To the Broke College Student with an App Idea
Have a groundbreaking app idea, but still in college? Don’t let that stop you.
If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, you can still be successful while pursuing a degree. The media has romanticized dropping out of college to become the next biggest tech giant, but 95% of entrepreneurs have a bachelor’s degree or higher, despite the recent PR for dropping out of college to startup.
Just to name a few tech entrepreneurs with Bachelor degrees: Kevin Systrom, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Steve Wozniak.
Mark Zuckerberg even has a college degree now! But that’s besides our point.
Venture Capitalist, and Co-Founder of Y Combinator, @paulg, is an advocate of undergrad and grad students starting companies in school for a few reasons:
Stamina, Poverty, Rootlessness, Colleagues, Ignorance, and Resources
You can read his essay, “A Student’s Guide to Startups” here
90% of young people believe that entrepreneurship education is important, according to the Young Entrepreneur Council. Today colleges, thought leaders and business experts are encouraging entrepreneurship now more than ever, so students are taking advantage of it.
The Rise of Entrepreneurship Programs
In 1985, there were about 250 courses offered in entrepreneurship at college campuses across the nation. That number is now over 5,000. Entrepreneurship programs, courses, and extracurriculars are taking America by storm.
According to a 2011 survey by the Association of Business Schools entrepreneurship is now one of the top 5 content programs that prospective MBAs want their schools to offer.
With the amount of interest college students now have in entrepreneurship, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that about one-third of business incubators are now based at universities.
NYC Entrepreneurship
New York colleges, in particular, are exploding with entrepreneurship programs. Universities such as NYU, Columbia, Fordham, and CCNY, offer their students startup innovation labs, venture funds, incubators, grants and more.
We sat down with a part-time marketing intern at App Partner, Jeremy Spence, who happens to be a founder of an up and coming app startup and a brilliant student at NYU. Here’s his take on what it’s like being an entrepreneur at NYU.
“NYU is a great place to be an entrepreneur. They have an entrepreneurship lab that is one of the nicest buildings on campus (and the only one with free coffee). They have experts there full time like Andy Moss, one of the early employees at Microsoft and Frank Rimalovski, a co-author of the popular entrepreneurship book Talking to Humans. There are always lectures going on, often hosted by people like Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, and Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare.
Despite all of this, by far the best part about being an entrepreneur here is the other students. They are all so ambitious, motivated, and already seeing early successes. We all collaborate a lot with each other. Even though we are all working on very different businesses, the problems we come across like early hiring, incorporating, and branding is often the same. If you’re having a specific problem in your business, it’s very likely there is someone at the eLab that had the same problem and is happy to help you. It’s an intoxicating environment.”
Creating an App in College
In more recent findings, colleges have been seeing an upward trend towards building mobile apps. Undergrads have grown up alongside these developing technologies, and spend an average of 82–90 hours using mobile apps per month, so it’s very easy for them to identify times in their lives when a mobile app would be helpful. This insight is how most entrepreneurs start their companies.
Mobile app startup, “Pocket Points,” solves every teacher’s problem of students texting in class. The app simply gives students rewards for not using their phones during class time.
Co-founders, Rob Richardson and Mitch Gardner, came across the idea for the app during a class lecture.
“We were just realizing that there was a problem in our classroom, a lot of students had their heads down, we knew that the teachers would have their own laws in place to punish students like take their phones, we thought there has got to be a better solution to this problem.” 一Richardson
These types of apps are being developed by students, across the world. For example, there’s “Winter Survival Kit,” an app that helps drivers stuck in severe wintry conditions by notifying authorities. “We Read Too,” an app that includes hundreds of books written by authors of colors featuring characters of color. And “LunchBox” an app that shows struggling students where they can get free food around campus.
Just three out of the thousands of apps that are developed by students with a passion for making a difference.
Managing School and Startup Balance
Continuing our conversation with Jeremy, we asked him how he approaches managing schoolwork and entrepreneurship.
“The student by day, entrepreneur by night story is mostly a myth. Movies like The Social Network glorify the obsessive “sleep when I’m dead” mentality of entrepreneurs, but this isn’t sustainable.
The key to being productive in these 2–3 hours is prioritization. When you’re building a business, everything is unstructured. You have no boss there to tell you what to work on next. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of working on what you like to do, and not necessarily what needs to be done. Many computer science students fall into the trap of spending months building the software that they want to sell for their business, only to find out that people don’t want to buy it. This wasted time is what ruins many entrepreneurs.
I recommend The Startup Owner’s Manual: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building a Great Company by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf for anyone that’s not sure what they should be prioritizing.”
Figure Out What Works for You
We are lucky enough to have another intelligent marketing intern at App Partner, Carissa Lintao, who is also a student and works on entrepreneurship and freelancing on the side. This is what she had to say.
“Managing school on top of a company is a challenge, to say the least. But like Jeremy said, if you can prioritize things in a way that works for youーyou’re set. A lot of entrepreneurs get caught up in trying to find ‘the right way’ to do things and listen to all of the podcasts and read all of the books, but fail to realize that everyone’s lives are different. What works for me might not work for you and vice versa.
However, the key to managing everything is to allocate your time effectively. Last summer I finished 30 credits to give myself more time to tackle business related work instead of trying to do everything all at once. So going back to doing what works for you, that may not be feasible for everyone, but if it isーgo for it.
Only you can find out how much you’re capable of achieving, so test your limits and have a long-term vision (years) and a short term vision (day by day) to accomplish your goals.”
Conclusion
If you’re a college student, now is the best time to pursue your ideas. Especially your app startup. There is more support, funding, and resources available at your fingertips now more than ever.
“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow know what you truly want to become.” ーSteve Jobs
This post originally appeared on our App Partner resource center. Click here for more.
