Presence

Reuben Pressman was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug early—programming since age 10, he always saw technology as a tool to solve problems. But his real inspiration came from his undergrad experience in student government and student affairs at a large university. He witnessed firsthand the absurdity of the situation: college students (many freshmen and sophomores) were being handed the responsibility of allocating $25 million per year in student activities funding at schools like the University of Central Florida, yet they had almost no data about what students actually wanted or who was engaging with campus life. It was a classic case of data poverty in a data-rich world.

"Most people don't realize," Reuben explains, "but student governments typically have a lot of authority and autonomy at their universities and colleges... they're in charge of allocating millions of dollars." Yet the student affairs side of higher education—everything from residential life to clubs to intramurals—was flying blind compared to the academic side, which had learning management systems like Blackboard. The core problem wasn't student engagement itself; it was the lack of data to understand, measure, and optimize it.

Reuben didn't jump straight into product development. Instead, he and his small team spent months talking to potential customers before writing a single line of code. "We basically brought a concept and pitched without a demo," he recalls. "We talked through things with people we knew, people we didn't know, got interest... whatever it took to get in front of potential customers." This customer research phase was crucial because it shut down several early assumptions—most notably, that their pricing should be cheap and month-to-month. Institutions pushed back: "Are we sure you can do all this for this cost?" They wanted yearly contracts and were willing to pay more.

The MVP was beautifully simple: let organizations create events, then swipe student IDs using a mobile card reader to track attendance and link it with demographic data the institution already had. But the technology was anything but simple. The team chose analog magnetic stripe readers (which institutions already had for campus IDs) rather than fancy new tech. This meant decoding sound waves on the server—translating the audio tones from the card swipe into the actual student ID data. It was advanced, invisible technical work that most competitors wouldn't bother with.

Reuben split the work: he built the front end and handled design (which he knew would be a differentiator in education's legacy tech landscape), contracted a partner for the back end, and worked with a friend's agency on mobile. The whole first product took 8-9 months, longer than hoped but reasonable given they were still part-time and wrestling with difficult technology.

When it came time to sell, Reuben had a secret weapon: Andy, now the Director of Campus Development. Andy had been working on sweat equity for months as a student body president and became Presence's first beta customer. When he graduated, Reuben recruited him: "Come do this with me. I've already got the product built, we've got schools interested." Andy said yes, and together they began closing their first schools.

It was just the two of them at first. Reuben was juggling everything—final product touches, customer conversations, investor talks, operations—while running on about 3-5 hours of sleep per night. He credits his extreme extroversion ("98% extrovert") and his obsession with staying organized via tools like Trello for keeping it all from crashing. When he needed to focus on one thing, he'd write everything else down and truly focus rather than context-switching.

Once they had closed a couple of schools, Reuben approached investors he'd already been cultivating. The early seed round was under $100k, which brought three more people on full-time. That small investment worked because he was in St. Petersburg, Florida, not San Francisco—costs were lower (though opportunities were too). The only reason he could raise at all was through relentless networking: he'd interned with the local tech accelerator, sat on 15 nonprofit boards post-graduation, and "networked the shit out of it," as he puts it.

The pricing assumption was the biggest early misconception: they thought cheap and flexible would win. Instead, institutions wanted longer commitments and were happy to pay more—which allowed Presence to hire better customer service (they now offer sub-minute response times) and build more robust features.

What worked was obsessive customer focus. Even after the MVP launched and paying customers came on board, Reuben was physically at every institution for months or longer, watching how they used the product and asking relentless questions. This wasn't just validation; it was continuous research that fed product decisions. The product evolved from a simple ID swiper into a comprehensive platform: event management tools, form builders with conditional logic and integrations, real-time analytics dashboards that combined event data with SIS demographic data, a branded mobile app, and a campus hub website.

The word-of-mouth engine started early. Satisfied customers referred other institutions; Reuben and Andy didn't need to build a big sales machine. By about three years after launch, they'd doubled their institution count year over year and grown to 22 employees (on track for 30 by year-end at that time).

Reuben also got a few key things right about culture and hiring: he deliberately looked for people with passion for the mission—most of his non-developer team were former student affairs professionals or student leaders themselves. This wasn't just feel-good hiring; it meant his team understood the problem domain and could make better product decisions. Even with 22 people, he held 20-minute all-hands meetings every Monday, keeping the mission visible.

Presence had closed just over 110 institutions across 35+ states and multiple countries. The company had raised just under $2 million in funding from reputable education-focused investors. Importantly, they were finally starting to get meaningful customer outcome data—case studies showing how their platform was moving the needle on student engagement, retention, and resource allocation.

Reuben remained deeply involved in product direction but had learned to delegate ruthlessly, pushing his team to own their domains. He remained convinced that depth of expertise matters: competitors who tried copying Presence's features without understanding the underlying student affairs philosophy simply failed to connect with customers. "Having that deep understanding of that market... you can really only get if you're passionate about it," he says.

The mission—to give institutions data to better understand, engage, and support students—wasn't a marketing slogan for Presence. It shaped every hiring decision, every feature prioritization, every partnership conversation. In a startup world often obsessed with hockey-stick growth, Presence was proving that a mission-driven, customer-obsessed, expertise-based company building real solutions to real problems could grow sustainably, even from a non-tech hub.