29A – Venture Concept No. 2 - Student Loan Advice Service (SLAS)

The idea I am pursuing is a service that will provide people with information about student loans and will build them a personalized plan to ensure that they are not being ripped off by student loan companies. We will analyze their financial situation and determine how quickly they want to pay these loans off in order to break down what they should be paying monthly for their student loans. They can then take this plan and send it to their student loan provider to ensure that they are able to efficiently and comfortably pay off their student loans.

This opportunity is created because recent information has come out that has proven that student loans companies are screwing over thousands of students and former students in order to make more money. There is really nothing these people can doe specially because the customer service for these companies is awful. They are forced to scour the internet for information that may not always be accurate and may not be related to their specific situation. Therefore, my service has a large potential market of people that need a problem solved. The market is defined as former and current students that are still dealing with paying off student loans. Customers are currently trying to satisfy this need themselves which is difficult especially because many aren’t knowledgable in student loans and personal finance at the level that they need to be. There is no loyalty to this system because they know they don’t have enough information. This opportunity is huge seeing that hundreds of thousands of people need to pay off their student loans AND make ends meet at the same time, giving this product an infinite window of opportunity.

In terms of innovation, this service hits the mark. Nobody has done something like this before and been successful despite the huge market. We will be radically different in that we will be able to provide completely personal information and only charge a small monthly fee of $20/month. We are able to use this money to innovate even more and scale the company. Since we don’t have very many maintenance fees, all the money can be poured into growth. Even then, we could use the extra money to build a fund for people that aren’t as fortunate to pay for their student loans are college tuition to help them make ends meet.

This service will without a doubt decrease overall student debt because the largest problem many people face is that ability to gather and understand the vast amount of information all over the internet about student loans. Customers will buy this product because there is nothing like this that currently exists so there is no difficulty in getting them to switch from their current situation. There are also no competitors which gives me the entire market to play with. Ultimately, all the money will  be poured into customer support and experience since that is the whole idea for our service. These costs are not high relative to other companies, meaning we can charge a cheaper monthly fee and still do extremely well. I would initially start off with few employees, around 2-3, and scale when we have more customers. Ultimately, the goal is to have a service that can help millions with student debt will providing a personal, friendly conversation to show our dedication to the customer.

Our venture’s secret sauce is that fact that nobody has done this before. We are then allowed full creativity to build the service and not have to rush out something because we are worried about competition. We will get that edge and once people see our success and try to imitate it, we will already be way ahead of the curve and outperform them by simple innovations.

Once we are able to significantly help solve the problem, the next idea would be to build a foundation and have a large amount of our earnings go to the foundation which is dedicated to offering scholarships and providing tuition to children that may not be financially well off.

Overall, the idea is still in its beginning stages and I am looking forward to continuing to tweak and innovate the idea before releasing it to the public. This is something I am extremely interested in and would love to hear anyone’s opinion and advice in order to make the product even better.

I received a few comments, however I did not actually receive any criticism. Instead, I shared it with the people around me and one of the larger criticisms I received was that it would be difficult to hire employees that would be highly educated in student loans. I decided we would have to provide some sort of course or teaching program that will allow the people we hire to be up to date and educated on student loans. What I changed as a result of this criticism was that I realized I could not hire people without educating them and testing them on their own personal knowledge of student plans because we want to ensure that everyone is getting good information when they are using my service.