Entrepreneurship

As a lifetime car enthusiast, I sincerely wanted my first car to be an outward expression of who I was as a person. After using my passion for aesthetic styling and engineering performance to personalize my own car, I realized that vehicle customization occupied two opposing spaces in our modern world: regular cars that were unappealing to most (excessively loud, made of “Frankenstein” parts, and scraping the ground) and high end cars that were customized by exorbitantly expensive and impersonal means. I founded A-RAM WRAPS with a mission to revitalize personalized automotive restyling and make it accessible to all types of cars and clients. My approach was simple: in order to make a truly personalized automobile, you need to first start with empathy and owner desires and then create a holistic vision for how all of the design elements will play together over time.

As a high schooler running a one-man-show, this business included self-taught technical restyling work (predominantly vinyl wrap solutions and aftermarket part installations) as well as design, marketing, finance, customer service, and project management. The experience I gained managing a business and interacting directly with customers has allowed me to appreciate the importance of a personalized approach to quality, creativity, flexibility, communication, and customer experience.

Cole McCollum and I felt that existing crowdfunding sites were not allowing everyday people to discover their inner maker. The sites were about raising intimidatingly large amounts of money and bringing a product to mass market with the promise of extravagant rewards. This left many hobbyists unable to pursue their ideas, which ultimately squandered their creative capacities.
 

“We believe there are only four things that prevent people from pursuing their ideas: time, technical capacity, emotional support and most importantly, money. Ignite is a social crowdsourcing platform that effectively removes these barriers by focusing on the power of human connection. The app provides three stages of engagement: crowd-sourced funding, personalized support, and skill-enrichment, and is specifically focused towards encouraging micro-financing of projects, prompting users to donate $0.99 at a time. It is low cost to maintain, and generates revenue by collecting a 5% fee on project donations.”
 

Our startup placed 2nd in Bucknell's BizPitch14 competition, providing over $2,000 in preliminary funding to develop our idea. I gained experience pitching and communicating our idea in front of 250 students, faculty, and alumni entrepreneurs. I fielded questions on stage in shark-tank style format from real entrepreneurs and learned a bit of what it takes to start a technology business, including how to determine your competitive advantage. Struggling with the development stage of tech software helped me understand the challenges and skills related to the sector. I also gained some familiarity with web and mobile app development, especially with regards to cloud-based servers, APIs, iOS, and Ruby.

I believe that mentorship is one of the keys to success in the start-up world. I have had the pleasure of mentoring a few student start-ups at Bucknell on technical product specifications, business models, business pitch strategies, company culture, and financial projections. Search Party, pictured above, was a start-up I proudly mentored and introduced at the BizPitch16 competition, where they won first place and received $4,000 in seed money to develop their idea.