I spend a lot of my life right now involved in entrepreneurial ventures, so I feel like I am very equipped to speak on this subject. After my senior year of highschool I spent a long time at home since I am an innovation academy student and classes didnt restart until the spring. During this time period a friend and I from school spent a lot of time trying to figure out creatives avenues of making money. We somehow figured that making stickers would be the easiest and most scalable business that two broke highschoolers could start so we did. We each started our own "companies" mine called Alemora (meaning adhesive in yoruba, my native tongue) and his, CarDrugs (sticker specifically for car enthusiasts). I didnt really take it seriously until coming to college when I was extremely strapped for cash and needed a way to gain money and pay for groceries. I spent the first couple of months of college flipping (buying and reselling) TI-84s that I bought off of college students and resold on ebay. Eventually I gained enough cash to buy a vinyl cutter, the machine I would need to make stickers a lot more efficiently that cutting by hand. Luckily, my roommate had bailed out of his housing contract so I had the dorm to myself, and I transformed it into my workshop. From this point I made around $80 a week just from selling paper essentially. During this time I also was a winner of the catalyst event for IA in whcih my team prototyped an app that made shopping more affordable for sustainable products. Once I was done with my first year as an innovation academy student I decided to spend the fall in gaineville, building business and working two other jobs. During this time I was featured in the innovation academy newsletter and got my own booth at an event called the popup plaza to make stickers on the behalf of the innovation academy. I also had meeting with a lot of entrepreneurs in gainesville to gain insight and grow my connections. At the beginning of the spring of this year my entrepreneurship story really started to kick off. I have beciome a very involved member of the entrepreneurship community in gaineville over the past couple months, becoming a head of the entrepreneurship collective and growing close with local business/ startup owners (Collin Austin of NS4L, Olga Renneich of Underdog Marketing and Kyle Lampkin of Laundr to name a few). My most recent experience was just this last weekend. Every year there is an event called startup weekend in which entrepreneurs and creatives around the world gather at these events in their community and spend the week creating the concept for a startup company. The winner of this years gaineville startup weekend would win thousands of dollars worth of marketing, legal consultation and other resources, in addition to their own space in the Innovate the Hub building for about six months. After a tough weekend of building this project with a group of people I grew close to, my team won! We are currently seeking funding to get this project off of the ground and are very excited for the future!
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| Sample photo of Alemora Stickers |
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| Picture after winning startup weekend |
I decided to take this class both because it is a required tracking course for innovation academy students, and, more importantly, my life for the past year or so has revolved around growing as an entrepreneur so I am always excited to spend time learning more aboout how to be more successful in this field.
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