For All Your Adam Shlomi Needs
Entrepreneur, Internet Nerd & Small Time Writer.
I'm Adam Shlomi the founder of SoFlo Tutors. I recently sold the company and am taking a two year RV trip across America visiting national parks, music festivals, and friends. I majored in Global Business at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and started SoFlo while in college. At SoFlo we offer online SAT/ACT Prep to students around the world and have 100 tutors on our team, but when I founded SoFlo I was bedridden recovering from ankle surgery with doctors saying I may never walk again.
I am proud of the entrepreneurial projects I have created, the short stories I have written, and the publications I have been featured in. So inspired by NFTs (eww, I put together this personal website as a mini-museum for my work.
Projects ⏱ 🤓
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SoFlo Tutors — Online SAT Tutoring
SoFlo is an online SAT/ACT tutoring company that I started while on medical leave during my junior year at Georgetown. SoFlo started as a side hustle. I thought I’d learn how to build a website and get clients and those skills would help me when I launched a more serious venture. Instead, SoFlo grew fast with great reviews and word of mouth.
We needed more tutors and I decided to start hiring remotely because I could find great tutors online, but no qualified people in South Florida. By May of 2019, a year before COVID, SoFlo was fully remote. The internet is our home field and we had system to teach students online seamlessly, so once COVID happened we were able to catch the wave of digital transformation.
SoFlo continued to grow fast and after 4 years of hard work, I sold SoFlo Tutors in a small all-cash exit. I bootstrapped the company and exited as the sole owner.
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Smile Analytics — NBA Gambling Algorithm
Smile Analytics is my first failure. My college roommate Sam Beyda loved gambling and I wanted to get better at Excel so in-between rips of the chicken bong, we built an algorithm to bet on 2nd Half Over/Unders for NBA games.
Our logic was that the 2nd half Over/Under line is normally just the first half-line with a few extra points tacked on that account for the end of the game when there are fouls that slow the pace and increase the score. There is not enough time and too much data for a bookmaker to make a custom line for each 2nd half, so there is an opportunity for us to consistently beat the book by looking at the data from the first half of play and selecting games that were most likely to go over or most likely to go under.
I found a data scientist in China who volunteered to web scrape every game from the 2019 season split by first and second half because he loved basketball as much as we did (if you have WeChat look up basketballjumpshot to see this dude's work). This dataset is not readily available on the internet and I think we are one of the few hobbyists to ever work with this data. We Index-Matched the NBA game data to Over/Under data which was readily available.
Then we got to work testing algorithms. We tried to identify what correlates from first half to second half, and what correlates with points. We kept running into walls as there are few correlations from first half to second half. Points don’t track well between halves and neither does FG%. Assist ratio tracked over somewhat well between halves and was a meaningful predictor of points, but it wasn’t enough of a factor to build a successful algorithm.
After trying tons of variations and backtesting against past data, just to find out that our algorithm was wrong 56% of the time and we would have been profitable if we bet against every suggestion our algorithm made, we lost interest.
Smile made a brief return my senior year when we signed a vendor contract with Avalon Bay Communities (where I interned the summer before) to solve a data tracking problem, but by that point, I was focused on SoFlo.
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Georgetown Entrepreneurship's Startup Career Fair
I built Georgetown’s Startup Career Fair which connects local DC startups to talent at Georgetown. The initial event I organized had 350 students attend and 50 startups apply. Though I was only involved in the initial event, the career fair has been run annually for the last four years.
I was enrolled in Professor Jeff Reid’s foundations of Entrepreneurship class and was assigned Smart People Should Build Things by Andrew Yang. I was inspired by Yang’s idea that top graduates are well-trained sheep who fall into the funnel of consulting companies that don’t promote innovation. I was frustrated by corporate recruiting and knew many of my friends felt the same. We wanted a casual job search, without suits and leather-bound resume books. I wanted work that was mission-driven and passionate.
I see this career fair as the first thing I ever truly built. I came close to failure and fought back. 4 weeks before the fair only two companies had applied to attend. My strategy was that by having a few key players on board, they would attract companies using their personal network, but I was wrong. I came home and went to bed thinking that tomorrow I will cancel the whole thing. Not many people will be disappointed and I can just move in. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about the work to be done, and how I had to make it happen. I couldn’t let myself fail. I ended up at my desk all night, teaching myself how to use mail merge, designing emails, and searching the labyrinth of Google Drive for a list of company emails. I sent out the first mail merge to 40 startups before going to bed that morning, and when I had woken up 10 companies had applied to attend. Because I had come so close to quitting and fought back, the success tasted that much sweeter.
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91 Days In China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Thailand
I believe the 21st century will be written in Asia. China is the future. But we know so little about the country which is going to dominate the coming 100 years (Alipay was one of the world’s most valuable startups in 2018 but the English Wikipedia page was 3 paragraphs long). Plus I read Graham Allison's book about The Thucydides Trap and how China and America may be destined for war. So the summer going into my junior year I decided to take a backpacking trip to Asia. I wanted to share what I learned with friends back home. I came on this trip as a fact finding mission. More to learn than to party. So I made a daily Instagram post about something I learned or saw while in Asia. For example, in China they can count to 10 on one hand. Don’t believe me? See it here.
My itinerary
— 14 Days in Thailand visiting family who live in Bangkok, learning to scuba dive in Ko Tao, dancing at the Full Mon Party in Ko Pha Ngan, and hiking in Khao Yai National Park
— 7 Days in Japan eating tuna rice bowls, playing video games in arcades, photographing fashionistas on the shopping streets, and meditating at Shinto shrines.
— 30 Days in Taiwan. I was accepted into the Taiwan United States Sister Relations Alliance where the Taiwanese government would pay for me to learn Chinese and give me a dorm room at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan. I learned enough Chinese that I could survive in mainland China before leaving for the PRC.
— 5 Days in Hong Kong wandering the most interesting and dense streets I’ve ever seen. I took a free walking tour with a pro-democracy collective, and saw the writing on the wall. One country, two systems wasn’t going to last with an empowered China.
— 35 Days In Mainland China. I Couchsurfed across China staying with locals who opened up their homes to me because they wanted to practice english and meet foreigners. Couchsurfing .comis blocked by the Great Firewall, so everyone was skirting around the system to host me. I took creaky old 12 hours trains and 200 KM/hour bullets. I saw the China of new and old, and in all the chaos I lost my US passport. So I took a crash course in Chinese bureaucracy and got a replacement passport after two weeks.
This journey is documented on my private instagram account, so unfortunately it’s not publicly available. Rather than build an audience from scratch, I wanted to reach my existing friends and flood their feeds. If you’re curious to read the stories my current Instagram handle is @shlomithemoneyy
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The Lariat Newspaper
I was the Editor in Chief of the Lariat Newspaper at Cooper City High School. For years the newspaper received money from the school's yearbook so that we could print editions without an issue and money was never a huge problem. But my year, yearbook and newspaper split. We needed money or we weren’t going to have a paper that year. So I got to work. I found a new printer who was able to print an edition for $600 instead of $1800. The paper quality was a downgrade, but now we could afford to publish.
Then I went to College Experts, a test prep company in Davie that I worked at in high school. I told my boss Janet Ronkin that the back cover was doubling in price (Janet was my first boss. She is responsible for much of my success and my heart goes out to her. Rest in peace). She was going to pay $600 for the back cover instead of $300. With one check we covered the entire cost of publication. I drove around without air conditioning in my first car, a 1997 Cadillac SLS inherited from my Grandma, to all the other test prep places in town and sold them ad space. Within a week we raised $2000, enough to publish for the entire first semester. The newspaper was back on its feet.
Media Mentions 🗞️
The Hustle
Higher Education Association Acquires SoFlo SAT Tutoring
The Wall Street Journal
Starter Story
Georgetown Entrepreneurship
The LA Business Podcast
Inflation of Brooklyn 📈
Doors of Brooklyn 🚪
Creative Non-Fiction Writings ✏️
I grew up reading the Beats like Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. I want to think about art, creation, and the human experience. I don’t want to be singularly focused on scaling businesses or making money. I’m a terrible athlete and can’t draw a straight line to save my life, so writing is my medium of choice.
These are the short stories I am most proud of. I hope that one of them engages you to read until the end. My personal favorite is Ask, and it will be given you. Knock, and it will be opened for you” Matthew 7:7 about sneaking into Zuckerberg's free speech event at Georgetown.
| Name | About | Genre |
|---|---|---|
Oh Suzanne | Based on a true story of the most powerful love I have felt, this poem is inspired by Leonard Cohen’s song of the same name. I wrote this during a scary Maha Shivaratri, a hindu festival celebrating Shiva. | Poetry |
Ask, and it will be given you. Knock, and it will be opened for you” Matthew 7:7 | Sneaking into Zuckerberg's free speech event at Georgetown | Creative Non-Fiction |
Free At Last, Free At Last, Good God. | What happens to unfulfilled genius? | Creative Non-Fiction |
Hiking While Brown | Three cops with guns drawn, cuffed me, and threw me into the back of a police car. There was no crime or charge, but they read me my Miranda rights. I was released after an hour without an apology. | Creative Non-Fiction |
First Day on a Brand New Planet | An alien comes to New York City for Fame and Fortune | Creative Non-Fiction |
Get In Contact
I’d love to help you however I can by giving advice on a business problem or feedback on an idea. I’m solicited by stock brokers, professors, and accountants for consultations on growing their businesses. I’m happy to share the lessons I’ve learned and collaborate with passionate people to make the journey a little easier. The more I can give and help others the better, so I do not ask for anything in return. If you want to get in contact, email adam@shlomi.us or schedule a call here.
However, if you really want to return the favor, here is what I’m looking for and how you can help me. Human relationships are the 2nd most important thing, following health. I’m looking for great people to spend my time with. So get in touch if you are:
- A friend who works less than 15 hours a week and wants to travel across America
- A potential co-founder who wants to build the future
Contact
Other Stuff 🤷🏻♂️
Doors of Brooklyn
Inflation of Brooklyn