Moving from your hometown to a completely new state and starting college in a place where you don’t know anyone isn’t easy, yet many young adults across the country take this leap of faith every year. When Finn Wolff took that same leap of faith coming from Salt Lake City, Utah to Berkeley, California, he didn’t know anyone. Meeting new people wasn’t easy, and attempting to follow new friends and acquaintances on all their social media accounts was a difficult task given some people had different usernames and you weren’t always able to find the person you’d met the day or night before.
Finn had always had a passion for technology and starting new companies that helped people solve real world problems. Given this was a problem that he and other peers were having at the time who were also freshman at Berkeley, he decided to co-found a company called Schmooze to help solve the problem.
Schmooze served as a one stop shop where with one quick scan of a QR code you’d have access to a new friends phone number and the link to all their social media accounts. All these new contacts were securely stored within the Schmooze app, where you could easily see the name of the person and when and where you met them. This meant no more trying to remember the name of the new friend you had met the night before or in class, and allowed you to easily connect and make plans to continue furthering new relationships.
In order to build Schmooze, Finn worked with one of the other co-founders who also had a technical background to get the Schmooze app built using Swift, a primary programming language for building mobile applications on iOS. After building a successful initial version, Finn helped interview and hire a team of additional developers to maintain the app, fix bugs and continue adding new features.
With the technical side of the company in place, Finn then realized that they’d need a team on the business side to help market Schmooze and figure out how to monetize it. Finn interviewed fellow Freshman and Sophomores studying business and marketing and helped develop a plan to market the app at local events throughout Berkeley’s campus, and reached out to local businesses to start monetizing the app by allowing them to advertise with the map in-app.
By the end of the Fall 2017 semester, Schmooze had a team of over 10 undergraduate students and thousands of users utilizing the app to help make new friends and ease the initial social pressure that comes with leaving the nest and heading to college as a young adult. Finn allowed the current management team in place to continue running the day to day operations at Schmooze while he decided to pursue additional business ventures that aligned with his passions.