Looking for someone to bake you a tray of brownies? Kill a spider? Teach you how to pole dance? These are just a selection of the jobs posted on UniDosh, a platform for students to advertise their skills or post requests for ad hoc help. “We wanted to become a marketplace for the things you didn’t know you could request,” says co-founder Joseph Black. “Tuition fees are increasing and students are finding it hard. [We’re trying] to tackle the student financial crisis.”
Black launched the business with a friend from secondary school, Oliver Jacobs, in September 2017. They were both studying at the time – animal behaviour at Manchester Metropolitan for Black, and architecture at Nottingham Trent for Jacobs – but juggled lectures, assignments and days in the library with evenings spent hunched over UniDosh market research, business plans and cashflow forecasts. “In that first year, we’d work solidly on the business until about 3 or 4am,” Jacobs says. “While doing it you’re knackered but you’re also excited this could lead to something amazing.”
It’s a situation an increasing numbers of students are finding themselves in. Research by Santander earlier this year found 26% of the more than 2,000 students surveyed currently run or plan to run a business while at university, and a third of those plan to turn that business into a career when they graduate. Student enterprises generate an estimated revenue of £1bn a year, each turning over an average of £11,408 per annum.
Financial pressures seem to play a part – of the 26% of students who currently run a business while at university (or plan to), almost two-thirds (60%) cited financial reasons as one of the factors influencing their decision to start a business. Other reasons, such as the desire to gain work experience (32%) and/or to pursue a hobby (59%), were commonly cited alongside financial considerations. With maintenance grants scrapped in 2016 and the average student debt expected to top £50,800 by graduation, many students are turning to part-time work to help fund student life. Almost eight out of 10 students (77%) will take on some form of job while studying, earning an average of £412 a month during term time.
In just over a year, UniDosh has enrolled 5,500 students on to its platform, mainly in Manchester, which is operating as its test city. Black has deferred his degree for this year to spend time focusing on the business, and Jacobs is now halfway through his architecture degree. The high points so far, they agree, have been crowdfunding £100,000 from friends and family to build the iOS and Android apps, and reaching the 1,000 bookings mark, which they did just two months ago.
The pair say social media has been key to hitting those milestones – particularly Instagram. “[It’s] allowed us to increase our level of visualisation among our audience and has certainly driven a large number of app signups and engagement,” says Black. The business runs a number of competitions on the platform, with giveaways organised in partnership with local firms such as the Gym Group, which launched a new venue in Manchester, and the Copenhagen Grooming Company, which has given away beard growth kits for the student with the best beard.
There’s been notable success among the broader startup community too. In 2017, UniDosh won the top prize in an Accelerate Places pitch competition in Manchester, which included £5,000, office space, and professional mentoring. Judges described the app as “the first of its type that could dominate the student sector”. The company was also named one of the top 200 EU startups by the European Webit festival in 2018.
But there have also been challenges. “What we’ve found over the past year is that students are extremely eager to earn money, and very receptive to accepting tasks, but they don’t want to spend the money [themselves],” says Black. “As soon as they see a job on the platform, within seconds there’d be 20, 30, even 100 students replying. But we struggled to get jobs posted on the platform. It was very hard to get to 1,000 bookings.”
That realisation has meant Black and Jacobs are planning to open the platform to the public and local businesses to post jobs for students from November. They’ll also start monetising the platform, taking a small (5%) commission from the student’s side and a service fee of £1.50 from the poster. They are hoping to start looking for a second round of funding from April 2019, and have plans to expand to other cities such as Nottingham, Newcastle, Liverpool, Leeds, and – eventually – London.
It’s been a steep learning curve for both co-founders. If they had their time again, Black says he would have brought someone who could code on to the founding team – outsourcing the development of the app proved expensive, although they now have two developers working for them full-time. But they’re both glad they had each other to bounce ideas off and lean on when things got tough.
“One tip for someone starting something like this is to do it with someone,” says Jacobs. “The low times are when people quit and if you don’t have someone to share the horrible times with, it can be so hard.
“Nowadays it’s so frictionless to start a business,” he says about the growing numbers of student entrepreneurs. “[Young people] see all of these influencers making money just by posting pictures on Instagram and you kind of want a piece of that. It seems like easy success, but of course it’s not always like that.”
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