Newswise — Kenny Morales and Wilson Overfield, second-year students in the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, believe they can solve a problem they witnessed while shopping for colleges as high school students.
Morales, who graduated from Grand Island High School, and Overfield, who graduated from Ralston High School, both won scholarships to attend the Raikes School. During their college search, they noticed that many promising high schoolers — particularly those who may be the first among their family and friends to attend college — struggle to identify the college that will be right for them. Overwhelmed and intimidated by the flood of information coming their way, sometimes students just give up.
“Finding the right fit can be especially difficult for first-generation college students like me,” said Morales, a software engineering major. “Before I applied to Raikes School, I did some research, where I put in top 'whatever' programs, like every kid does. Then you see Harvard, you see MIT, you see Princeton. You see you need a 35 ACT to go to this school or that school, and you just start to feel like college is not for you.”
Overfield and Morales think the solution could be a Tinder-like smartphone app that would allow prospective students to swipe left or right as they sort through potential college matches. The two aspiring software engineers have created a prototype, called “FindU.” They hope to bring the app to market in the next several years.
They are among a pipeline of students who have used the Raikes School’s support model to launch startup businesses even before graduating. It is one factor that contributes to the university's listing as a top 50 school for entrepreneurship in both the region and the world by The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur Media.
Overfield and Morales got a confidence-building boost recently when they landed first place in the Nebraska Silicon Prairie Startup Week pitch competition. After considering startups from across Nebraska, the judges awarded FindU the top prize of $10,000.
After a celebratory “founders’ dinner” at an express Chinese food restaurant, the pair used some of the funds to upgrade their computers and banked the rest for the time being.
“It was eye-opening,” Overfield, a computer science major, said of winning the prize money. “It just told us there are people who saw what we were doing and believed in it.”
“The win was nice — I won’t lie, but it wasn’t the most important part in my opinion,” Morales said. “Even if we wouldn’t have won, just the conversations we had and the way people reacted gave us the validation we needed.”
In the weeks since the contest, and with advice and assistance from Raikes School faculty and advisers and their parents, Overfield and Morales have formed a limited liability company and developed a minimum viable product.
They still have a long journey before their idea becomes a viable business. They intend to load publicly available data about some 6,000 higher education institutions onto the app while building a base of student users large enough to attract revenue from colleges that would want to use the app as a marketing tool. They aim to recruit high school students to test the app, including getting it approved for posting on Apple’s App Store for testing.
They are considering competing for a spot in the Raikes School Startup Studio, which would give them a year to work on their project with a bigger team and more support from faculty, staff and industry volunteers, while earning academic credit.
“The faculty and advisers here do an amazing job of helping you create a business, as well as develop an app,” Overfield said. “That’s what this place is all about. A lot of the professors have industry experience or entrepreneurship experience, and they are really willing to give you advice and help you push yourself as far as you want to go.”
Overfield and Morales think FindU has the potential to change the way college is marketed, by creating a more customized approach for prospective college students — but they don’t necessarily foresee FindU as their lifelong career.
“I don’t see myself working on this past the age of 30,” Morales said. “I hope we can build something very valuable. But the thing is, we both have a variety of ideas and I don’t think I ever get attached to one idea.”
“I would say we’re both problem chasers,” said Overfield, adding that he’s interested in a full-time software engineer career, as well as entrepreneurship. “We get excited by creative ideas we come up with, and we want to put a lot of time into those.”
Morales and Overfield came up with the FindU concept during a freshman-level Innovation Processes class, where students separate into teams to create problem-solving ideas. Morales continued to tinker with the idea as a self-directed skill-building exercise over summer break, using the Figma design tool to create models for the application.
After returning to campus last fall, he and Overfield redoubled their efforts, refining their idea, conducting customer and stakeholder interviews and building out their design and value propositions. That led to their entering the pitch competition organized by Silicon Prairie News, the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce and the Lincoln Partnership for Economic Development.
“We decided we were going to dedicate ourselves to trying to make it work, to make it happen,” Overfield said. “There are still things we have to figure out as we go. I could put the rest of my college career into this or even beyond that, but even if it fails, we’ll just move onto the next thing and find something else.”
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