Gimme a Demo
by Raveena Pandhare
Photo courtesy of Austin Negron
This past weekend, Startup BU hosted its Demo Day. Four different startup companies pitched their ideas to a panel of judges. Let’s backtrack to the beginning of the semester to see how everything came together.
Startup BU occurs once a semester at Boston University and is hosted by the Entrepreneurship Club, which was directed by Austin Negron this semester. Essentially, this program brings together budding entrepreneurs and allows them to come up with an idea in teams, create a business plan and present their ideas to an audience on Demo Day. The program started off with seven teams and four were narrowed down to participate in Demo Day. It lasted eight weeks, and the four teams that made it to the end were Sleep Spot, Toku, Invento and Munchbox.
Created by Brianna Swartz (CAS ’23) and Victoria Gonzalez (ENG ’23), Sleep Spot is a service that provides necessities for guests such as floor mattresses, pillows, sheet sets, toiletries and blankets. Their execution process included conducting surveys with BU students, building a website and developing a marketing team.
The next idea, Toku, was developed by Will Rawlings. Essentially, Toku is a rental website and app similar to Zillow that simplifies the rental process. It’s a site targeted towards millennials where people can browse, apply, sign a lease and even pay rent all on one platform.
Invento, by Max Ward, is a social media app similar to Instagram only instead of pictures, the content is ideas. It’s a post-feed platform for getting and sharing ideas. Invento is aimed towards the high school to college demographic with the goal being creativity and sparking conversations with similar people.
Bringing home the win for the night, Munchbox was founded by Miles Dorsey, Jonathan Jiang and Victoria Chen. Munchbox combines strains of weed with perfectly paired snacks. It started when the three of them had the thought that people enjoy eating and smoking at the same time. They combined this idea with the fact that it still is difficult to obtain weed safely and legally to create a solution to this issue.
It’s refreshing to see student organizations at BU hosting programs that foster creativity and allow students the opportunity to hone in on their entrepreneurial skills. What’s even more inspiring is witnessing students supporting other students following their aspirations and turning them into reality. Events like Demo Day really go to show how much potential our generation holds and is exciting to see all the societal progress that can be made in the years to come.