Christopher Gray grew up in poverty in Birmingham, Alabama. He had a single mom, and two younger siblings. None of his family had ever gone to college, but he was hoping to be the first. He did not really have anyone to help him pay for college, since his mom had lost her job during the recession in 2008. He was determined to find out how to get to and pay for college, so he started looking for scholarships. He did not have a computer at home, so he used the library computers where usage time was limited. He would also write his application essays on paper at home, then type them into the application on his phone. All of his hard work paid off, though. In the end, his total was $1.3 million in scholarships that he had earned.
Christopher could have stopped there and been satisfied with just going to college and living his own life, but he did not. He knew that there were thousands of other people just like him who wanted or needed scholarships, but there was not a good process out there for finding them. He also learned that about $100 million in scholarships go unclaimed each year.
So, he started Scholly, an online program to match students with scholarships. He developed a patent-pending algorithm to select the scholarships that fit each student, based on information about them. His major breakthrough came when he appeared on Shark Tank in November, 2015. Within the first few hours after the show was aired, Scholly received 80,000 requests. Scholly now has almost two million users. It has also connected students with over $100 million in scholarships to further their education.
Christopher Gray is an excellent example of someone who saw and experienced a problem, and figured out how to fix it. He has made the lives of many future college students much easier, and he looks forward to continuing to do that with further innovations to the program.