Welcome to another installment of the Student Spotlight.
Each installment highlights the cool things a current or past Stukent student is doing. Use these stories as motivation for reaching your entrepreneurial and marketing goals.
Meet Chino Azcue
Azcue studied entrepreneurship and earned a bachelor’s degree from Baruch College. He co-founded Agro-Sustentable, an organic fertilizer company. On top of his business accomplishments, he was also a professional tennis player and maintained a 4.0 GPA as a member of the Sigma Nu Tau Entrepreneurship Honor Society.
Azcue shared insights on co-founding a company. You can read his interview below:
Tell Us About Yourself
Q: Why did you want to study entrepreneurship?
A: I chose to study entrepreneurship because, since a very young age, I’ve always carved my own path, and I knew that sooner [or] later I wanted to start my own business.
Q: What are some of your hobbies?
A: As far as hobbies go, I consider myself a professional barbecuer, and I love being with my family and going out.
Tell Us About Your Cool Venture
Q: Why did you start?
A: I started my first venture, a distribution of organic fertilizers, in 2015. At that point, I wasn’t planning on starting anything. But one of my best friends came with the idea and network necessary, so we took the risk. Today, we sell our product all over Argentina and Paraguay, with sales of over $180K last year.
Q: How are you marketing your business?
A: Agro-Sustentable is marketed mainly in agricultural magazines [and also through] a lot of cold calling and email marketing. I use ActiveCampaign to track emails and automatize our answers and actions depending on our clients’ responses. We also developed a “finders fee” program that, together with word-of-mouth, really helped scale our distribution efforts.
Q: What advice would you give to a college student looking to start down a path similar to yours?
A: Try as many different things as possible until you find your dream, then ironically lose your sleep working for your dream. Also, find mentors and reach out to them when you have doubts. Advice from people who have done what you are trying to do is priceless.
Q: Do you have a favorite book, website, or online tool / service that you’d recommend for Stukent nation?
A: My favourite book is “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel, and my favourite resource is the Small Development Business Center at Baruch College. I still can’t believe it’s free.
Q: What Stukent product did you use, and how did your experience using it help you with this venture?
A: I used Stukent for my internet marketing class. I loved how intuitive the software is and how easy it was to transition from one task to the other. It almost felt like I was actually underlining the text and writing notes. The simplicity and adaptability to different screens also helped me study and read from my iPad, computer, and sometimes, phone. The class was also very interesting and applicable to my venture, so it was definitely a great learning experience!!