The team
Five management students who could not find anyone else doing this.
We study at Wichita State University's W. Frank Barton School of Business. This is not a startup and it is not a class assignment we are trying to escape. It is a service, and we would like it to outlast us.
Who we are
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Team member one
Management, Barton School of Business
What they own on the project, and one line about why they joined it.
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Team member two
Management, Barton School of Business
What they own on the project, and one line about why they joined it.
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Team member three
Management, Barton School of Business
What they own on the project, and one line about why they joined it.
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Team member four
Management, Barton School of Business
What they own on the project, and one line about why they joined it.
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Team member five
Management, Barton School of Business
What they own on the project, and one line about why they joined it.
Why we started it.
In a management degree you spend a lot of time on companies with a hundred locations. You learn contribution margin, cohort retention, treasury forecasting — and then you look up and notice that the coffee shop you have gone to for three years has none of it, cannot be found on a map, and would have to pay a consultant more than a month's profit to fix either.
The gap is not knowledge. Every method we use is decades old and taught in undergraduate classes. The gap is that nobody has ever found it worth their while to package it for a business with one location and no analyst.
We had the methods, the time, and a city full of businesses we actually care about. Then people started offering to help, and it turned into something bigger than the five of us.
Why none of this costs what you would expect.
This is the question we get first, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a marketing one.
- Nobody is being paid
- We are students doing this alongside coursework. There is no payroll to cover, so there is no revenue we have to find.
- The expensive parts are donated
- Software, infrastructure and a great many volunteer hours come from our sponsors. Our own running costs are close to nothing, so we never have to mark anything up.
- We charge nothing for the work
- Building a website is free. The roughly $100 people pay is the domain name and the first year of hosting, passed straight through at what it costs us, and after that only the domain renewal at $25 to $50 a year. The whole breakdown is here.
- The tools have no paid tier at all
- We removed the payment code rather than leaving it switched off, so there is no upgrade screen and no card on file anywhere in the software.
- We are not selling your data either
- Your books stay in your browser. We could not sell them if we wanted to. Here is exactly what that means.
- We take no commission from anyone
- No software company pays us to recommend it. When we tell you to cancel something, nothing about that is worth money to us.
- What we get out of it
- Real engagements with real businesses, which is worth more to five students than anything we could charge for them.
What happens when we graduate.
A fair thing to worry about before you put your numbers into something a student built. Two answers.
First, the design protects you. Your books live in your own browser and export to CSV in one click. If this project disappeared tomorrow you would still have every figure you entered, in a file you can open in a spreadsheet.
Second, we are recruiting behind us. The intention is to hand the project to the next group of Barton students rather than let it lapse.
Come and find us.
If you run something in Wichita, tell us about it and we will do the work with you. If you want to cover a shop's first year online or donate a few hours, there is a list of what helps. And if you are a Barton student who wants in, say so — we would rather grow than stay at five.