20A - Growing Your Social Capital

I talked to the scholarship and student loan guidance counselor at my high school Mr. Green when I went back this week. He was the only domain expert I could find in the area and provided me with some extremely useful information in terms of my idea. He said that the problem is that there is no one place to go if you want to find all of this information and by putting it in one place, we could save customers a ton of money and allow them and their families to be a little less stressed. He said that search engine optimization would be the best way to get my business out there because many search up solutions and are bogged down by useless results. Including him in my network will benefit me as he can give me insight about my service and where to find the right information 

I talked to a Wells Fargo Representative that came to Student Finance Group about the market and her own personal expertise and how I would go about conducting customer research. What they are doing is they are targeting college students to open up student accounts and even apply for credit cards so that they can begin to build credit for themselves. She said that because I am a college student, I am in the best position to conduct research because not only do I know what attracts others like me, but I am in the same position as my customers which would make it an easier plan to execute. We connected on LinkedIn and I may pick up a job their because of this new connection. She offered me the option of emailing her for help to build my idea which was very helpful.

This one may seem odd, but I talked to an Uber driver in Gainesville in order to fill the “important supplier to your industry” person. His name is Demetrius and has a 4.97 star rating. He has only been an Uber driver for 5 months and also struggles with paying off student loans. he fills this spot because he drives students in my industry around Gainesville in exchange for money. I pitched him my idea and he thought it was awesome. He said that many students come into his car and talk about how broke they are and how little money they have and he thought that if they had a little guidance, they would be able to have an easier life in his words. I connected with him on Instagram and I feel that he will be useful because he has had thousands of college kids in his cars all day and can provide a good census of what is going on and how people are dealing with their student loans since he has to talk to new people all day.

This assignment was extremely difficult. For one, it was hard finding the specific people that would meet each category but it did provide me a lot of useful information and connections for which I can build my idea. This experience showed me how much people are willing to help you with your ideas if you just reach out so from now on, I am reaching out if I feel that someone could help me with an idea. This is different from what I used to do, which is no networking whatsoever and not collecting information to reach out to them later.