By Emily Miller
REXBURG — Nick Hepworth has the mind of an entrepreneur. When he saw a service not yet being offered in the marketplace, he jumped in to fill the need. Now he’s getting recognized for his idea and has a chance to win big at the upcoming Boise Entrepreneur Week Pitch Competition.
With his new company, Subitt, Hepworth and his business partners stand to win up to $50,000 if they take home the grand prize at the October 3 competition in Boise.
In this day and age, as technology plays a large role in business, many companies use subscriptions to offer incentives to their regular customers while also keeping their own revenues flowing. It’s a win-win for the businesses and the consumers.
Hepworth, a student at Brigham Young University-Idaho, initially set out to create a subscription service for his own potential customers. He wanted to offer subscriptions for nutritional supplements and pre-workout protein powders. When he sat down with his computer-science-major roommate, Aoi Kuriki, to make a plan, they realized the idea could be more far-reaching and they explored the idea of offering the service to other small businesses.
“It’s hard to make a subscription,” Hepworth says. “That’s a problem, and we needed to find a solution.”
The solution was Subitt, a new online service which aims to provide small businesses a way to offer subscriptions without having to build the system themselves.
“Plain and simple, we’re just a marketplace for subscriptions,” Hepworth says. Users can visit the website or download the app to see subscription offers from local businesses. In east Idaho, businesses are offering subscriptions for food and drinks, pet grooming, car detailing, and more. Hepworth says Subitt has 45 businesses using the service with about 150 more ready to join.
Hepworth, Kuriki, and a third team member, Jae Kim, recently competed at the Idaho Entrepreneur Challenge at Boise State University. The Subitt team won first place, which came with a few thousand bucks to invest into the business and a “golden ticket” to make their pitch at Boise Entrepreneur Week.
Hepworth says it’s rewarding to be part of something that helps other people and to have received such a positive response.
“The competition and all the other benefits of trying to build something that has an impact – it’s been awesome,” he says.
Subitt will join seven other finalists at Boise Entrepreneur Week, each hoping to win the $50,000 grand prize after the judges and investors hear the entrepreneurs’ best pitches. Hepworth says the Subitt team members haven’t had a lot of pitch practice and have never presented their idea to hundreds of people at once. While they’re excited at the possibilities at the competition, they’ve remained focused on their main goal of building their business.
“As much as we love the pitch competition, we’re definitely focused on building Subitt right now,” Hepworth says. “We try to talk to sellers all day.”
They’re talking to businesses in east Idaho, but they’re also branching out and offering their services elsewhere.
“We’ve gotten sellers signed up from Rexburg and Salt Lake City, to sellers now in Dallas, Texas, to sellers in Arizona,” Hepworth says. “We’ve been able to kinda get to a point where we can do this in more than one place, and that’s really exciting.”
Hepworth, who is originally from Alabama and plans to graduate from BYU-Idaho in 2025, says he and his team are in it for the long haul.
“We want to build something that can last and be impactful,” he says. “Small businesses really don’t have a lot of resources or people who are looking out for small business owners. We’re trying to create a huge business tool network to make it easier to run a small business.”
