For any ambitious college student thinking about starting a business anytime soon, now might be the perfect time.
Student entrepreneurs across the nation are trying their hands at real-life business. Though it isn’t certain whether or not the actual number of student businesses has increased during recent years, few argue that these ambitious enterprises are receiving more attention and notoriety recently.
Last week, Randal Pinkett, the winner of the most recent version of “The Apprentice” reality TV show, released a book called “Campus CEO” that offers advice for aspiring business moguls and details Pinkett’s own experiences at Rutgers University.
University business professor Alan Meyer said he thought there have been more student-founded businesses at the University in recent years, which has likely stemmed from the rise of Internet resources following the “dot-com era” crash of the late 1990s.
“Now we’re entering a period where the Internet is making a comeback, and the climate for starting new ventures is encouraging,” he said. “I think it’s sort of a cyclical thing, and I think we all learned a lesson from that bubble bursting.”
The two most prominent and active student ventures at the University today are Better Bus and Campus Vortex, both started by University students earlier this year. Better Bus is a shuttle service to and from Portland that runs during vacation periods, and Campus Vortex serves students as an online marketplace similar to Craigslist.
Campus Vortex, though just officially launched early last month, has already made big plans to expand after its success here, said Eli Alford-Jones, who founded the company with fellow student Colin Jensen.
“It’s really catching on here,” Alford-Jones said. “We’ve got about 162 things posted currently, and we’ve got a bunch of new features in the works for that.”
Among those new plans are launching a city and restaurant guide within the Web site that will open at 150 schools nationwide on March 3, Alford-Jones said. He added that the ultimate goal is to open Campus Vortex to as many as 325 schools by the end of March.
“We’re going to launch the food guide to as many schools as possible, and then piggyback the classifieds on top of it,” Jensen said. “We’re hoping this will create a lot of buzz at those schools, and then we can add other features on top of that.”
Better Bus operates with a slightly less ambitious approach to business, but co-founders and students Jered Parkin and Jonah Fruchter said they are happy with the bus’ two trips so far this year. The service is still very much up and running and will make a third trip during Spring Break, but both said fewer students have used the service for the return trip back to campus than the initial trip home.
The biggest problem for Better Bus has been trying to reach students in the residence halls without being allowed to advertise inside them, Fruchter said. University Housing has said that only student organizations that are not for profit can advertise in the dorms.
“I think that’s really a limiting factor on student businesses that are for profit, but yet education as well,” Fruchter said.
Fruchter and Parkin both said they have received strong support from the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship and faculty in the University’s business school.
“I would say all faculty – all my teachers or professors that know about it – they think it’s awesome,” Parkin said. “They’re really excited for us.”
For any student business now, a key to success is hitting the target audience right away, Meyer said.
“One difference is there is more of an emphasis on building a viable business – one that satisfies a genuine need, and there is an identifiable customer out there,” Meyer said. “The other piece is that you’ve got to find somebody that’s willing to pay.”
There have been other successful University student businesses in the past, Meyer said. Paul Walton, a 2004 University graduate, began a business selling computer mice with the University’s “O” logo on it while he attended school. Today, Walton owns Rhinotronix from North Bend, Ore., which sells a variety of technological accessories bearing dozens of other Universities’ insignias.
In the case of both current businesses, the founders felt they had fulfilled a service for a legitimate demand. Alford-Jones said he felt this was a large reason for their success, along with the relative ease and easy access of the Internet.
And starting a business through the Web is not a new phenomenon, giving rise to such corporate giants as Google and Facebook.
“There’s such low overhead (cost). You can create something of immense value that you couldn’t before,” Alford-Jones said. “Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in a week on his computer, and it’s worth something like $2 billion today.”
Fruchter and Parkin said any student entrepreneur should plan far ahead if they try to tackle such a venture.
As the climate improves, current businesses on campus could potentially lead to others in the future, Parkin said.
“Maybe that’s our biggest impact on campus, is just the fact that we exist here, because we didn’t have any kind of model … We definitely had our doubts about whether or not it could succeed,” Parkin said. “Hopefully we can inspire future student businesses just by the fact that we have succeeded.”
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