Student Entrepreneurs Create Campus Businesses

For Michael E. Kopko ’07, necessity was the unkempt mother of invention. The student founder of DormAid, an on-campus cleaning service, says his nascent business rose from the dust of his own bad habits—Kopko, by his own admission, is not so neat.

“I’m not a clean freak by any standard,” he says. When the clutter in his freshman dorm room got out of hand, he and his roommate hired a cleaner to tidy the suite once a month. Soon, his friends were asking how they could get their rooms cleaned, too.

Kopko, an economics concentrator, eventually decided to capitalize on this apparent need. He and a few friends—in collaboration with his brother at Princeton—founded DormAid, which has managed to amass both customers and critics over the past semester.

“We are past the hump of getting that critical mass that most students need,” Kopko says, “I am very happy with how much the campus has been purchasing from us.”

DormAid is only one of a few student-run enterprises to take root on campus over the past year.

When Danny F. Yagan ’06 realized that he could get books for his economics class much cheaper online than from the Coop, he assembled seven Currier House classmates to set up a service to make the discounts more widely available. The result, an online service called Redline Textbooks, now makes required volumes available to Harvard students at lower prices. This spring, 40 percent of the 333 students enrolled Biological Sciences 50, a genetics and genomics course, bought their books from Redline.

Each year the Harvard Student Agencies (HSA) gives a Non-Profit Enterprise Award, and this year’s honor went to Ezaria, a student start-up designed to connect artisans in developing countries with American consumers.

Alexander S. Captain ’06, the company’s founder, was looking for a way to bring remedial money into Iraq, when, on a visit to Egypt, he was “shocked by the huge amount of beautiful art” that Americans would consider purchasing at higher U.S. prices. Seeking some sort of “connection” between dynamic and developing economies, he founded a web service to try to bridge the gap.

But, for student entrepreneurs, it’s not always the idea that comes first. Daniel “Zak” Tanjeloff ’08, who has been doing entrepreneurial work since selling Beanie Babies online in the seventh grade, created an internet classifieds service called H-Ads simply because he wanted to start a business on campus. “I thought that was a nice business where people give you money and you don’t have to do much but print their ad,” says Tanjeloff, “You don’t have to go clean their room like DormAid.”

From cleaning to classifieds, the College has seen a flurry of student start-ups hit the ground over the past semester. Taking advantage of the technological resources available to the internet generation, these burgeoning businesses mark some undergraduates’ first steps into the entrepreneurial world.

According to Associate Dean of the College Judith H. Kidd, who is Chair of the Student Business Advisory Committee (SBAC), the College permits student businesses such as these because of the entrepreneurial playing field opened by online technology. All of the student start-ups use the internet as their marketplace.

“I believe that the original intent of permitting student business activity was to acknowledge that the Internet had changed the landscape,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Starting a business within the College community carries its own challenges, and some of the start-ups have struggled with red tape as a result. But all say they have learned lessons that will serve them even outside the undergraduate world.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS?

Even though all of the new crop of student businesses are internet-based, they represent a wide spectrum of origins and interest in aid and profit. For some, like Tanjeloff, the measure of success is mainly financial.

“A business only works if you do it,” he says. “A good idea doesn’t make you money,”

Yet even though the other student businesses have managed to collect gains—Redline, for instance, turned a profit of about $6,500 in the fall—many of the entrepreneurs cite experience as their primary goal.

“The money is really not the reason,” says Kopko with a chuckle. “The typical average for a business is three years to be profitable.

“There are other ways we could make much more [money],” he adds, “like tutoring for SATs.”

For Kopko, as for many other of the young entrepreneurs, starting a business can help put their classroom economics into practice.

“[Entrepreneurship] gives you chance to apply the economics you learn, make some mistakes,” he says, “and go back and see if something in your education was wrong or give it the second college try.”

Many of the student entrepreneurs cite low over-head costs as being a key ingredient to their financial survival. Both Redline’s and H-Ads’ successes hinge on their being less expensive options. “We’re able to charge significantly less than the Coop,” explains Redline Sales Manager Brooks E. Washington ’06. The Coop charges large mark-ups from publisher prices, since it has “essentially a monopoly on this market,” he says.

During the spring semester, the Redline group made their guaranteed next-day delivery free of charge, something online retailers ordinarily do not do. Michael W. Reckhow ’06, Redline’s technology manager, says that this helped Redline provide a “completely unique product.”

A similar strategy gave Tanjeloff’s enterprise its financial edge. The business, which is now merging with The Crimson, sustains itself by selling commercial ads alongside free student ads. “We offered a cheaper alternative to advertising [than other campus publications],” he says. “Our only overhead cost was printing and distributions.”

Captain says that Ezaria was able to start up with only 4,000 dollars of investment capital by coming up with creative ways to reduce [their] costs,” such as shooting high-quality product pictures themselves.

WORKING THE SYSTEM

For student entrepreneurs, running a business from within the College gates can mean brushing up against administrative boundaries.

The College’s Handbook for Students stipulates that “Harvard permits undergraduates to undertake modest levels of business activities on campus, subject to approval by the Harvard College Business Advisory Committee.” The implications of this regulation has threatened to trip up a few of the young start-ups.

On a request from the College administration, both Ezaria and Redline had to shift their postal operations off campus in order to alleviate the workload of the Harvard Mail Services. Their leaders say that applying for campus approval was otherwise relatively straightforward.

“Dean Kidd was actually really helpful in making things run smoothly, directing me to people in the University who might be helpful,” Yagan says.

But not all businesses find the waters of Harvard’s bureaucracy so smooth. According to David A. Eisenberg ’07, DormAid’s chief operating officer, the company encountered “resistance from the administration.” Beginning in early April of last year, the company’s executives entered into nine months of meetings with the Deans, all of the house superintendents, each of the house masters, and several other administrators.

While the freshman dorms and most of the houses eventually allowed DormAid to operate under a strict “one-strike” policy, Mather and Lowell have refused them the privilege. The service will ultimately be up and running on campus next year and, according to Kopko, its mere existence reflects the value of resilience for any start-up enterprise.

“Don’t take ‘No’s’ too easily,” says Kopko. “People who don’t quit, typically win.”

—Staff writer Nina L. Vizcarrondo can be reached at nvizcarr@fas.harvard.edu.