For the Omnipointment team, everything started during a hackathon at Northwestern University in Chicago last November.

“I was in Lincoln at the time and [Vinesh] was going to the hackathon, and he called me and told me, ‘We have to build this, it’s a really cool idea,’” said Brendan Batliner, co-founder, Omnipointment. “So I worked remotely with him that weekend, and we built a working prototype.”

The inspiration behind Omnipointment comes from a common problem many college students have–the struggle of working in groups.

“We know a lot of classmates that do amazing things individually, but once you put people in a team or group together it can fall apart,” said Vinesh Kannan, co-founder, Omnipointment. “To be honest, we’ve had a lot of bad collaborative experiences.”

“We’re the kind of people that end up doing all the work in group projects,” said Batliner. “The types of experiences when you can’t trust your group, or you can’t figure out everyone’s availability, those are the types of experiences we’re trying to get over with our product.”

How Omnipointment works

Kannan explained that Omnipointment was designed to help busy student leaders find a time to meet with their teams.

“A problem that a lot of college students have is that they don’t keep calendars,” said Kannan. “Some of them couldn’t even tell you when they are free for the rest of the day.”

Omnipointment makes it easy to mark when you’re free on a grid and the person organizing the meeting can see when everyone’s free, all in real time.

“Something that is cool that our app can do that no one else can do, is you can filter people in and out of the grid,” said Batliner.

The team applied to Straight Shot after an introduction to David Arnold from one of Batliner’s professors at the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management. They are now one of the eight teams in this year’s Straight Shot cohort.

“[My professor] knew I was working on Omnipointment and he introduced us to David back in March,” said Batliner. “David encouraged us to apply and was gracious enough to accept us into Straight Shot’s program.”

Student tested

Batliner explained that since Kannan was going to school in Chicago, he had access to a lot of different college campuses and was able to run tests and do mock-ups with students on a weekly basis.

“Everything we’ve built has been tested with students,” said Batliner.

Since starting at Straight Shot, the team has worked on getting the product out to even more students. They are currently trying out different pricing and discount models.

“We currently have 200-300 users,” said Kannan. “We haven’t done any external advertising, we’ve basically acquired everyone manually. It’s technically a closed beta right now.”

The team is really excited to have added two new members to their team, as well as making their first sale to the University of Miami Ohio last week. The team credits their success to their first few weeks at Straight Shot.

“I think [Straight Shot] has enabled us to have a first good few weeks with our team,” said Kannan. “To have that vision, and not feel like four college students playing startup–it’s what enabled us to find our first sale.”

The big vision for Omnipointment

Batliner explained that the Omnipointment team hopes that people can not only find times to get together, but to collaborate better.

“Finding a time to meet was just the first big barrier, and if we can help people have better collaboration habits when they’re a student, they’ll carry those to the workplace, hopefully some of our products too,” said Kannan.

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Melanie Lucks is a communications intern for Silicon Prairie News and AIM Careerlink.