Entrepreneurship is the backbone of the start-up company epidemic that has been sweeping over the nation in the past few decades. ASU has been at the forefront of this change and has taken it into its own hands to give students the opportunity to shape their mindset and learn about this new perception of the business.
Lauren Aldrich, a junior Computer Science student at the Barrett Honors College, has taken advantage of this opportunity through her work with various other students in FSE 301 – Entrepreneurship and Value Creation, where she created Time Crunch, an app that allows people to share their time online, track phone usage, and ultimately eliminate their technology addiction.
Initially, this group of students from W.P. Carey School of Business and Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering began their path toward a startup by creating a platform that would allow pet owners to find pet-friendly areas around the nation so they could spend more time with their animals. Though, by following the “innovation through experimentation” technique and the customer development skills they learned, they soon realized the need to turn their focus onto something more applicable to consumers. That is where they noticed a great problem in society stemming from addiction to technology. Through various interviews, engagement with real people, trial-and-error, and design, Time Crunch was finally created.
FSE 301 allows you to work with a team of like-minded individuals all with different backgrounds and talents, making the teamwork process educational and also engaging. The key to innovation is to keep an open mind, and with this wide range of students, the team was able to do so. Lauren also was pushed beyond her boundaries of the engineering school and was able to gain a better outlook on how business functions and how customers react to different marketing and management techniques. There is so much more to a startup than just proposing an idea and finding investors. There are multiple rounds of experimentation, dozens of interviews, and endless revisions before you can even present a pitch deck to investors.
“This course is the closest thing you can get to actually creating and following through with a real-life startup. Not only was I given all the information and background needed to start my own, but I was given endless connections to people who have started their own businesses and are thriving in the modern community. I really do appreciate everything this class has given me and hope that more students decide to take FSE 301 to combine both their engineering and business skills.”
Click the following link to watch Time Crunch’s pitch: https://youtu.be/n6lvEtTlq8Y
Website Link: https://lilsnicker.wixsite.com/time-crunch