SaferSit founder’s IQE victory helped jumpstart her business
University of Cincinnati Center for Entrepreneurship and Commercialization’s annual elevator pitch competition gave student and her business partner confidence to keep pitching
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Most businesses are born out of the need to solve a problem, and Francie Ruppert was no exception. What made the then-high school sophomore’s problem different from others was the one she needed to solve was her own: Ruppert had more demand for her babysitting services than she could handle.
“Five families would ask me for a Friday night, but I could only say yes to one and no to four,” Ruppert recalls. “All my friends wanted jobs though, so I thought, what if I start sending my best friends who I already know are great babysitters?”
Ruppert started farming out the work, and soon she realized she could make extra money by charging $1 per hour to her fellow babysitters as a finder’s fee. Not long after, she was getting texts from nearly 40 families per week inquiring about babysitting services, and every Monday she would receive stacks of $1 bills from her army of babysitters.
Today, Ruppert is on the cusp of graduating from the University of Cincinnati with a bachelor’s degree in business, and her babysitting startup, SaferSit, is closing in on an app that will allow the business to reach any city in the country. Although it’s been years in the making, Ruppert and partner Laura Borsky needed just a minute to get others to open their minds to investing in the SaferSit business model when they won the 2017 IQ Elevator Pitch Competition. Founded in 2014 by Tom Dalziel, associate professor of management and executive director of the UC Center for Entrepreneurship and Commercialization, the IQ-E competition challenges competitors to generate interest in their business ideas in 60 to 90 seconds.
Tom Dalziel, center, with past participants in the IQ Elevator Pitch Competition.
“My business partner and I planned our 1-minute pitch down to the second,” Ruppert says. “We really were looking forward to the competition and were especially excited that the judges would be angel investors. I think winning the IQ-E Pitch Competition gave us the confidence to continue pitching our idea, which has led to many more opportunities.”
Although the event is put on by the Carl H. Lindner College of Business, the IQ-E is open to all UC students, undergraduate and graduate alike. Students can work alone or in teams of up to five members, pitching their ideas to groups of investors that judge the event.
This year’s competition will be held Wednesday, April 3, from 5 to 9 p.m. in the Campus Recreation Center. A total of $10,000 in prizes are at stake.
This year’s IQ-E competition is part of the university’s Research & Innovation Week, which highlights inclusivity and the positive impacts that UC research and community engagement has on Cincinnati, our region and beyond.
SaferSit is already reaching beyond the boundaries of Greater Cincinnati. The startup has hired community managers in Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky, and it has joined the UC Venture Lab Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EiR) program at the 1819 Innovation Hub. EiR Nancy Koors is assisting Ruppert and business partner Laura Borsky — a former babysitting client of Ruppert’s — with the creation of a strategic roadmap that will include all of the milestones and large decisions the pair will need to make in 2019 and 2020.
Featured Image: Francie Ruppert, left, and Laura Borsky, co-founders of SaferSit. Submitted photo
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