8 Pillars
Discover your path to university.
What is 8 Pillars?
8 Pillars is a university discovery and planning platform designed to help students make better decisions about their journey from school to university.
Most university planning begins with a list of universities. 8 Pillars starts somewhere else: with the student.
The platform helps students understand their interests, explore possible academic directions, make more informed subject choices, discover extracurricular activities and programmes, find relevant opportunities, and gradually identify universities and courses that could be a good fit.
Rather than treating university admissions as a single decision made in the final years of school, 8 Pillars brings the different parts of a student’s journey together into one personalised roadmap.
As students explore and make choices, their roadmap evolves with them. They can discover opportunities that are relevant to their interests and aspirations, understand how different choices may shape future possibilities, and build a clearer picture of the pathways available to them.
For parents and counsellors, 8 Pillars provides greater structure and visibility into this journey, making conversations about subjects, activities, programmes and universities more informed and connected.
The goal is not to tell every student which university they should attend. It is to help them discover the possibilities available to them and make thoughtful decisions along the way.
Because we believe university discovery shouldn’t start with universities.
It should start with the student.
Ready to launch?
Submit your product and get discovered by builders and creators worldwide.
Launch Now
FounderPlaybooks.
What other founders did to grow.
2722 dispatches from hundreds of founders, pulled from the week's best podcasts.
Build something you can launch in one, two months. Choose an idea that is quite novel but validated by someone else. Don't spend a lot of money and time to validate a completely new idea. When you see that there is traction, that you see some revenue, just go for it, leave your jobs and focus 100% on that.
Build and launch in two months, quit your job when revenue arrives
In his closing advice, Anton distilled his 15-year lesson into a sequenced launch playbook: ship fast, wait for real revenue signal, then commit fully. He explicitly warns against prolonged pre-launch validation of unproven concepts.
For a really strong app an investor would be super excited — you're closer to 6x. Less than 3x you start to cool off. But the important thing is how does the story of your business tie to these metrics.
LTV to CAC of 6x signals investor-grade health; below 3x, excitement cools
Eric's benchmark: investors get excited at 6x LTV:CAC; 3x is lukewarm. But the ratio only makes sense relative to stage. An early-stage land-grab might intentionally operate at 1-2x while acquiring UGC-contributing users whose platform value compounds. The discipline is building a narrative that explains why your current ratio is a strategic choice, not a weakness — and knowing which metrics each investor type prioritises.
There's a play for whatever you're stuck on.
Read all 2722 playbooks