I realize this is the second post off of the topic of scrubs, but we probably needed a break anyway. Don’t worry, scrubadoo is still the primary focus of my entrepreneurial endeavors we are just branching out a little. I promise we will get back to the posts about scrubadoo shortly (there is plenty to talk about)!
My second new venture is far more defined than the consulting that I am starting to do. Brett, the previously mentioned entrepreneur with whom went to AZ with me to try and build our wholesale scrubs business, and I spent a lot of time together over that weekend. During a variety of talks we came to the conclusion that there had to be an easier way to make money than the ventures we are both working on. We decided to start brainstorming new ideas we could work on together.
We first laid out a few ground rules for ourselves:
- It had to be something we could keep simple and launch withing a month.
- We weren’t looking to hit a home run that we could sell for millions of dollars, a single would be fine.
- It had to have low financial start up costs.
Essentially we wanted something that we could make a little money on each month that would be easy to get into, manage, and wouldn’t have huge up-front costs.
Brett and I proceeded to take a plane flight to Charlottesville for a wedding. By the end of the flight we had literally come up with an idea, a quick business plan, and an outline of what our website would look like.
We combined my experience with web development & SEO and his experience with college lacrosse recruiting (see empowertheathlete.com (ETA)) and came up with collegelacrossecoaches.com.
Basically, it is a pain in the butt for high school students to conduct their own collegiate recruiting process. You can hire a company like ETA to help you, they do a great job, and spend a decent amount of money or you can try and do it on your own. When families try and do it on their own a major pain point is finding the contact info of the college coaches they need to contact to start the recruiting process. You can do it on your own but finding this info that is buried in crappy .edu websites can take days. Especially if you are targeting a wide range of schools.
We are solving this pain point. Essentially we put together a list together of every collegiate lacrosse coach int he country for both men and women. We are now selling this list to anyone who can use it. Basically, we are selling to people who are willing to spend a little money to save a lot of time.
The week immediately following the plane flight where the idea was born we started working on our new project. It took a little over a month for us to launch (largely due to my recent wedding and vacations). We were very close to sticking to our budget and timeline.
The concept is yet to be proven but it is very low maintenance. We certainly do not expect to become millionaires from the idea but if it works we will rinse and repeat the concept for every other sport.
