Stint in Progress
We’re Stint — a digital freelancing platform designed to connect college students with companies through virtual, short-term projects. We are live and receiving sign-ups from student freelancers and companies! Give us a try.
The Problem 🧐
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, job security became a frightening concern. Students everywhere were scrambling to find new work because they understood the importance of gaining professional experience in order to get ahead. As recent college graduates, we (Linda, Charles, and I) understood this sentiment well. We saw their student instincts in action, how hard they were willing to work, and became convinced that there must be a better way to satiate this massive desire to grow professionally and improve their future prospects of succeeding in industry.
We discovered that there is an oversupply of student talent to match a severe lack in immediate work opportunities in the market. As a result, college students often end up providing quality work to pre-professional clubs and organizations for free in order to improve their candidacy during the school year to secure a summer internship. The process students undergo to position themselves for a promising career is inefficient and undermines their current skills and abilities. A supplementing problem we’ve identified on the business side is that small companies without the advantage of strong brand recognition struggle to gain access to college communities and student talent.
What We’re Doing 🔧
Stint provides college students with flexible and paid opportunities that allow them to grow professionally at all times through short-term work with smaller companies. These opportunities guarantee that students receive the industry experience extracurriculars are unable to provide, while circumventing the physical and time constraints of a traditional internship. On the business side, Stint opens the door for smaller companies to gain access to college communities and skilled pre-professionals at some of the most prestigious universities in the U.S. before they are hired by larger iconic companies.
College students make up a huge pool of overlooked talent that deserves the attention of companies who need immediate help to grow their businesses, and Stint enables mutually beneficial work partnerships that empower both students and companies.
Our Progress 🌱
We set off on a journey to grow Stint from its seedling stage, guided by a vision of happier, less-stressed-out college students. At its core, Stint is built on a foundation of intuitive user experience, clean interface, and the student perspective. All of our initial planning and adjustments revolved around these concepts, until we got them just right. The idea that started as just an idea took off when we finally spun it into something tangible — our first MVP.
We released Stint to the world in its barebones form with just the simple functions needed for the platform to run, and it was exciting to see users start to trickle in as a result of our marketing efforts, mostly via Instagram. One piece of advice we received early on from Ivraj (through BIP Office Hours) was to double down on our product-market fit and thoroughly test our value props on a few individuals rather than spend energy blindly growing a platform that hasn’t undergone enough trial and error. With this in mind, we started small by hand-matching student to company and carefully following them through each step of the Stint partnership process. As we worked on the first couple of Stint pairings, we continued collecting data and observations on what worked, what didn’t, and what we could do better. This iteration process led us to make realizations about adding new features, prioritizing certain tasks, and laying out plans for the near future.
Moving forward, we will keep iterating on our current website to improve the overall experience for companies and students. We hope to create a service that will allow students to approach the recruiting process differently and open up their options for gaining work experience while growing continuously.
