The BYU-Idaho Entrepreneurship Society is meant to help students as they learn how to start businesses. For entrepreneur students, that includes making plans to find funding and get experience in creating businesses that can work.

“We have an entrepreneurship society, and our whole goal is to try to help students who are wanting to start businesses to be able to find funding … to do that, as well as to give them the appropriate tools to create effective business plans, so that they can be effective at creating those businesses,” said business management professor Rob Tietjen.

Part of that is competing in certain competitions, for students to take what they have learned and put it to the test.

“Every year, there are various competitions that are held for cash prizes,” Tietjen said. “And that helps them kind of get a start, and then once they do well in those, then potentially we can line them up with investors so that they can hopefully be able to fund their projects.”

The Entrepreneurship Society is coming off a big win, having swept a state-wide competition, the Idaho Entrepreneur Challenge, held in Boise in April 2024. As part of that win, the team took about $34,000 in cash prizes.

“Last year we went to the Boise competition, they have a competition for all the universities around the state,” Tietjen said. “We went to that competition and we actually won first place in every single track.”

BYUI took home seven awards: first, second and third place for the outdoor recreation track; first and second place for the social and environmental impact track; and first place for the technology track.

“We actually won first place in all of them and then we won second and third place in most of them,” Tietjen said. “We ended up winning most of the competition, which was really cool.”

The final challenge winner was Subitt, a product by BYUI students Nick Hepworth, Jae Kim and Aoi Kuriki.

According to the Idaho Entrepreneur Challenge website on Boisestate.edu, “Subitt is a marketplace for subscriptions connecting buyers with a wide range of sellers offering products, local services, and memberships.”

As for the next competition in Boise, over 30 students have already applied.

“This year, we just applied for that again, and we had a super high record of applicants, we had 33 people apply and 31 of those made it to preliminaries,” Tietjen said. “And that was huge considering the total for the state was 80 applicants, so our school alone was more than a third of that. And then from that, we had seven of them be accepted to the actual competition.”

The 2025 Idaho Entrepreneur Challenge will be held in Boise on April 3 and 4.

Along with the Boise competition, BYUI entrepreneur students participated in a city competition on March 13.

“We just had a city competition, there’s also a city one every year,” Tietjen said. “The top three places were all BYUI students that won the competition.”

The winners were Kaysen Klingler in first place, Daniel Rubio in second place and Nathan Larsen in third place.

Tietjen also said that professors will help students with their pitches to make sure they know what they’re doing when they get in front of the judges.

“They have to give a pitch where they show a PowerPoint,” Tietjen said. “It shows the problem that they’re trying to address, how their idea is going to solve that problem, and then they talk through things like how much are we going to be charging people for our product? How much are we going to make off that?”

Tietjen said that judges look at it and give feedback on information and how prepared they are.

According to Tietjen, something that helps out a great deal is for students to prove that people actually want what they are selling.

“It helps a ton to show that we already have proof that people are going to buy this thing,” Tietjen said. “There’s been times I’ve judged a competition, I’m listening to them and I’m going, ‘Nobody’s ever going to want that,’ and then they show me, actually we’ve already sold this many. It helps a lot if you can prove that it really is what people want.”

Tietjen also said that they have a competition at the school in July. Those interested can meet in the Joseph Fielding Smith Building, room 440 Thursdays at 11:30 a.m.

Featured image: The winners from BYUI at the 2024 Idaho Entrepreneur Challenge. Photo Credit: Boisestate.edu