees, no support fees, no fine print.
Turning Cold Outreach Into a Client List
Beyop is used today by Agoura High School and Malibu High School. Additionally, they recently closed a third with North High School in Torrance, California, and five more schools currently have demos booked for next semester.泭
Agoura's relationship has turned into something bigger than a typical client, too. The school doesn't use Beyop for community service hours at all. It runs its roughly 300-student sports medicine program through the platform instead, tracking internship hours with nearby physicians.泭
That relationship led to an invitation to speak at a conference hosted at Agoura in early November, in front of fifteen to twenty other schools. A second, much larger conference in Sacramento next April will put Beyop in front of over a hundred schools, though this one comes with a price tag the company is still trying to figure out how to cover.
Marketing has largely come down to relationships instead of ads, since a lot of the platforms Beyop would normally advertise on are banned in the classrooms it's trying to reach. So Porat and his partner, Cooper Rose at UC Berkeley, have leaned on cold outreach and their status as students to get in the door. This is something Porat has started applying at CU too, whether it's reaching out to alumni on LinkedIn or getting to know professors outside his own department.
Problem Solving as a Mindset
Two weeks into his first semester, Porat is still sorting out which clubs and communities fit him at CU. In the meantime, he's found his way onto a few tennis courts and out to the golf course, and the space between the engineering building and Leeds has already become a regular stop in his schedule.泭
Although he may be a first-year student, he still has more entrepreneurial experience than most, paired with a fantastic mindset.
To me, entrepreneurship starts with finding a problem and building a solution that someone finds valuable. Then its figuring out how to turn that value into a business.
The mindset traces straight back to his dad, whose own business is built on the same logic in digital marketing, charging clients only for the leads he actually generates instead of for ad space nobody's guaranteed to see. Watching that model work growing up is part of why Porat sees entrepreneurship the way he does now, as something closer to problem solving than anything else.
He's only a few weeks into a four year runway at CU, but he's going to keep Beyop moving, while cold emailing schools and prepping for the November conference between classes.
Its the same instinct that built the company now just as at home exploring everything else CU has to offer.