HAS The Geek – A “Geek Squad”-esk business where I would offer technology repair and consulting services to local businesses and residences. Started at the age of 12 through door hangers places on doors in local neighborhoods. Mom would drop me off at the client appointment and introduce herself as I couldn’t drive and was barely a teenager. Ultimately grew to 500 residential clients, 75 businesses, and 50k in revenue by my junior year of high school. Ended up shutting the business down after graduating from college as I was no longer challenged with the customer problems that were presented.
DePaul2019 – Meeting fellow classmates was cumbersome just scrolling through load of Facebook posts on an admitted student page. In addition, trying to find a potential roommate that wanted to live in the same building as you did, was even more difficult. I built a site that allowed students to create a bio about themselves and enter in their preference for both dorm and roommate type. Students used this site to find roommates in an easier fashion. Shut down at the request of the university after a few months.
Student-Sourcing – When preparing for finals in high school, I noticed that curating all assignments, quizzes, and tests in a digitally consumable and searchable format (via manual scanning + OCR) was a strong suit of mine. I uploaded course content for every course I had taken in high school to date by the course name and teacher. Students were able to download PDFs of the class by chapter, test prep guides, etc. to help them prepare for their upcoming final. Students could contribute their own notes (hence the “sourcing” play on words with “open sourcing”) that were then uploaded to the site. The first day it launched, there were over 500 organic visitors through purely word of mouth.
The Blue Crue – The high school sports teams at the high school I attended were typically pretty good. That said the school spirit and sports outing experience was less than idea. The first week of school, I partnered with a classmate of mine to co-found a school student section club and we sold over 500 t-shirts with a custom design that I made. The proceeds from this t-shirt sale funded tailgates at all football games, a 30 foot long banner, fatheads of players, and many other promotional items. In addition, we pre-printed 500 shirts for our cross-town rival game that we sold in 3 days to classmates. Upon graduating, we handed on the club to the next class to run.
College Application Portfolio – A client wanted to present their daughters work in high school in the most favorable way possible when she applied to colleges. I worked with her to create a website that acted as a live portfolio of all of the daughters achievements with links to each achievement. Individual micro-sites were created for top priority universities where she could tailor the messaging for her mission statement to better align with the University’s beliefs. Overall, with the help of these sites, her daughter was able to get into her top choice university and obtained over $750,000 in scholarships in aggregate from all the universities she applied to.
