The team
Five business students who could not find anyone else doing this.
We study at Wichita State University's W. Frank Barton School of Business, and this started as a project for one of our courses. We would rather say that than have you find it out later. It is not a startup and it is not an assignment we are trying to escape. It is a service, and we would like it to outlast the semester.
Who we are
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Shane Vithana
Project Lead
Entrepreneurship & Business Management · prior degree in Mechanical Engineering, Mathematics minor
Shane's background spans technology, engineering, software development and business, with much of his work focused on figuring out how different systems and processes can work better together. He builds the business websites, this site and the analysis tooling. Through this project he hopes to use that experience to help Wichita small businesses identify practical problems, find opportunities to improve, and make better use of technology without overcomplicating things.
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Zeb Henry
Finance & Resources
Senior · Business Administration, Marketing minor · Shocker baseball
Zeb owns the budget, the donations and the outside resources that keep this free. He sees the project as an opportunity to give back to the Wichita community and help small businesses gain access to useful tools and opportunities, similar to the opportunities Wichita State has provided him.
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Adán Parker
Marketing
Junior · Human Resource Management, Finance minor · Business Senator, WSU Student Government
Adán owns outreach, the social accounts and what this website says. Originally from Texas, he has found an accepting community in Wichita and wants to give back to it. He believes small businesses are a major part of what makes Wichita unique, and hopes this project can provide meaningful help to businesses that need it.
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Joseph Pifer
Community & Operations
Senior · Business Management · Wichita born and raised
Joey arranges the visits and sits down with owners in their own shops. Outside of school he enjoys gaming and going down deep lore dives into his favourite shows and films. As someone who has called Wichita home his entire life, his goal is simple: to leave his hometown better than he found it.
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Mickayla Tosch
Data & Impact
Senior · Business Administration · Shocker softball
Mickayla owns the intake form, the outreach tracker and what we report back. Wichita has become a second home to her through the experiences and support she has received from the university and the community. She hopes to give back by connecting with local businesses and finding ways to support the people who have supported her along the way.
There is one inbox rather than five, because five students on five different schedules answering separately is how things get missed. hello@hdhict.com reaches all of us.
Why we started it.
In a business 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.