Students Need Extra Cash – Who’s Going to Step Up with A Service?
We all know that college students love money. I mean, who doesn’t? But the party hopping, big spending, college student really, really loves cash more than anything. It’s a shame that we young entrepreneurs — many of whom are still in college — haven’t built ventures around this simple fact.
Sure, we have facebook, zooomr, dormitem, ect… all businesses that were creating by young entrepreneurs. All these service are excellent, but it seems like we’re all going in the same direction nowadays.
Social networking this and college classifieds that, it almost seems as though we’re becoming locked into specific categories of business. Why aren’t we focusing on businesses that will allow students to get involved with a service that will make them cash?
I attempted doing just that when I created my first company, cashcampus, but only saw modest success. It was a service that allowed students to sell their class notes and study material to other students over the net. It wasn’t a brilliant idea, but I think that I was heading in the right direction by trying to put cash in the hands of students.
I strongly believe that the young entrepreneur who thinks of a way to help students pay their tuition, buy beer in the bar, or perhaps help offset the price of expensive college books by creating a service that allows them to make residual income, will become one of the most powerful young entrepreneurs in existence.
The opportunity for an entrepreneur to create such a company is up for the taking because it simply hasn’t been done before. At least not on a large scale. Do you know of any service?
Think about, what college student do you know that couldn’t use a few extra bucks? Tuition is increasing, books are becoming more expensive, and the cost of living has never been higher before. With that in mind, students would jump on the opportunity to make some additional mullah if the proper service.
Though I don’t think that anyone has created such a venture yet, I do see things happening in colleges around the country that leads me to believe that there is such a market forming, but it’s just fragmented and someone needs to pull it all together.
This is what I see:
- Students are gladly paying other students upwards of $20 per page to write papers for them
- Students are paying students to help them with their homework and to even take notes for them in classes
- Students are paying their friends finder fees when they refer business to them. Business such as small programming and designing jobs. I’ve even seen student artists pay people to help them find clients to paint portraits of
- I see students lending money to their friends for a small commission
Do you see what’s happening? Students are doing things to make extra cash. Imagine there was a portal thank organized this and even broke it down by college, ages, feedback, recommendations, etc…
Such a well thought-out and organized service would be golden for students around the world who are constantly seeking ways to make that extra buck. And as I hinted in that above list, such as system could even be beneficial for the affluent students who may not need extra cash. Their extra cash could be used to lend money out specifically to other students in need of cash.
Sure, that may be tricky because students don’t exactly have the best of credit (many don’t even have credit), but that risk could easily be absorbed if they had someone co-sign the loan with them, i.e., a parent, uncle, or even a trusting professor.
5 Comments
Dana Janssen
December 4th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Beyond ideas that target students who are at various levels of desperation (as the three examples you provided would suggest), students are tied to whatever their professors ask of them. Textbook writers and publishers know this and direct all marketing and sales at professors. Professors are often the decision makers that affect hundreds or thousands of students.
So, another question to ask yourself is: what services or products could you market at professors who would in turn force their students to use?
David Askaripour
December 4th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
That’s an excellent point, Dana. I think I’ll write something about that as well. Hmm… maybe we’re waiting for the next student founded blackboard.com, eh?
Dana Janssen
December 4th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
Building on the example of blackboard, I believe that it is not usually marketed at directly to professors. It is sold using peoplesoft’s ability to walk into any Dean’s office and say “hey, why don’t you buy this piece of software?” directly to the top decision maker. It is enterprise selling at it’s best. At least, this is what happened at my University–I had a minor role in the deployment of Blackboard there.
These connections are what you, the entrepreneur, gain when receiving venture capital. So if you decide to create a product or service that requires a top-down push, similar to Blackboard, VC is essentially a requirement. Just another thing to consider!
David Askaripour
December 4th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Yeah, I actually have a friend who is working on something similar to blackboard and it took me a while to see that it’s smarter to go after the professors than the students when it comes to services where professors interact with students. But at the same time, I guess it can be equally as smart to focus the marketing on students because at the end of the day, they are going to be the ones who actually sign onto it or not, regardless of what the professors post.
I agree, to really hit a school hard, notably the professor’s hearts, VC funding is a huge, huge, huge plus…but, being the optimistic entrepreneur that I am… I think it can be done with 0 funding as well
Web Enterpriser
December 5th, 2006 at 2:22 am
Actually, there is a product that is quite similar to Blackboard.com and WebCT. It’s called Nuvvo (http://www.nuvvo.com). It allows anyone to create a course and then provides you with all the capabilities of these similar services at a fraction of the cost. They even have a free account option with limited features. I’d high recommend trying to sell this. As for the paper writers, that’s an iffy situation. Do you really want to risk getting kicked out of college? If you’re going to get someone to write your papers, at least make sure they are a professional academic writer. I know a few. I’m even creating a website for one. Furthermore, how do you motivate the unmotivated? Most college students that I know are lazy. They beg their parents for money instead of having the maturity and independence to create their own cashflow. Motivated college students will not be happy with a $6/hr job and will find ways to generate wealth on their own.
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