Page 63 - Innovation Delaware 2019

ARTUR ZVINCHUK AND CHAHIN AGHRIM
These Delaware students are launching transformative ideas
Possessed with passion, with vision, and with a strong commitment to service, Delaware’s next generation of innovators has already begun to demonstrate that they will have an impact far beyond the borders of the First State.
They are making their mark in fields that include web and app development, engineering, biotech and agriscience. They are finding better ways to teach the things that they weren’t taught well enough. And, for those who haven’t yet found purpose in their lives, they’re writing books to help others find their path forward.
The young men and women profiled here may have just started their journeys, but the first steps they’ve taken seem destined to place them on a superhighway to success.
ARTUR ZVINCHUK AND CHAHIN AGHRIM:
MAKING COLLEGE EXPENSES MORE MANAGEABLE
Best friends and schoolmates in Bonn, Germany, Artur Zvinchuk and Chahin Aghrim hadn’t planned on settling in Delaware, but they landed at Goldey-Beacom College in Pike Creek, with Zvinchuk arriving first on a combination academic- athletic scholarship in 2014 and then convincing his soccer coach to bring Aghrim to campus a year later.
They scrimped and saved, never buying textbooks because, Zvinchuk says, the $800 they each would have spent each year pretty much matched the cost of flying home to visit their families at Christmas.
Then one of Zvinchuk’s professors threatened to give failing grades to students who didn’t buy textbooks and a business model was born.
“You had to know someone who had taken the class before [to buy a used text- book]. You eventually meet people through social media, but it was such a hassle,” Aghrim says. “So we decided to create an online platform just for students.”
Their online exchange program is called SmartStudents.us, ironically named because they’ve learned that not only are many college students not smart about money but they’re also lazy.
It’s a marketplace where college students can buy and sell textbooks and just about anything else — like the furniture and accessories they no longer need when they’re moving out of their apartments or dorm rooms.
Zvinchuk, 23, and Aghrim, 22, haven’t made a penny yet on their business because their initial goal is to build relationships and goodwill rather than revenue from memberships or transaction fees. But they’ve expanded their network consider-
ably. Starting at Goldey-Beacom and the Camden, New Jersey, campus of Rutgers University, they’ve added team members at six campuses in Philadelphia and at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science in Pittsburgh.
Their objective, they say, is twofold: to use their time in college to learn how to develop online business models and to build a positive reputation for themselves among college students so their future ventures will take off.
While they aren’t selling anything yet, they have persuaded an angel investor — a Wilmington attorney whose son is one of their classmates — to loan them “an amount in the five figures” to get their project started.
And their platform is attracting interest on the campuses where team members are trying to promote it. As of mid-March, nearly 5,000 students had checked out the site and more than 650 textbook transactions had been completed.
“Our mission,” Zvinchuk says, “is to use technology to connect college students so we all can achieve our full potential.”
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