WHERE ENTREPRENEURS ARE BORN

Formerly Solution Lab, Hatch is an idea incubator for student-led ventures, businesses, and products. Students gain entrepreneurial and design thinking skills and mindsets to bring ideas to market. Hatch provides seed money, resources, and coaching to empower students to develop their innovative ideas, or those of community partners, into business startups or high-impact projects.

Clutch in the Media

CLUTCH: Enhancing the world’s drive to just drive

Clutch was created through a 12-week long project, aimed at minimizing distracted driving. We began with  researching the true impact of the issue, the populations impacted, and what solutions have already been implemented. Our empathy work was shaped when we spoke to a BPD officer, who had the insight that parents were the main demographic that he pulled over for distracted driving. Our team ran with this insight and put together a parent focus group. In addition, we spoke to over 100 parents about their driving habits. It became clear to our team that people were losing their lives every day for reasons that were completely preventable had someone waited until they made it to their next destination to pick up their phone.

After 12 weeks, our team had created wireframes, a working prototype, and began branding. Our process relied on feedback from our parent focus group and an user experience designer, Kylie Poppen, who works for Google.

The next chapter of Clutch’s development took place during an 12-week entrepreneurial experience at One Stone where we prepared for The Idaho Entrepreneurial Challenge that was hosted by the Boise State Venture College. The team developed Clutch’s market research, and continued to empathize with parents. We pitched Clutch at the 2018 Idaho Entrepreneurial Challenge Pitching Competition. We won 1st place and our first seed money of $2,000. 

​Winning was just the beginning of Clutch’s story, it turns out. The same summer, the team applied for a grant from the Hunter Watson Fund. The HWF aims to give students grants up to $5k that relate to their passions. Coincidentally, Hunter Watson, the one who inspired his family to start the fund, was killed in a distracted driving accident. In addition to drawing our team’s attention to the differences between distracted driving and texting while driving, Hunter’s family was unbelievably excited about the possibility of our company. Though it was slow going throughout the summer, the team juggled phone calls with the founders of the fund, submitting budget reports, and writing the extensive application for the award, which we couldn’t have done it without One Stone’s champion grant writer, Neva Geisler.

After becoming finalists the Fall of 2018, the team realized that we were quickly losing momentum and running out of our limited knowledge that we had about creating a startup. Enter: our awesome coach, Caitlyn. Though we were far from ‘failing’ as a company in the traditional sense, it seemed like we were wandering around aimlessly until Caitlyn put us back on track. This was perhaps our earliest lesson in the benefits of asking for help, especially with those in our own backyard: everyone in the One Stone community and surrounding Boise area. We would quickly come to lean on many of them as the months went on, and our ambitions got even bigger for what Clutch could look like.

It was around this time that we all realized that the fundamental business model that the original Clutch team had wasn’t necessarily feasible from a sustainability standpoint for the business. Finding, maintaining, and supporting dozens of close local partnerships with businesses around our area would not only take nearly all of our time and resources, but it would be distracting from our main goal: keeping the app easy to use and preventing unnecessary deaths that come from distracted driving. So how could we reframe our solution to better cater to our company and our user’s needs?  After examining our key goals and focus for the app, we determined that a sort of “B to B” business model would allow for the sustainability, expandability, and most importantly, profitability of our app.