For Michael E. Kopko ’07, necessity was the unkempt mother of invention. The student founder of DormAid, an on-campus cleaning service, says his nascent business rose from the dust of his own bad habits—Kopko, by his own admission, is not so neat.

“I’m not a clean freak by any standard,” he says. When the clutter in his freshman dorm room got out of hand, he and his roommate hired a cleaner to tidy the suite once a month. Soon, his friends were asking how they could get their rooms cleaned, too.

Kopko, an economics concentrator, eventually decided to capitalize on this apparent need. He and a few friends—in collaboration with his brother at Princeton—founded DormAid, which has managed to amass both customers and critics over the past semester.

“We are past the hump of getting that critical mass that most students need,” Kopko says, “I am very happy with how much the campus has been purchasing from us.”

DormAid is only one of a few student-run enterprises to take root on campus over the past year.

When Danny F. Yagan ’06 realized that he could get books for his economics class much cheaper online than from the Coop, he assembled seven Currier House classmates to set up a service to make the discounts more widely available. The result, an online service called Redline Textbooks, now makes required volumes available to Harvard students at lower prices. This spring, 40 percent of the 333 students enrolled Biological Sciences 50, a genetics and genomics course, bought their books from Redline.

Each year the Harvard Student Agencies (HSA) gives a Non-Profit Enterprise Award, and this year’s honor went to Ezaria, a student start-up designed to connect artisans in developing countries with American consumers.

Alexander S. Captain ’06, the company’s founder, was looking for a way to bring remedial money into Iraq, when, on a visit to Egypt, he was “shocked by the huge amount of beautiful art” that Americans would consider purchasing at higher U.S. prices. Seeking some sort of “connection” between dynamic and developing economies, he founded a web service to try to bridge the gap.

But, for student entrepreneurs, it’s not always the idea that comes first. Daniel “Zak” Tanjeloff ’08, who has been doing entrepreneurial work since selling Beanie Babies online in the seventh grade, created an internet classifieds service called H-Ads simply because he wanted to start a business on campus. “I thought that was a nice business where people give you money and you don’t have to do much but print their ad,” says Tanjeloff, “You don’t have to go clean their room like DormAid.”

From cleaning to classifieds, the College has seen a flurry of student start-ups hit the ground over the past semester. Taking advantage of the technological resources available to the internet generation, these burgeoning businesses mark some undergraduates’ first steps into the entrepreneurial world.

According to Associate Dean of the College Judith H. Kidd, who is Chair of the Student Business Advisory Committee (SBAC), the College permits student businesses such as these because of the entrepreneurial playing field opened by online technology. All of the student start-ups use the internet as their marketplace.

“I believe that the original intent of permitting student business activity was to acknowledge that the Internet had changed the landscape,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Starting a business within the College community carries its own challenges, and some of the start-ups have struggled with red tape as a result. But all say they have learned lessons that will serve them even outside the undergraduate world.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS?

Even though all of the new crop of student businesses are internet-based, they represent a wide spectrum of origins and interest in aid and profit. For some, like Tanjeloff, the measure of success is mainly financial.