Student Ideals

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Author: Elwyn Pratt


It’s a bright afternoon in late August, and Eagle Rock is cooking under the heat. Because it’s summer, there are fewer students walking about Occidental College, but young thinkers are still cramming for tests in the library, working tirelessly in the labs for research studies and filling their hours with internships. Just outside of campus, a small group of undergraduates and alumni are working together to save students hundreds of dollars and transform a community in the process.

Student IDeals’ headquarters look like a hippie man cave. Empty cups and cereal boxes litter every surface, and magnets featuring slogans like “I’m a Tree Hugger” adorn the mini-fridge in the corner. But next to the Beatles mug on the coffee table is a stack of paperwork. Next to the Muse concert poster on the wall is a scattering of website blueprints. And sitting in the couches and recliner chairs around the room are a half a dozen young men working tirelessly to create a comprehensive discount service for Occidental students.

Co-founder Patrick Fish (senior) and the rest of the team will stay up until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. for the next few weeks, fueled with the energy of their goal. Their mission is to help over two thousand students save money and explore the community.

Signing up for Student IDeals is free, and the website, www.studentideals.com, is clean and intuitive. Deals are organized into categories based on the intensive research done over the summer by Chris He (senior), Sam Benfey (senior) and Alex Bennet ’13. Bennet also helped lead the design of the website, which launched at the beginning of Fall Semester. Student IDeals now has over 600 sign-ups.

Their house is still the center of activity for Student IDeals. The blueprints on the wall have been replaced with an American flag and a splatter-paint art canvas, but the team is still typing away on their laptops. Now that the website has launched and students are signing up, the team is devoting its focus to developing its upcoming iPhone app and maintaining over two hundred Student IDeals business partnerships.

Fish believes that he owes much of the success of Student IDeals to the cohesiveness of his team. “If you have a great team with a bad idea, you’ll figure out a way to make it a great idea,” Fish says, quoting his mentor Bill Gross. “But if you have a good idea and a bad team, you’re never going to go anywhere.”
He adds that Occidental was the perfect place to find a cohesive team with complementary skills.

“It’s really about the people,” he said. “When [Bennett] and I were working together, I had my field of concentration, and he had his, but the fact that I could learn so much from him and he could learn so much from me was the most important part of working in a team.”

The idea for Student IDeals was born when Fish was shopping for a birthday present for his sister at Banana Republic. When he found out that the store offered a 10 percent student discount, he wondered about all the other deals he had been missing out on. Many stores, he would later discover, offered discounts but failed to advertise them, missing an opportunity for both suppliers and students. But Fish was inspired to create a solution to the problem.

Most student discount opportunities are really just bigger expenses: buying a special swipe card to carry in your wallet, paying for ten drinks so that you can get an extra one, or upgrading your laptop to get a gift card. Students in the United States still spend about 100 billion dollars per year in discretionary spending, according to Bennett’s research. That’s 12 thousand dollars per student every year. Fish believed that students shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to save money. Discounts should be made convenient, organized and, most importantly, explorable.

In just months, with much hard work from the unlikely band of Occidental students and alumni, a few friends at Pomona and various mentors, including Fish’s father–Student IDeals became reality. No one expected the service to be ready by the time school started in the Fall, but the start-up was quickly embraced by students and store owners.

“The first day we went canvasing, we were just longboarding down York and Eagle Rock with black T-shirts,” recalls Benfey (“next time we’ll wear white shirts!” adds Chris). “We’d just pop into every business that was on the street, whether they looked like they wanted us or not.” That day, Benfey and Talon Gonzalez (senior) received an overwhelmingly positive response from businesses. Some store owners named their discount, some as high as 20 percent, before they were even given an offer. Don Elsa, owner of Elsa’s Bakery, was so thrilled about Student IDeals that he met with both President Veitch and the Eagle Rock Chamber of Commerce to promote the start-up.

After partnering with Student IDeals, Senator of The Associated Students of Occidental College (ASOC) Melissa Donaldson wrote: “We’ve been hearing consistently from students about what they’d like to see in a service

that promotes spending with local businesses,
and it is all about ease of use


We always look for ways to extend the
relationship between Oxy students and the surrounding community, and I think this is one great way to do so
.”

Fish is already thinking about the long-term future. “As we get closer to graduation in 2014, we plan to expand nationwide!” reads the “About Us” page of the website. Student IDeals is looking to test their service at Pasadena City College, the California Institute of Technology and Le Cordon Bleu in the coming months. The team ultimately envisions Student IDeals as an international service.

But here at Occidental, the Student IDeals team is setting a precedent for future entrepreneurs on campus.

“When I graduated from Oxy, what I wanted more than anything – the six figure salary, anything – was to work with people,” Alex Bennett said. “Not work for people, but with people. And I’ve found that entrepreneurs do that best. I really wanted to take the group mentality I learned at Oxy and take that to the next level, and that’s what I found at Student IDeals.”

“We’re getting a huge response just from word of mouth,” Fish said. Indeed, the Student IDeals sticker can be found on ping pong paddles in common rooms, student ID cards, laptops and notebooks. Fish recalls many times when friends told him that they heard about Student IDeals through the grapevine. Business owners have approached him asking for a partnership because their name has spread throughout the community.

“It’s not just about allowing undergrads to save money,” Fish said. “We want to be a bridge between the school and the community. [First-years] always seem to discover the same restaurants, Juniors and Seniors always seem to discover the same bars. There’s so much more, and we want to encourage students to experience all that Eagle Rock offers.”

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