How Kevin Li Founded Sproutly, A Crowdfunding Platform Connecting Donors to Organic Farmers

Kevin Li started his first company at 11. He woke up at 5am to film two or three videos a day, ran three accounts across four platforms, and managed a supplier himself. "I just had this almost infinite energy to work on it," he says. By the end of the first month, he'd made around $5,000 selling seasonal products. That was the beginning of a pattern that hasn't really stopped since.

Catching the Trend, Choosing Collaboration Over Competition

At a time when the dropshipping industry was said to be saturated, 13-year-old Kevin decided to go against the market and launch Tui. His product: slippers styled like Uggs, but with a reindeer stitched on - a Christmas-season bet aimed at teenage girls and moms. He found a supplier, and organic videos started pulling in a few thousand views, sometimes up to 18,000. That's when he made the riskier call: moving into paid ads without telling his dad, with only two sales to show for it so far. "There were a million reasons I shouldn't have done it, but I felt like I should, and it worked," he says. The timing landed right as Christmas shopping hit, and the slippers caught fire on TikTok and Instagram, taking Tui from zero to about $5,000 in two weeks.

Kevin showed the same read on a competitive situation the following year. While selling candy and cold drinks at a summer camp, he faced a competitor who began undercutting his prices. Rather than getting into a price war, Kevin proposed a partnership, finding a way for both sides to sell without directly competing with each other.

Persistence in Entrepreneurship

About a year ago, Kevin decided he wanted to work on water access in Africa - something he'd thought about since he was four or five, ever since hearing the classic "finish your vegetables, think of the children in Africa" line as a kid. He reached out to roughly 200 charities. Most said nothing back. The ones that did said no in different ways: his school called the idea unsafe, told him to delay a year, and said he lacked a verified partner. His housemaster told him directly that it was too large-scale, and that he was too young to do it.

Eventually his persistence paid off and he found partnership with WaterAid. This resulted in an empathy walk that raised around $1,000, a flight to Tanzania with his dad and work with Projects Abroad, which runs volunteer placements with local schools.

"The biggest lesson was not taking no for an answer," he says. "If I'd listened to him, I wouldn't have gone to Tanzania or Berlin. I wouldn't have met any of those people or learned any of it."

That project is also, directly, how Sproutly started.

Sproutly: Pivoting from a Real Problem

At LaunchX, Kevin's team built Sproutly, a crowdfunding platform connecting donors to smallholder organic farmers. Once a farmer receives money and uses it, they pay the same amount forward to another farmer - less a donation, more a loan that never has to be repaid to Kevin's team, just passed on.

The idea came from real work. "We interviewed people from Ghana, Ethiopia, Minnesota, San Diego, all over the place," Kevin says. "They all said that getting loans was a big issue for smallholder farmers. Many didn't have a phone number, let alone a bank account - so a platform like GoFundMe could reach a headline campaign, but never an individual farmer."

Sproutly raised $6,000 dollars in its first stretch, with Kevin's team taking a deliberately small cut of about $800 in actual revenue, because most of the money was meant to reach farmers, not the founders. Their first model looked more like a loan paid back to the team directly, and Kevin pushed to pivot away from it. "I stuck with my gut that it wasn't a good idea," he says. "We got a lot more traction, I visited farms, and we got more support."

Learning When Not to Trust His Gut

Kevin is upfront that his stubbornness cuts both ways. "When people tell me my idea doesn't work, I basically wouldn't listen, and that's gotten me a lot. But I'm starting to open up to genuine advice and see how I can benefit from it."

At LaunchX, that meant judging advice by a simple standard: whether it mattered to a buyer, investor, or referral rather than his own preferences. Working closely with teammates helped put that mindset into practice. Because his team brought different strengths, including his CTO writing the website code, Kevin found that collaboration worked best when he shared the load. "I couldn't have coded the website as well as my CTO did. Listening got a lot easier once the ego was removed."

Power of an Inspiring Community

Kevin has been to seven summer camps since he was 10, and to him LaunchX has been the best one, not because of the maker space or the guest speakers, but because of the people. “I couldn't find a single fellow student there who wasn't both smart and nice. I'm still thinking about the people there. I don't think I'll ever forget it.”

His advice to future Launchies comes from the same place as everything else he's built: keep the persistence to build, and the right opportunity will come.

Connect with Kevin here.