No two founder stories are the same – which is part of the beauty and fun of entrepreneurship. While entrepreneurs are bonded by their common belief that they can create a product or offering that helps others, the ways in which they arrive at this belief and their desire to build a company are entirely different.
It may be an accidental invention, like with the chocolate chip cookie, when Ruth Graves Wakefield tried to use chocolate chips to make chocolate cookies and discovered that the chocolate chips wouldn’t melt.
Or, it could be created as a solution to the founder’s own problem, such as when Leah Busque founded TaskRabbit. It was a snowy night and they were out of dog food, and she couldn’t help but think how easy it would be to simply hire someone to go get the dog food for them.
Colin Yurcisin is the founder of Credit Class, and his story is a bit like the latter one: he solved his own problem, which was tens of thousands of dollars in debt over his head.
Yurcisin’s College Years
Yurcisin isn’t shy about sharing the darker years of his life. “In college, I was partying all the time, but struggling deep down with confidence,” he candidly shared. “My girlfriend of two years had just broken up with me and I was battling with insecurity over acne.”
One night, he was at a party when someone who was highly intoxicated came up to him and began to punch him repeatedly. “He must have hit me over twenty times – I had to go to the emergency room,” he shared. The force of the punches had entirely shattered the left side of his face, and he had to schedule a surgery.
“This led to an even further crisis of confidence, because I was planning to spend that summer on the medication for acne, but I couldn’t take it because I was still on pain meds from the surgery. But I knew something had to change.”
He went back to school the following Fall and started to get his life back together. The summer after graduation, he went on a trip with his friends to Barcelona. “I remember everyone was saying, ‘That was the best summer ever, we will never have a summer like that again,’ and I absolutely hated that feeling.”
Finding Freedom
Yurcisin found himself beginning an entry level job for a $38,000/year salary, and had left college with $20,000 in debt. “I immediately felt trapped, and wanted a way out of it, so I took a $20,000 personal loan from the bank and invested all of it into a get-rich-quick Shopify deal that turned out to be a scam,” he said.
Yurcisin didn’t know what to do. He now had $40,000 in debt, plus bills, and calculated that it would take over eight years in his current job to be able to repay the debts that he owed. “I quickly had to figure out how to get out of this situation, or else I was going to have to move back in with my parents and explain to them what I did with the college opportunity they gave me,” he reflected. “I knew that wasn’t an option.”
So, he began to invest in himself, studying credit, and choosing nights of taking courses on credit rather than going out with friends. The more he learned, the more he shared – mainly on his Instagram story. “I was learning about credit, and credit repair, and wanted to share this information with others,” he said. “Soon, people were asking me if I had a course where all of this information was shared… and I didn’t.”
Credit Class Begins
So, Yurcisin heeded the call and created the Credit Class, and has now helped over 200 students repair their credit and learn how to leverage the tool to live the lives of their dreams. “I paid off my debt, and my business is on its way to doing 7 figures in the first year,” Yurcisin said. “I now travel the world with luxury amenities by leveraging credit, and teach others to do the same.”
He believes strongly that anyone who wants to access more freedom in their lives can do so easily by understanding credit and how to leverage it. “I learned very quickly that success comes from a growth mindset. I decided not to be a victim to my circumstances. I felt trapped, so I created my own freedom, and I’m excited to help others access theirs’, too.”