(Photo by Aryn Sanderson)
Aryn Sanderson
asanderson@mustangdaily.net
San Luis Obispo HotHouse and the Cal Poly Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) launched a 30-day crowd-source funding campaign to finance their accelerator program. The summer-long program gives seven teams of Cal Poly students and recent grads funding and mentorship as they take startup business ideas from concept to creation.
“It’s pretty much all based on Learn By Doing, but this is really ‘do by doing,’” CIE co-founder and director Jonathan York said. “It’s the next stage beyond Learn By Doing, a stage that enables students to take control over their own destiny.”
The Indiegogo campaign began one week ago with the goal of raising $70,000 — just enough to fund the seven teams for the summer.
Each team of entrepreneurs will receive $7,500 in seed funding. Although Cal Poly supports the program in terms of administration and gave the original seed money for the HotHouse, all of the funding comes from donations, York said.
“Crowd funding is a great way to get a lot of people to see our mission and our vision in supporting student startups,” York said.
CIE media coordinator Kristin Kenney said crowd funding is “a really cool idea.”
“We’ve had people in the HotHouse that have done successful crowd-funding campaigns before,” she said.
Since HotHouse isn’t creating a physical product, the campaign is putting a creative spin on crowd sourcing. Donors help create “Innovation City,” a virtual town built with each donation.
York compares the idea to a “digital brick campaign.”
For this campaign, a sketch of the imaginary city is updated to illustrate the progress toward the donation goal. For example, a $10 donation helps to “beautify the city,” giving it a bench or foliage. In actuality, it funds one team for an hour this summer.
Art and design junior Bryn Hobson and art and design senior Patricia Jimenez are in charge of creating the “Innovation City” blueprint.
“We came into this with the structure of the campaign in place, but we are really trying to make it feel like a hand drawn, personal thing,” Hobson said.
“The fundraising and urgent nature of the campaign make it fast-paced and exciting. It’s really exciting to get to add specifically what people want you to add,” he said, referencing personalized additions such as a skate park, library and block party with balloons.
Engaging the community isn’t unusual for the HotHouse or CIE. The accelerator program is nestled in downtown. Local mentors consult, and Cal Poly students and grads create. But when looking to fund the teams, HotHouse wanted to expand its scope past San Luis Obispo city lines.
“We have, over the last few years, really built a network of early supporters, and at this point in time, we wanted to expand that out into the broader Cal Poly alumni and global community,” York said. “The student companies are really exciting, and we want to have a chance to get more people on board.”
The student companies moving in this summer include: Veg This Way, Spongecrete, SeatWizz, Before and After Maids, Z Living Systems, Prelimb and HomeSlice.
Cuesta student Luke Bayard of SeatWizz, which offers “the next generation of online ticket purchasing,” said the chance to be in the HotHouse this summer is an honor.
“To me, it’s a dream come true to have the opportunity to build my own business and possibly have my own employment when I graduate,” he said. “That in and of itself is the biggest opportunity that this poses to me, is a chance to really make something of myself.”
HomeSlice entrepreneur Shea Brucker, a business administration senior, mirrored this sentiment. Brucker said acceptance to the summer HotHouse program is “priceless” and “invaluable.”
“SLO itself is becoming kind of a mini-Silicon Valley,” Brucker said. “There’s an enormous amount of growth coming out of SLO in terms of startups and entrepreneurship. So the message behind promoting us as an ‘Innovation City’ idea is really just awesome.”
It’s a message that Mary Kelting, director of development for CIE, hopes will catch on.
So far, the campaign has amassed more than $6,000.
“We want this campaign to go viral,” Kelting said.
Kassi Luja contributed to this article.