Student-To-Student Lending: Progress & Our MVP

These last few weeks have been a whirlwind! Our team is now moving closer to an MVP… Here’s what we’re doing:

Creating a MVP

Our team collectively invested in the QuickMVP software to get our test product up and running. We plan to survey our customers and disseminate a link that will explain our business model and services and will allow them to “subscribe”. This will provide us with their feedback and contact information. To measure our outcome, it is highly important to us to reach a wide array of potential customers. We are hoping to see that these students will find our idea appealing and begin to imagine themselves as a participant in S2S lending!

How Will We Reach Large Volumes of Customers? Reaching Out to the Middlemen!

To reach and maximize our contact with our potential customers we have drafted a list of middlemen to reach out to. These would include professors, staff involved with student affairs at community colleges, public and private local universities, and even academic institutions abroad. We will begin to contact these people one by one hoping that they will share or forward our MVP to their colleagues and students. Fingers crossed that it will be received well!

Contacting Companies: Large & Small

After attending the Industry Lunch, our group was prompted to reach out to banks, and other large companies with a similar model to ours to ask them… “Why haven’t you done what we are doing?”… As we go forward with these conversations, we are excited to hear the whys and why-nots that these existing entities report back to us. We hope that there will be lessons to learn and advice to take into account. Again, we hope that these answers will allow us to further our critical thinking about pivoting our idea.

Stay tuned, SVIA-ers!