Will Alverson
Will Alverson and Scott Romano are not new to startups. Between them they’ve launched four businesses. As they continued to hang out with fellow entrepreneurs at DU, they started to see that a lot of the startups fizzled out.
“We noticed that the majority of student startups get a little lost in product development and businesses have this inherent issue with marketing to college students,” said Alverson, a junior marketing major at Daniels.
So, instead of coming up with another new idea, the two decided to join forces to cultivate new businesses. Hence, they launched Cultivo (the Portuguese word for cultivation.)
“We see a lot of student with great ideas and ambitions, product launch plans and market research. When they go to deploy or develop a product, that’s where students really stumble,” Alverson said.
Scott Romano
The two see Cultivo as an on-campus digital agency focusing on product development and marketing.
“We aim to assist businesses in developing effective and scalable campus marketing solutions, and to help student startups get their ideas actually built and successfully deployed,” said Romano, a second-year international business and economics major.
Their immediate vision is to focus on helping student startups and local businesses. They eventually want to take their learnings from this and compile them into marketing packages that a business can access, manage and track from a dashboard-type software product for managing campus marketing.
“We’ve built a network of students in computer science, emergent digital practices and more,” Romano said. “The students can say yes or no to each project, so it’s a great resume building for them and has great scalability for us.
They credit Stephen Haag, director of entrepreneurship at Daniels, with encouraging them to continue to innovate. “Being successful is all about meeting the needs of customers, being able to define their problems and then innovate around solutions,” explains Haag. “Will and Scott have done just that as entrepreneurs. And their market is other entrepreneurs.”
You can find Cultivo online.