24 Venture Concept

Currently, there are 19.9 million college students in the United States. All are looking to receive a higher education which could catapult them to a higher-level position in their career. In order to remain a student and graduate, a student most stay focused on their academics, but as we all know, a 4.00 GPA is not enough to get hired today. Participating in clubs and volunteer opportunities is a must and internships are required by many colleges in order to graduate. With all of these requirements and dates, it’s hard to keep up and stay stress free. The last thing on a student’s mind is what’s next. Many students just live day by day as they don’t have time nor effort left to actively plan their month or even week. This way of organization is ineffective and leads students to mismanage time and forget about important events and due dates. The most used forms of organized for students includes online calendars that are provided by the education platforms they use like Canvas, and the calendar apps provided on their cellphones. Both of these options create problems of their own. These online calendars provided by sites like Canvas are helpful when your logged in, but could be hard on the go to pull up. Not only that, but the are single use, meaning they only serve a single purpose. This leads to students going back and forth from multiple open tabs to get your correct schedule. A smart idea may be to log everything in a planner or calendar app, but it’s tedious work to schedule individual dates, especially if the students participate in multiple clubs, volunteer, and work.  When looking at the most used online calendars on the market like Google Calendar and Outlook, there is an amazing tool, the sync button. This allows you to automatically sync most calendars at just a touch of a button, creating a single calendar in seconds. This tool is a life saver and used by many, except for college students. Due to the secured log in for education sites, you cannot sync these online calendars to Outlook, leaving a huge opportunity that could benefit students in a big way.

I am a college student myself, obviously. I am a full time student who works a part time job and participates in a club. I am always on the go and have a need to stay organized, especially since my job requires me to keep my schedule up to date incase they need me on the spot. I have gone through different ways of organizing in hopes to find something that works. I like calendar apps as I always have my phone on me and its pretty easy to use and make your own. Though with any planning, it takes time to do. Most weeks I’m okay with the snail pace of logging each individual date in, but others I’m scrambling to finish the current week, not even stopping to think what’s to come the following week. I’ve seen this problem first hand, I have background in web design and coding, and entrepreneurship background, making me a good candidate to try and make a product to solve this problem. So, I created Sync Me EDU, a calendar app that automatically connects and syncs with student’s educational sites due dates, class schedule, club meeting times and locations, and any events happening around campus. This product would be sold to Universities for $5,000 a semester and provided to students to use by logging in with their student’s ID number and password. I plan to work with colleges and universities to allow my app access to their programs, like Gator One, in order for students to successfully sync their calendars into one place for easy access and use.

Once a student opens the app and inputs their log in information, their class schedule and canvas due dates would already be inputted into the calendar. From there the student can sync any other online calendar, like their work or personal schedule. Students would also be able to look up official clubs of their university and add their schedule with meeting locations to their calendar. This can be also be done with Greek life, sports events, and special events happening around campus. Each organization would be required to keep their schedules up to date and would have a different type of account.

Though the idea seems simple, there are no other business trying to solve this problem. My largest competitor would be Outlook, but there is a clear difference between Microsoft’s product and mine. Outlook’s target market is business professionals, whereas mine is college students. My simple design and includes desired features for active students then Outlook’s over complicated design and heavy focus on email. And, as stated before, Outlook cannot sync calendars from websites that require a log in. I decided to sell my app to universities because of how closely we would have to work together in order to make this product a reality, and the fact that college students are cheap. By partnering with universities instead of selling the app on the app store, we would be able to give more to students and offer them a chance to become more active in their time at college. I plan on starting small, selling my idea to colleges with a student body of 10,000 or less to test the system to make sure it works under pressure and to find out more of what students want from the app. I would eventually need a team; a crew of tech gurus to help with later system updates and new additions when larger amounts of students start to use it, as well as a professional connections team to help keep our bonds with the colleges and universities we partner with.  Through this product I would love to grow with our connections to create and provide more tools and products that students can use to make their lives stress free and more valuable.