Insights From the Mind Behind ‘Split’

Last winter, my friend came to me with the idea to optimize and reduce the cost of travelling to and from the airport for Emory students. After paying a lot of money to get back to Emory from Hartsfield-Jackson, he thought there had to be a good way to find people to split the ride with. The pre-existing methods for that were primarily finding friends, posting on facebook, or riding the shuttle. These methods of finding people to ride with were not working very well, so we decided to create an app, Split, dedicated to ride sharing for college students.

We developed the business through EEVM’s Excelerator program. We met every week to complete the necessary steps for our start up. In addition to the mentorship, we got some funding from the excelerator to help with website costs, advertising, and more. We also got the opportunity to pitch our idea the excelerator demo day, and later infront of Emory’s endowment team.

Throughout the summer, we worked on the app almost daily. By August, we released an invite only beta test for the app. After fixing some bugs and improving the app, we released the app publicly for fall break. We continued to update the app throughout the year and eventually we expanded to two other schools. We are currently working on some exciting updates and are looking forward to what the future holds for us.

Written by Josh Karol

Emory University | EEVM | Technology Associate