Everything about college feels just a bit temporary. From your ever-changing class schedule to your ever-shifting dorm room, these four years aren’t exactly about permanence. Taking this concept and turning it into a business is Jetpack, a new app that launched out of Stanford to bring students travel-sized versions of necessities like cold medication, energy drinks, and hangover cures (it’s college, after all).
“We’re a peer-to-peer delivery service that makes products available within minutes,” Jetpack says on its website. “We identify the top clutch products you may need and pre-stock the people around you.”
At launch, Jetpack has 15 items that you can order on demand, to be delivered to you by any one of 100 Stanford students who are effectively walking vending machines. They have Jetpack bags filled with miniature goods that will cost you between $1 and $5. And these deliverymen and women (affectionately dubbed Jetpackers) get a weekly salary for selling a percentage of products.
While Jetpack may be starting on a college campus, founder and CEO Fatima Dicko, a graduate student at Stanford, has high hopes for the company, and sees a possibility of expanding Jetpack into cities and selling themed kits. But wait, you say. Aren’t there already companies that bring you items on demand? The answer, of course, is yes, but Dicko told TechCrunch that these other companies don’t benefit from “economies of scale when it comes to speed of delivery.” Jetpack, however, is different, pre-stocking its little packs and keeping them in densely populated areas.
And of course, there’s the idea of selling smaller versions of things. “It’s not that they completely ran out of these things, but they’re in a situation where they just need a sample size,” Dicko noted. And as the company grows, it’ll also learn what its users need. “We wanted to first understand which products are getting some traction and then curate from that,” she added.
Next year, Jetpack could be making its way to Cornell and Harvard, so if you’re a college student finding yourself in a bind, this might just be the solution you’ve been waiting for.
