Student entepreneurs receive award to expand businesses

JuniorDanielle Feerst and senior Robert Wallace were recently awarded the 2014 Paul and Elizabeth Montle Prize for Entrepreneurial Achievement for their businesses, AutismSees LLC and Suisey Fanwear, respectively.

The prize awards Feerst and Wallace a total sum equivalent to the cost of Tufts tuition, which is split between the two of them and is aimed to propel their business plans forward.

According to Anne Moore, program specialist in scholar development, the recipients were chosen from a pool of eight applicants by a selection committee comprised of judges including herself, Dean of Academic Advising & Undergraduate Studies Carmen Lowe and representatives from the Entrepreneurship Leadership Studies (ELS) program, the Gordon Institute and the Department of Economics.

The Montle Prize was established by Paul Montle (LA ’69), whose family now manages the fund, Moore said.

“The criteria laid out by the family were entrepreneurial skills and to accept along with the prize a moral obligation to return to Tufts much more than you received in terms of financial aid and educational benefits,” she said.

According to Sam Liggero, professor at the Gordon Institute and selection committee member, the committee looks for originality, innovation, feasibility and something that goes beyond the concept stage.

“I also look for if the applicant has an idea of who the customer is and what problem is being solved by their product or service; so how well done is the analysis of the market for this product or service,” he said. “I take a look at the managerial skills, planning ability of the applicant, also a little bit at the financial analysis, the business plan, also, if possible, the product or service should have some social impact.”

Wallace cofounded Suisey Fanwear with Zach Etkind (LA '10) to sell a sports jersey-suit jacket hybrid product called a suisey, which the two designed for an episode of their YouTube series, "Donnie Does."

“Having that Suisey be on display during the video, then the video wind up on WORLDSTARHIPHOP, where it got over a million views, that got a lot of people interested in the Suisey,” Wallace said. “They wanted to know how they could get their hands on them, and then we're like ‘oh wow, there's a lot of interest, we've got to turn this into a business.’”

According to Wallace, the company is currently working on launching a website in the spring.

“We have sold 70 of them over in China so far, mostly as a means of marketing to get pictures out there,” he said.

Liggero noted Wallace’s clear understanding of his market audience and said he was impressed with him for developing prototypes and for potentially getting off-shore manufacturing set up.



Through AutismSees LLC, Feerst is developing software to help young adults who are on the autism spectrum and have learning disabilities seek post-secondary education and employment opportunities. Through mock-interviews and other programs, the software is aimed to increase presentation and speaking skills by providing feedback to users based on eye contact, emotions, speech timing, facial recognition and vocabulary, Feerst explained.

“The idea is that this would be a licensed technology for a nonprofit and for a school or institution, and then essentially the institution would have access to the technology and would be able to distribute the platform in a classroom or to their clients or to student who are practicing job preparation or interviewing skills,” she said.

Feerst said she plans to finish the product development phase in March and pilot the software later this spring. The software is currently being developed for use on an iPad or computer, but Feerst hopes it will eventually be accessible across platforms.

Feerst hopes to collect evidence to support her claim that her technology actually increases social and communicative abilities in young adults. Her goal is to have her technology recognized by the United States Department of Education and implemented into schools to help teachers assess communication in conjunction with the Common Core Standards.

“My goal is that this would be a new way of revolutionizing how people practice for a job interview or a public speaking event, and in that sense, we could grow this to be much more than a software development company -- it could be something that fixes unemployment for people who have special needs or learning disabilities,” she said.

Moore noted that Feerst’s product is filling a clear social need and commended her heavy involvement at Tufts in undergraduate research to get to this point in her career.

“This really came at the best time, because without further funding, I wouldn't really be able to finish up the goals that we had for developing the product and really getting it to the point where we could launch it into schools and actually pilot it,” Feerst said.

Wallace also said that the award will help him jumpstart his business.

“Using the money that we won from the Montle Prize, we found lawyers, and with those lawyers we were able to get incorporated within the state of Massachusetts,” he said.

Moore explained that just applying for the Montle Prize is an opportunity in and of itself for ELS students.

“Just doing the application forces people to put the kind of nuts and bolts for their plans for their business, and forces them to articulate that in a concrete way, which I think is really really useful for the development of your business, whether or not you win the prize,” Moore said. “We also give all the applicants feedback from the committee if they don't win, ways that they can improve their applications moving forward.”

Wallace agreed that although the application process was intense, it was helpful for his company's progress.

“It was a pretty challenging task to be able to squeeze everything that our business is into three pages, but in the end, it was definitely beneficial to the business to be able to just brainstorm like this and cut down to the very basic fundamental explanation of what we do,” he said.