University of Memphis student Jared Rodgers took home first place and a check for $2,500 in the Crews Center for Entrepreneurship’s first annual Fast Pitch competition.
Twenty students participated in the event, with the top three taking home prizes. Second place winners received $1,500, and third place received $1,000.
Rodgers, a junior finance and engineering major, won the competition with his idea for Tutor Fly, an app that allows students to quickly find a tutor.
The 21-year-old said he came up with the idea with a roommate.
“We were cramming for a test in game theory,” he said. “We wanted extra help from someone, without having to set up meetings or wait for certain times where the office hours were open from the professor. We took that problem and ran with it to find a solution.”
Tutor Fly aims to connect college students to their peers for tutoring services. Students can download the app, search for nearby tutors and get help whenever they need it.
Tutors sign up to get screened and tutor whenever they are available. Rodgers said the app is still in development, and there will be no need for cash transactions.
“The tutors are user-reviewed and set their own rates,” he said. “Payments are handled through credit payments in the app. Tutor Fly takes 20 percent, and the rest goes to the tutor. It is very similar to Uber’s business model, but we applied that to peer-to-peer tutoring.”
Rodgers described his feeling of winning first place as “breathtaking.”
“I knew our team had a great presentation, but it’s something else entirely to be placed in the top performers for the competition,” he said. “It’s very humbling to say the least. The entire competition was full of brilliant business pitches.”
Memphis Tiger quarterback Jason Stewart took home second place. The senior by way of Alexandria, Virginia, started Glory 2 God, a Christian athletic apparel start up.
Catrell Maclin, 22-year-old journalism major, won third place for his idea of Ultimate Memphis Preps Television, which would help high school basketball players in the city get recruited nationally by colleges.
Students made a three to five minute business pitch of their business model to a panel of judges. The presentation included an introduction, a description of the problem and a proposed solution.
The participants were allowed to use slideshows, props or prototypes in their presentations. Any ideas of the students must be original. The competition was open to all students enrolled at the U of M.
Undergraduate students had to be enrolled full-time to participate. Graduate students had to be registered and active in a masters’ or doctorate program.
