Chris Ostrowski and Nick Hess are proof that the best ideas can come quickly and with very little planning. Ostrowski and Hess were en route to East Lansing’s Technology and Innovation Center’s
Startup Weekend this April when they came up with the event’s winning pitch:
Campus Routes.
“[Nick] explained to me that he had trouble coming up with the quickest walking route from his dorm room to Starbucks,” says Ostrowski. “He couldn’t believe there wasn’t some app or website that could tell him the fastest path. We pitched the idea together an hour later.”
Today, Campus Routes exists as a website, the full application of which is still under construction. After their win at Startup Weekend, Ostrowski and Hess took a few weeks off to finish their finals, but now that summer has arrived, they’re back in business.
“We would really like to have the website ready for a Fall 2011 semester launch so that we can be ready for the incoming freshmen at MSU,” says Hess. “We are only going to have Campus Routes available at MSU for this year in order to see how it goes. We plan on expanding Campus Routes to other colleges in the future.
Ostrowski and Hess are joined by three other partners, and have used their $500 prize from Startup Weekend to jumpstart their business.
“Startup Weekend changed my life,” says Hess. “I did not know how many people there were out there excited to work on creating awesome startup companies.”
Source: Chris Ostrowski and Nick Hess, Campus Routes
Writer: Natalie Burg, News Editor
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