"The Helping Snack"- My Entrepreneurship Story

“The Helping Snack” changed my life, let me tell you why. I was born and raised in La Paz, Bolivia. A city in South America where the majority of people lives in poor conditions and where the differences between rich and the poor are easy to perceive. Even though there has been an increase in the middle class due to an improvement in the country’s economy and also due to the migration of people living in rural to the urban cities, you can see poverty in many streets around the city. La Paz is one of the two most important cities in Bolivia and it is also the seat of the country’s government. I attended a private school from pre-kinder to senior year and I lived all my life surrounded by the wealthy people and the upper middle class of the city.

Poor families living in La Paz, Bolivia

But as I grew up, I started to think and realize the notion of what was surrounding me and I started to ask myself many questions. Why am I not helping them? How I could do something to help the people that need my help? I asked myself; How is it possible for me to just wait for someone to do something instead of helping and creating something that would be able to help the poor people that were living right by my side?

That is why, with the support of my school with a couple of friend, we created a kiosk that would be focused on raising funds oriented to help poor people. The name of this kiosk was “The Helping Snack” and it was my first and one of the most amazing entrepreneurship stories I had lived through that will always be dear to me. “The helping Snack” was focused on buying candies, chips, pizzas, and almost everything related to what we know as a snack. The kiosk we offered was based on a fast-delivery service, which was one of the greatest competitive advantages we had over our competition (a typical kiosk that was located on a specific part of the school’s campus).

What our  kiosk looked like

Another key advantage of “The Helping Snack” was that you could order anything you wanted just by sending a WhatsApp message to The Helping Snack group. But the key feature that you were getting when buying from our Kiosk was that 100% of our profit was going towards fundraising focused on helping several charity organizations and people living in the streets.

I’ll give you a detailed example of how the kiosk use to work:
Assume that you are located far away from the typical kiosk that was settled on a specific part of the campus and you wanted to get something to eat or simply any snack. You would just send a message to the group with the quantity and the specific product that you wanted, where do you want it and at what time do you want it. The student and professors where able to see our Menu simply by going to the WhatsApp group and looking on the profile picture of the group, and if there was a big menu list, we would post it on the group.

I believe that it is important to mention that what helped us develop this type of ”fundraising kiosk” was the fact that my school didn’t have really big distances between the different buildings that composed the entire school, which in the end was favorable for us to meet the type of delivery that we were focusing on.

I can say that this project was completely successful. In our last two years of high school, we were able to rise from 8 to 12 thousand dollars that were completely intended to help our community. “The Helping Snack” is one of the (if not the best) entrepreneurship story that I was part of and I am completely proud of having being part of such an amazing project.

The reason why I enrolled in ENT 3003 is because I want to learn how to manage my ideas and resources in such a unique way that could finally serve as a new tool for helping people solve their problems. I want to learn how to express and develop my skills to the point where I can contribute with new solutions and I hope, and believe, that this is the right class to be in, because an entrepreneur works harder to pursue his or her own lives, to improve the world around him or her, to build a better future for his or herself and for his or her families and communities. I am an entrepreneur.