PeerRent — Campus Rental Marketplace

ENT 360: Entrepreneurship and Value Creation — Pitch Deck

The Venture

From Frustration to Business Plan

ENT 360 was one of the most exciting courses I took at Arizona State University. The course pushed me to think like an entrepreneur and challenged me to come up with a business idea that solved a genuine problem. My venture, PeerRent, came directly from a frustrating personal experience I had during my freshman year. I spent $80 on a graphing calculator for Calculus 1 and barely used it after my final exam. The same calculator has been collecting dust on my desk ever since. Later during my junior year, I ran into another problem when my old laptop could not handle the heavy software for my Operating Systems class, and I ended up renting computing resources from Azure and AWS instead of buying a new computer. It made me realize that if we can rent computing power and apartments, there is no reason students cannot rent other everyday items from each other too.

In ENT 360, I took this frustration and turned it into a structured business plan. I developed PeerRent, a trusted peer to peer campus rental marketplace where students can rent and lend items they only need temporarily. I learned to write a full business description, analyze competitors like Facebook Marketplace and Chegg. I also developed a market validation plan, planned out my marketing and operations strategy, and even project five year revenue forecasts. Additionally, I learned to think about the financial aspect of running a business like the profits, revenue and insurance policies to protect the lender. I was able to account for the revenue for running the platform through transaction fees, late fee splits, and startup costs.

I designed an investor pitch deck and wrote an ideation document for PeerRent. Overall, the course taught me that a good business idea is not enough on its own and that you need to understand your market, validate your assumptions, and have a solid plan to execute. The course gave me the mentorship to validate an idea, discover a niche market, speak with investors and customers. I walked away feeling more confident about my ability to take an idea and turn it into a solution helping my customers.

Documents

Ideation & Business Write-up

ENT 360 — Ideation & Business Write-up

Reflection

In terms of my future career goals, this experience made me more confident in building my own product as a software engineer rather than always working for some technology company or a multinational corporation. I have the technical skills to build the platform myself using React, Python, Firebase, and Stripe, whereas the course gave me the business knowledge to understand the difference between building a product and selling a solution. The combination feels meaningful to me since I am not just a coder but someone who can think about a problem end to end from the user pain point all the way through to revenue and growth strategy.

Moreover, my work in SOC 334 also became more relevant to me after this course because I had learned that being an engineer means you need to communicate your solutions to the society and not just build them. My PeerRent venture pushed me further in a direction where I had to think about the customers' frustrations, and design a solution around their behavior and needs. I felt genuinely excited pitching PeerRent because it was a problem I once faced myself and that authenticity made every part of the business plan feel meaningful rather than just an academic exercise.

The connection between my PeerRent venture and Joy of Living starts with financial stress. College students are regularly forced to spend money on items they barely use and it creates financial pressure quietly but consistently chips away at their overall college experience. PeerRent removes that burden by letting students access what they need at a fraction of the purchase price, and it simultaneously gives students with unused items a way to earn passive income from things they already own. It also contributes to building a more connected and trusting campus community since the platform is built around verified student identities, safe library pickups, and transparent photo documentation. When a community shares resources and supports each other through a system they trust, the overall quality of daily life improves for everyone on campus. A student who is financially comfortable, feels safe, and is part of a community that looks out for each other is basically living a better life. Thus, I can confidently say that PeerRent directly connects to Joy of Living.