Student launches own business

Nick Cash, a University of Northern Iowa junior, has his own personal office. Located in the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center, he shares the space with a select group of students who are all part of the Business Incubator, a program designed to nourish the creative talents and ideas of student entrepreneurs.

This office provides Cash with all he needs to run his own business, a high-tech startup called Book Hatchery. It's a company that will allow writers to publish their own work through the website www.bookhatchery.com.

On July 24, Cash was named one of five finalists in Entrepreneur magazine's National College Entrepreneur of 2010 contest. The winner will receive $5,000 in seed money, a profile in Entrepreneur magazine and a multitude of other prizes designed to aid new businesses.

Cash took the incredible news in stride.

"It kind of came as a surprise," he said. "Just an e-mail, really. I mean, it wasn't anything fancy. It was like, ‘Hey, guess what? You're a finalist. Promote yourself.'"

Cash first conceived Book Hatchery toward the beginning of his sophomore year, while attempting to write an eBook that would be more useful to the computer science students he was tutoring.

"We didn't really have a good book to use because when you have a book that's full of computer code but printed on paper, it's not helpful," he said.

He explained that students really need something they are able to copy and paste from, otherwise they waste time typing out each code by hand.

Book Hatchery was his solution.

"There's nothing quite like what I'm doing," he said. "Some (websites) can help you publish, but they're kind of set up as their own retail store, and I'm not really interested in making a website for people to come and buy books, because that exists. It's called Amazon or Barnes & Noble. So that's been done. I don't really want to compete with them. I just want to get them more stuff to sell."

As a junior attending Cedar Falls High School, Cash began taking computer science classes at UNI, quickly landing a student job.

"I became a research lead for the College of Natural Sciences, working on their auto meter reading project, and somewhere along the way, Lockheed Martin had gotten my resumé and called me up and said, ‘Hey, we have an internship program, and we really need people to fill it,'" he said. "Would you like to be one of those people?' So I didn't even call Lockheed Martin. They called me, which was really cool."

Almost immediately after his internship with Lockheed, Cash landed another internship with a firm called Distek Integration.

Cash has also won first place in Iowa State University's Cyber Defense Competition and in the Pappajohn New Venture Business Plan Competition. The latter provided Cash with the $5,000 in seed money and the strong sense of validation he needed to quit his job and put full-time effort into the success of his business.

It's been a year since then, and throughout the process of creating Book Hatchery, Nick has relied heavily upon the Incubator and, in particular, on Entrepreneurial Center employees Laurie Watje and Katherine Cota-Uyar. Though he is technically a one-man company, Cash likes to think of the two as unofficial employees or even board members.

"(They) do an astronomical amount of work," he said. "They are the best mentors I could possibly have."

And for Cash, Cota-Uyar had equal words of praise.

"Nick has continued to grow as a small-business owner through each step," she said. "His confidence level has increased, and as frequently happens, he now recognizes opportunities everywhere and thinks of new ideas."

Cash has words of advice for other students who wish to become entrepreneurs.

"Get started," he said. "You don't need the best idea. You don't even really need an idea, to be honest; you need a direction."

Cash attributes a great deal of his success to the opportunities provided by the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center and the donors who make everything possible.

"We have incredible resources here that a lot of students don't know about, like the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center and the Student Business Incubator," he said.

To vote for Cash's website, visit www.bookhatchery.com.