Oneday MBA Reviews: What “Founders” Say About The “Learning by Doing” MBA Program For Entrepreneurs

By Georgette Virgo

Many dream of the freedom of being their own boss, leading them to try their luck in entrepreneurship. However, entrepreneurship is far from easy. It requires dealing with challenges such as understanding market demands, developing a viable business model, securing funding, and building a team.

Understanding that textual knowledge and theories are insufficient to equip aspiring entrepreneurs in the entrepreneurial world, the VC-backed ed-tech startup Oneday pushes a different approach. Its program allows students to earn a fully accredited MBA degree by building their businesses.

With over 2,000 students, or “founders,” as Oneday calls them, the MBA program for entrepreneurs has built a portfolio of success stories—mere ideas turned into thriving companies, and fears and uncertainties transmuted into empowered and confident entrepreneurs and leaders today.

 The Oneday Edge in Education Technology

Oneday credits its success stories to one of its curriculum’s core aspects: mentorship. Each student is partnered 1-on-1 with a mentor who builds their business with them hands-on. These mentors serve as advisors and co-pilots, guiding founders through the complex startup journey. They do not take any equity in their students’ companies, so the students keep 100% of their business.

The MBA program for entrepreneurs boasts a board of over 50 mentors, all renowned entrepreneurs from various industries. One of Oneday’s mentors is Brian Meece of GreenlightGo, a marketplace for film and television producers. The company has driven $20 million in top-line sales through Brian's leadership. He also previously founded RocketHub, one of America’s largest crowdfunding platforms.

Another Oneday mentor is Ben Whately, who successfully co-founded Memrise, an education technology company that has raised over $20 million and has over 100 employees and 50 million users.

 Oneday MBA Reviews: The Founder’s POV

 Neil Smith: Raised 2.5M To Fight Men’s Mental Health Crisis 

Neil Smith, a Oneday alumnus, credited his mentor at Oneday as a key figure in helping him start his business, Mettle. Mettle is a mental health app for men that recently received $2.5M in funding. The founder emphasizes that having a mentor covered aspects of business management that he lacks.

He says, “My background is not tech, and Mettle is a tech product, so I needed help with that. I met somebody playing tennis who recommended Oneday, and I signed up. I was assigned a mentor, Steph Hamill, who was brilliant. She got behind the idea and ended up as one of the founding members of Mettle.”

 Steph is an expert in branding and marketing, and her experience was invaluable in finding the product-market fit for Mettle. According to Neil, he started his business due to men’s increasing mental health crisis. Today, suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in both the U.S. and the U.K. Unfortunately, men were not utilizing existing tools and apps to improve their mental health.

Together with Steph, Neil conducted customer research that showed none of the apps on the market addressed men’s needs. This is where Mettle came in. Mettle’s value proposition was so strong that it enabled Neil to raise enough investment to build his app and attract hundreds of paying customers. 

“The mentoring support at Mettle helps you gain confidence and allows you to speak to someone with experience who can help you overcome your obstacles. It was a very rewarding experience, and right now, we're in a really good place as a business,” Neil shares.

 Jamie Woolnough: From Launch To Breakeven in 3 Months

 Starting a business can be lonely. With this, Oneday’s program emphasizes being in a community of entrepreneurs. All founders are assigned a squad, a group of like-minded entrepreneurs who support each other on their journeys.

Jamie Woolnough, who joined Oneday to launch his eco-impact mobile network, says that he did not expect to benefit so much from the community at Oneday, saying, “The main thing for me was to be with others on the same journey. We're all learning from each other: I've got people in my cohort who are good at marketing and sales. I like to think that I'm good at design, so they come to me and ask me about design.” 

Jamie had founded businesses before but decided to join Oneday to launch his latest venture—Meaningful Planet, a mobile network that takes everyday consumer spending and puts it back into the environment. He says, “Having built products before, I knew chunks of it. What I didn't know was how to sell that product. In some ways, it was like starting from scratch. Oneday gave me the framework to build on.”

Three months after launching with Oneday, Meaningful Planet has hundreds of paying customers, is close to breakeven, and will soon be ready to raise investment.

Maria Lomas: From One Sale a Month to One Sale a Day

When starting a business, passion is not enough—aspiring entrepreneurs need to know things like taxes, finance, setting up companies, and hiring teams. Maria Lomas, the founder of the jewelry brand Santa Lomas, joined Oneday to get the knowledge she lacked.

She shares, “I knew I needed more knowledge to run my own business... not just manage it, but take it to the next level. I have energy and passion but need help with strategy, organization, finances, and technology. An old-fashioned MBA was not an option because it would mean pausing my business. A friend recommended Oneday, and I just went for it.” Maria had already launched Santa Lomas when she joined Oneday—but the program helped her accelerate the business.

She adds, “The progress I've made with my business speaks for itself. I don't think I would have managed to get to this position without Oneday, as it has given me all the tools I needed—from being stocked in a luxury department store in London to signing contracts with retailers worldwide. From one sale a month to at least one sale a day in less than a year. And with more to come, I am sure!”

Building More Success Stories

Every business is different, but as Oneday is an MBA program for entrepreneurs, the frameworks it offers, the mentors available, and the community it surrounds its founders with are all effective in every phase of their business journey.

From building the business from scratch to scaling business operations, the founders experienced Oneday as a valuable tool and a stepping stone to achieving the goals they set for themselves and their businesses in no time.