Meet sophomore Riley Soward, founder of Campus Insights

He’s the youngest person on BostInno’s 25 under 25 list

Sophomore Riley Soward, originally from the Bay Area, was recently included on BostInno’s 25 under 25 list for his startup, Campus Insights.

Tied for the youngest person on the list at 19 years old, he is also the only current BC student included.

The CSOM student founded Campus Insights in the fall of 2014, and has since worked with companies such as Venmo, StreakU, and Pingpad.

The Tab met up with him in Lower, during what was technically late night on a Thursday, to talk about making the list, his startup, and how he did started a company in his freshman year.

In your own words, can you explain what Campus Insights is and what it does?
Campus Insights is a company that does UI and UX usability testing for different startup and tech companies, in addition to marketing and research interviews.

Can you give me an example of that? 

Let’s say you’re Venmo and you want to come out with a new feature for the app, but you’re not quite sure what college kids would think of the feature. So, they would come to us and we would actually test out that new feature or ask college kids questions surrounding that feature to gauge what problems college kids would have with it.

We would then be able to help Venmo improve whatever they want help on whether that’s a product feature or their messaging or anything like that. So what we actually do is sit down and conduct interviews with college students. In some cases, the college students are using an app and we film them using the app. In other cases, it’s just what we are doing right now, just interviewing them and asking them questions based on like, hypothetically, if this existed, what would you think of it.

And by problems do you mean usability, like if its really difficult to use or just doesn’t do what people want at all?

Depending on the project, it can range from usability to new features to messaging. So for usability, it would be if you are a 40-year-old founder you don’t know may not know how younger generation interacts with apps, so as a result we are actually able to have college kids test it out.

So maybe the students were expecting it to swipe on something, and it doesn’t let them swipe, or maybe when they press and hold down they are expecting the video to pop up like it does in Snapchat.

What was the process of developing your startup – from idea inception to product usage?
Last October, as a freshman, I got the idea because I’ve always loved giving feedback on different products. I saw this idea as a way to amplify that feedback.

After coming up with the idea in October, I started talking with different startups and figuring out what we could actually do for them. I wanted to hear if it would be valuable and if its something people would pay for.

Starting second semester last year, we just did various free projects for companies to, first of all, make sure that we knew what we were doing and, second of all, to have projects to talk about so that it would be easier to sell the company. So that took us through February, we did a few different paid projects, and then starting in March we were able to actually start charging companies for different projects.

What is your team like? Are there other Boston College students? 

My brother Steven [who attends the University of Michigan] joined in December and since then, we actually just brought on our first team member at BC, Ameet Kallarackal. He will basically be coming on to do, you know, everything–it’s been hard having only two people on the team. Ameet is really the person who is going to give us bandwidth to tackle new projects.

Fellow BC student and new Campus Insights team member, Ameet Kallarackal

Is there an app or website for college students you currently wish would hire Campus Insights to be improved?

So in terms of dream projects, I would say that LinkedIn is certainly one of them. I use LinkedIn a lot, I think there’s a lot of things we could help LinkedIn improve, a lot of usability things, but also new features. On the more app side, it would be fun to work with some sort of financial tech company, so a company in the banking space.

Has getting on the BostInno list led to any new opportunities? Such as surprising phone calls, emails from business leaders, etc.

It’s been cool. I certainly received a lot more emails than I expected from various people I met in Boston but also some random people who saw my name on the list and just wanted to connect so that’s been very exciting. For the company it’s big, just because our biggest challenge is the fact that we are college kids so we have to build this perception or this brand of credibility and saying even though we are college kids that’s actually our advantage and that’s why you should trust us. I think it just gives us a bit more credibility to our brand.

Was this always something that you saw being tested on both campuses, with your brother at University of Michigan, or did it start more in one place, and how beneficial has that been?

It’s been hugely beneficial. We always were trying to do stuff on both Boston College’s and Michigan’s campuses, just because a large amount of value in what we can provide is multiple and diverse perspectives and so having both students from BC and students from Michigan, for sure very different universities in terms of their general demographic, allows us to provide a much more diverse interviewee pool which is valuable to the different groups we work with.

Riley’s brother and Campus Insights co-founder, Stephen Soward

Would this startup have been successful, or even possible, if you were not still a BC student?
Did your networks come from the people you already knew?

Definitely not, I think our biggest selling point is the fact that it’s college kids interviewing college kids because I think a conversation you have with a friend or somebody your age is way different than a conversation you would have with somebody who reminds you of your father or mother. So, our biggest value really comes from that casual and unbiased interaction and also the access we have.

As I’m sure you know, Jebbit co-founder Tom Colburn left BC his sophomore year to work full-time on his company. Is that something you can imagine yourself doing?

It’s certainly something I’ve thought and had discussions with people about. I don’t think it’s something I would do because, first of all, I really value Boston College and the professors I’ve met here, the alumni and being around other college kids, and I think there’s a lot of value to be said for college education. And two, the fact that our business model is built around college kids, it certainly plays to our advantage to still be on a college campus, because at the end of the day, that’s where our value is.

Do you consider this venture a potential full-time role?

I think so, definitely. There are many different ways we could grow the business and we absolutely love what we’re doing so the plan is to just keep building it.

Would you rather be able to focus on your own startup ideas, or deciding which of other people’s to fund? 

It’s really satisfying and fulfilling to be able to work on your own idea and take something from really nothing to something that can bring in money, can give people feedback, whatever that is. And what’s been cool with Campus Insights, it started with an idea, started with me going on eBay and ordering a camera for $125 and telling my brother, I’m just going to sit down and interview kids and we’re going to help out these random companies and see what happens. I love that it’s so up and down, it’s very exciting, and fulfilling.

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