Anyone who has made it through college knows that ideas are cheap.
Every conversation in the classroom, on the quad or at the coffee shop
is littered with them--some great, most awful. On occasion, the
spitballing even spawns a bit of short-lived business action (witness
all the broken links on any Best College Startups internet list from the
past few years). o Clearly, it's not just an awesome idea that makes a
college startup great. It takes follow-through, patience and business
smarts to transform a dorm-room musing into a viable business. Here are
some college startups that made the leap from good idea to great
company.
The perfect fix
In 2012, Spencer Quinn was a junior at Brigham Young University in
Provo, Utah, working a summer job at a company that sold athletic tape,
when he heard about a doctor who used medical casting tape to fix an
all-terrain vehicle. It was an "aha" moment for Quinn, a biotech major.
Along with his cousins Reed and Chris Quinn and brother-in-law Derek
Rowley, Quinn attempted to repair household items using casting tape. "I
thought maybe this stuff could fix more than bones, so we started
putting it on broken tools, leaky pipes and other stuff," he recalls.
"It was not a good solution."
Repair man: Spencer Quinn of FiberFix.
Image credit: BYU Magazine
Those efforts didn't work, but the trio got to thinking about what
elements would make a better repair tape. The product would have to go
beyond duct tape to create a permanent bond, and it would need to be
waterproof and able to withstand impact and heavy loads.
They worked with the BYU mechanical engineering lab to find a
solution. Once they had a prototype, they took it to an adhesives
manufacturer to work out the production process. The result was
FiberFix, which, after being soaked in water and applied tightly, can
permanently repair shovel handles, leaking pipes and just about any
other broken object.
But creating FiberFix was just the first step. "I think so many
products fail in the manufacturing and logistics stage," Quinn, now 25,
explains. "You have to learn how to approach big retail buyers and know
how to execute your product in such a way that you don't get chargebacks
that kill the company. After that first sale, 99 percent of the work is
still ahead of you."
The team worked trade shows, demonstrating their miracle product to
hardware and construction experts, and entered their idea in
competitions. They won events at BYU and placed second in the
International Business Model Competition. But their biggest coup came in
October 2013, when they were featured on TV's Shark Tank, where they
convinced judge Lori Greiner to invest in their concept.
That led to multiple stints on QVC, where they sold 45,000 rolls of
FiberFix in 10 minutes. The product is now carried at 10,000 retail
locations, including Home Depot and Lowe's. More than 1.3 million rolls
of FiberFix have been sold at $6 to $10 each.
Despite the success, Quinn and his business partners are dedicated to
finishing their education, though on a more relaxed schedule.
"I was initially nervous that I wouldn't get enough support from my
professors to do both things, but I haven't found a single one that
wasn't excited about the opportunity and supported us," says Quinn, who
hopes to expand the FiberFix product line over the next three to five
years before selling the company. "BYU has lots of entrepreneurs and
great talent. I think everyone here likes a good success story and wants
to be a part of it in some way."
Let's go to the tape
Lindsay Stewart was a TV news producer in Los Angeles before
enrolling at the Wharton School's San Francisco campus in 2012. The idea
was to get a few letters behind her name to help make her way up the
ladder on the management side of the media business.
In one of her classes, students were asked to pitch a business idea.
For several years, Stewart had been thinking about the inefficient ways
news outlets acquire video footage. Deadline-focused assignment editors
are often forced to buy tape sight-unseen from third-party stringers; at
times they even contact people through YouTube. News stations go to air
with whatever images they can find, good or bad. On the flip side,
Stewart knew great photographers and videographers who missed out on
work because they had no way to communicate directly with editors. And
the payment process was equally slow and messy.
When she proposed her idea of an online exchange where editors could
view and purchase news footage, and photographers (and the public) could
show their work and find assignments, her classmates were intrigued.
But it wasn't until fellow student Brian McNeill filled her Dropbox with
plans and calculations that she realized her concept, which she dubbed
Stringr, could be a viable business.
Footage found: Stringr's Brian McNeill.
Image credit: Matter Ventures
"It was having someone throwing their weight behind my idea that was
the genesis of Stringr," Stewart says. "You can go to the best
business-school program, but it's not so much about the academics as it
is who sits next to you. Classmates helped write the business plan and
build the tech stack. They gave me all that human capital for free, and
that's what helped us launch Stringr."
Through the rest of their time at Wharton, Stewart and McNeill, both
of whom graduated in May, refined their concept. They're now based at
the San Francisco media accelerator Matter, where they have five
engineers on contract. Stringr, which launched a three-month pilot in
the San Diego news market in August, plans to roll out to several more
pilot cities before expanding to newsrooms around the country.
Unlike other college entrepreneurs, who often have nothing to lose,
Stewart, 34, and McNeill, 37, are taking big mid-career gambles with
their startup. "I think doing something like this is totally different
than when you're younger," Stewart says. "There are more risks--I sold
my house to do this; I'm not taking a salary. But my contacts are wider
and deeper; I'm able to navigate and sell to bigger companies. I'm not a
19-year-old selling a pipe dream."
McNeill, who tried to start a tech company during the dot-com boom of
the late 1990s, agrees that things are different this time around.
"Without a network or capital to get you down those first 50 yards,
starting a business is extremely difficult," he says. "At the same time,
the opportunity loss is high. I walked away from a partner-track job at
Ernst & Young. But leaving that behind has given me more confidence
in what we're doing."
The founders agree that their entrepreneurship classes helped them
clarify their once-hazy expectations. "One of our professors ended our
class by giving us the stats on our education and experience," Stewart
says. "He said less than 1 percent of the population was as prepared as
[we were] to start a business, and he ended by saying he hoped we would
try. That was very inspiring. This is not just an idea for me. I feel
passionate about it."
A global cure
For all the debate about healthcare in the U.S., it's easy to lose
sight of the fundamental problems plaguing medical systems in other
parts of the world. In developing countries, people often die from lack
of basic medicines, blood or operable surgical equipment.
During one of her first classes at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor, chemical engineering major Carolyn Yarina stumbled upon this
reality. Assigned an open-ended engineering challenge, Yarina turned to a
campus club that had recently surveyed rural health workers. One of the
needs in Africa, the survey found, was a centrifuge that could run
without electricity, allowing clinicians to diagnose and treat diseases
in areas without power.
Yarina took on the challenge, and by the end of the semester she and a
team of students created a human-powered centrifuge built from bicycle
parts. It was a neat engineering feat, and Yarina didn't want the idea
to die with the end of the class. So she created a student group called
CentriCycle to continue work on the project. She also enrolled in
entrepreneurship classes, including a practicum in social
entrepreneurship, which convinced her to go to India for the first time.
"I learned a lot on that trip, which led to a lot of changes," she
recalls. "I realized what they needed on the ground, and using a bicycle
was not the best idea."
Lifeline: (from left) Katie Kirsch, Carolyn Yarina and Gillian Henker of Sisu Global Health.
Image credit: Zach Hurley
Returning to India over the next two summers, she refined her concept
and developed contacts. After graduating in 2013, she worked on her
centrifuge full time, eventually developing a portable machine dubbed
(r)Evolve that can alternate between manual power and electricity. She
also lined up engineering and manufacturing support in India.
But it dawned on Yarina that she needed to go further. "Once I
created our student organization and started going to business classes, I
had an epiphany," she says. "Open-source designs are not a viable
option if you actually want to get your product out there. If it was
just about creating a process to separate blood, we would have been done
four years ago."
Early this year, she and CentriCycle member Katie Kirsch teamed up
with another University of Michigan grad, Gillian Henker, who is
developing Hemafuse, an auto-transfusion pump for blood. Together, they
started Sisu Global Health, a socially conscious for-profit company, as a
platform to deliver medical products designed specifically for the
needs of developing countries. The centrifuge and auto-transfusion pump
are their first two offerings.
"Eighty percent of medical products are designed for 10 percent of
the world," Yarina explains. "Designing for that other 90 percent is
what we want to do."
The 24-year-old says she never expected to be at the helm of a
company, but she's glad her life has taken this turn. "During freshman
orientation they took us on a tour of the Center for Entrepreneurship. I
remember I couldn't wait to get out of there," she says. "I never
thought I'd do anything with entrepreneurship. After learning how to
turn this idea into something that could impact people's lives, I've
realized entrepreneurship can be more about making an impact than making
money."
