Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

The Founders lab is a year-long program that gives its students an opportunity to participate in a unique team-based, experiential Barrett honors thesis project to design and apply marketing and sales strategies, as well as business and financial models to start up and launch a new business. This honors thesis project focuses on increasing the rate of vaccination outcomes in a country where people are increasingly busy (less time) and unwilling to get a needle through a new business venture that provides a service that brings vaccinations straight to businesses, making them available for their employees. Through our work with the Founders Lab, our team was able to create this pitch deck.

Winners Circle is a collaborative application that allows friends, family members, and peers to communicate with each other about sports news and friendly wagers on teams and players. Through research and trial and error, a mock app was created by the team that combines breakout rooms that mimic a social media platform where users can identify news, scores, and perceptions of the outcome of games from other sports fans.

As entrepreneurs, we understand the challenges and obstacles that come with growing a business, which is why we developed a revolutionary software platform to connect entrepreneurs with qualified life coaches. The purpose of Coach Connect is to empower entrepreneurs to achieve their maximum potential by providing access to premium coaches and cutting-edge resources in human excellence, including the latest advancements in neuroscience and psychology. This objective is accomplished by the development of an application to connect entrepreneurs with coaches, providing value through facilitation. Our platform is unique in leveraging a user database and weighting system to match constituents based on suitable preferences like individual learning and communication styles. Based on categorical filters, our platform perpetrates matches for a more personalized and productive coaching experience. The application addresses key challenges for both coaches and entrepreneurs: a lack of effective marketing resources for coaches and laborious tribulation in finding the right coach. By bridging this gap as the “connective tissue”, we will create a cost-effective, efficient way for coaches to scale their businesses while enhancing the personal and professional development of entrepreneurs. At our core, we are driven by a powerful mission–to unleash the immense potential of entrepreneurs. We are committed to providing every entrepreneur with the tools and resources he or she needs to succeed. As a vehicle of social change, we will make a meaningful impact in the entrepreneurial community where those with the greatest capability require the most decisive wisdom. Our two-ended target market consists of ambitious entrepreneurs aged 25-45 seeking personalized support to overcome obstacles alongside experienced life coaches seeking exposure to those clients for expanding their practices. Coaches will be charged a monthly subscription while entrepreneurs will pay a small fee for platform utilization. Coach Connect boasts a talented and diverse team of five individuals with backgrounds in coaching, NeuroLinguistic Programming, accounting, finance, entrepreneurship, customer service, software engineering, and personal development. Cross-functionality allows us to iterate per validations while algorithms are in development, reducing our time to market. Leveraging an extensive network in the startup industry, as well as resources and connections through Arizona State University, we are uniquely positioned to scale Coach Connect.

For our Founders Lab Thesis Project, we are investigating the viability of a cryptocurrency that will be marketed towards students, prospective students, alumni, and faculty members of Arizona State University (ASU). Our cryptocurrency is known as “Hippocampus”. Essentially, individuals within the target audience will have the opportunity to exchange their fiat money for our university-affiliated cryptocurrency. These individuals will be incentivized to utilize the university-affiliated cryptocurrency as opposed to fiat money, because this cryptocurrency will offer them discounts on college-related expenses, such as tuition, student loans, textbooks, supplies, on-campus housing, on-campus dining, and much more. As the demand for Hippocampus increases, so will its value, which will benefit ASU as a whole. We created a Spring 2022 Semester Survey and surveyed a sample of 250 ASU students regarding the viability of our Founders Lab Thesis Project. 73.2% of participants revealed that they would support a university-affiliated cryptocurrency, and 62% of participants revealed that they would personally utilize a university-affiliated cryptocurrency. Additional activities that we completed to enhance our Founders Lab Thesis Project include interviewing an avid cryptocurrency user, learning about the Blockchain Research Lab, meeting with a financial advisor to understand the financial implications of a university-affiliated cryptocurrency, collaborating with a group of university students at Portland State University who implemented their own university-affiliated crypcorreucy, and touring a cryptocurrency-mining company to grasp an understanding of how cryptocurrency is mined.