Senior creates app for student marketplace, services

Shilpa Sadagopan first came up with the idea for Thoyen, a student services app, when she realized how much extra spending money she needed as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sadagopan, now a senior majoring in business administration and popular music at USC, has since taken her concept to market with help from her father.

Thoyen creates a marketplace for hiring and offering student services. Thoyen’s value proposition is “the college student’s easiest way to get tasks done and most flexible way to earn money,” according to its website.

Thoyen offers not only task requests and responses, but also a marketplace for rentals or purchases and carpool options. Potential tasks include cleaning, housework, packing, moving and vehicle washing.

“It’s not just focused on one thing, like Uber or Postmates,” Sadagopan said. “We have apartment cleaning and laundry services. Within all of those things there are all of these intricacies, like how [to] explain to people what all of these things are but still keep the app looking clean, not over-inundating people with information.”

After three years in production, the app launched on iOS in late March at USC and Texas A&M. After workshopping the idea with another student at Penn during her freshman year, Sadagopan told her family about it during one of their ongoing entrepreneurial brainstorm sessions.

“My dad has always been a really big advocate for coming up with your own ideas,” Sadagopan said. “My brother and I would go home, and we would just have these family conversations … He always says ideas are nothing without execution, so if you really want to work on this, then we can.”

In Fall 2016, Sadagopan transferred to USC to study popular music. She quickly added a business administration major, resulting in a busy three-year schedule — she’s currently enrolled in 24 units.

Sadagopan said her busy schedule motivated her to launch the app. She didn’t qualify for work-study and didn’t have the time to work a full-time internship. Sadagopan said she hopes Thoyen offers students more flexibility in their schedules.

“I was like, ‘Maybe we can combine these and create an app that allows people to sign up as either customers who want to get these tasks done or [as task providers],’” Sadagopan said.

Sadagopan said she wanted to create a centralized place for task management. With an overwhelming amount of options, including TaskRabbit, Thumbtack, Craigslist and Facebook, she wanted to streamline the service booking and offering processes for students.  

The company plans to earn revenue by taking a percentage off each transaction, ranging from five to 10%, depending on the size and difficulty of the task.

In the spring of Sadagopan’s junior year, her father decided to come on board as Thoyen’s full-time co-founder. Years of ideation finally began to take shape as the father-daughter duo financed the app, outsourcing development to engineers in India.

“So far, it’s been going pretty good … At this point, my biggest challenge would be to actually get it going live as soon as possible,” Sadagopan said. “We only have another month before school closes, so the biggest challenge is to roll it out … and make sure everything is working.”

Alexandra Caro Chavez, a junior majoring in business administration and economics, is a Thoyen brand ambassador. Chavez and Sadagopan strategize the brand’s identity and messaging and are looking to expand their team.

“It’s pretty free, all the work I do,” Chavez said. “They give me a lot of freedom to do a lot of what I want. They let me put a lot of input in all [of the app’s] ideas.”

The working title of the app started as “aaya,” which translates to a service-person. However, the team decided to pivot away from that, as the term has an unfavorable connotation in its home country of India.

Thoyen is a play on the Tamil word thoren, which means friend. The name Thoyen was adopted for Western pronunciation — it also serves as an acronym for “To Help Others & Yes Exactly Now.”

While the app is reaching the end of its development stage, the marketplace is waiting for enough user sign-ups to go live. The app is also only on iOS for now, but the team plans to launch an Android version by the end of the semester.

Sadagopan said the biggest challenge has been cultivating Thoyen’s growth and engagement.

“It’s obviously been hard because people can see it on Instagram, but going from impressions, to click-throughs, to actual acquisitions — that is hard,” Sagadopan said. “I guess I didn’t realize that just by reading these case studies in my business classes.”