04/22/2025
Big ideas led to big success when Cortland students took first and second place in the opening round of the New York Business Plan Competition (NYBPC).
The intercollegiate competition is used to show off the most innovative student start-up businesses in New York for six categories: Food & Agtech; Health & Well-being; Learn, Work & Live; Safety, Power & Mobility; Products & Hardware; and Software & Services.
Thirteen students formed the five teams from Cortland that competed In the Central New York Region against 30 other teams.
- NIL Finder, created by Michael Echevarria, Kyle Germain and Cris Judge, placed first in Learn, Work, Live.
- Teamup, by Morgan Wenkler and Rylee Fishkin, with help from Daniel Jackson, Luk Schirmer and Sakura Suzuki, took second in the same group.
Other teams included:
- Above Average: a fashion brand.
- Capital Coach Investing: an app designed to educate young investors.
- Hive: a hardware/software technology to monitor and reserve gym equipment when it’s available.
The first-place winners behind NIL Finder won $200 each for travel expenses for future rounds of the competition that would pit them against teams from other regions.
After that early victory, they were again chosen by judges in an online first round of the statewide portion of the contest, moving on to an in-person presentation on April 24 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
“This class has been awesome and extremely beneficial for me as someone who wants to be an entrepreneur,” said Echevarria, a sophomore business economics major minoring in entrepreneurship.
All the Cortland teams will present their business plans on campus during the annual Transformations: A Student Research and Creativity Conference.
Cortland’s competitors came out of the MGT 275: Entrepreneurship 1 class taught by James Wilson, a lecturer in the Economics Department. Work on the project is factored into the final class grade.
Wilson began at Cortland last fall, teaching MGT 175: Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship that semester. Students from that class could then go on to this spring’s Entrepreneurship 1, with the NYBPC an integrated part of the course.
“As part of these classes, we learn about how to take an idea and put it through the wringer in terms of questioning, research and analysis, market opportunity and scrutinizing an idea to solve a problem and bring that all the way through to a viable business concept,” he said.
NIL Finder is designed to enable student-athletes to more easily secure NIL deals while boosting the players’ profiles on social media.
NIL, short for Name, Image, Likeness, has become a significant term in college sports, as student-athletes have recently been allowed to profit from deals that use their high profiles commercially.
“This started out just for a good grade in class but now we all believe it will become something in the future,” Echevarria said.
The team has been looking for investors to help fund its growth.
“After we won the NYBPC something clicked in all of us and we are now working harder than ever to try and get NIL Finder up and running, hopefully within the next six months,” he added.
TeamUp is an app made to connect people looking to play sports, regardless of skill level.
“With TeamUp, they carry themselves well,” Wilson said of Cortland’s second-place entrepreneur team. “They had a lot of good storytelling and good energy, and in their presentation, and I think it translated well to the judges.”
The NYBPC states its goals as fostering entrepreneurial skills, connecting students to the entrepreneurial landscape in New York and launching new business ventures.
After his students’ early success, Wilson said he plans to continue taking part in NYBPC in the future. He noted that it felt great to see what was learned in the class put into action.
“We’ve been working on it since (the students) inception into this whole notion of taking this idea and turning it into something that’s viable for a business,” Wilson said. “And it’s even further of a leap to create formal presentations around a business plan for it. So, they put in a lot of work into getting it to where it’s presentable in a competition setting with other colleges and universities. It's high stress.”
———
In top photo, from left, students Michael Natalizio, Michael Echevarria, Chris Judge, Kyle German, Aaron Coston, Daniel Tarpey, Julianna Grillo, Blake Thomas and Joe Ponesse at the New York Business Plan Competition.