{"id":100879,"date":"2019-07-12T14:12:43","date_gmt":"2019-07-12T12:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=100879"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:24:24","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:24:24","slug":"this-student-dropped-out-to-become-a-successful-entrepreneur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2019\/07\/12\/this-student-dropped-out-to-become-a-successful-entrepreneur\/","title":{"rendered":"This student dropped out to become a successful entrepreneur"},"content":{"rendered":"

Confronted with failure in his first start-up, Juriaan Karsten later met the two founders of the up-and-coming parking start-up Parkeagle by chance. Starting just as an intern, he was able to focus more on the business side of the company, expand it, and later become one of the co-founders of Parkeagle.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\n\n<\/svg>\n<\/span>\n\tImage by:<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSanne van der Most<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\t

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What brings students to set up their own business? And how do they turn their entrepreneurial ideas into reality? In this series, student entrepreneurs talk about the early years of their business. In this instalment: Juriaan Karsten decided to quit his study to build and expand his start-up, Parkeagle.<\/p>\n\n\t<\/div>\n

Juriaan Karsten (26) seems to have a knack for risk and creation \u2013 in fact, in the previous six years he has ventured into four different projects alongside his university studies, each with varying degree of success.<\/p>\n

Currently, he is a co-founder of Parkeagle, a smart-parking start-up based in Amsterdam. Since its inception in 2016, the company has focused on solving traffic and congestion within inner city districts through smart-parking technology. Their smart sensor can be placed in parking slots or even garage entrances giving the user the ability to visualise available parking spots around the city as well as access to traffic insights. At the moment, the company is working with businesses as well as the municipalities of Rotterdam and The Hague.<\/p>\n

First attempt<\/h2>

This urge to create initially started six years ago when Juriaan decided to build his first social media app while studying Economics at Erasmus University. In his eyes, social media was really starting to boom, with Facebook in particular leading the way. This led to \u00a0the birth of his first start-up: \u2018Grader\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the beginning I did a lot of the stuff myself, but I could only get so far. I was later working with a Chinese guy that I had found online and we built the app together\u201d. The app had a simple yet effective concept. It would let users upload pictures and outfits to be rated by others \u2013 \u2018an Instagram on steroids\u2019, recalls Juriaan.<\/p>\n

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With a solid base of users and consistent growth every month, Juriaan saw his team expand in the following two years, and soon investors took note. Juriaan accepted 250 thousand euros in investment, yet this came with one costly concession \u2013 the contract explicitly stated that if he accepted the investment, he would have to put his studies aside for an extended period of time. \u201cI didn\u2019t see this as an issue; and next thing I knew we were moving our office to work in Amsterdam.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though the app was growing consistently and Juriaan had a team of nine people working on the project, it soon hit a wall. This was a rude awakening, as it proved without a doubt that a good idea and growth on their own are not clear indicators of success so much as an effective and profitable business model. \u201cWe were still working in ways to monetise the app, but we needed more money. We couldn\u2019t find more investors unfortunately, and soon I was completely broke and in debt. In the end I sold it for pennies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Post\u2013trauma<\/h2>

Juriaan returned to Erasmus University where he commenced his studies in History, exasperated by his previous failure, but not discouraged: \u201cI think of \u2018Grader\u2019 as a really expensive MBA since I was able to learn a lot \u2013 a really, really expensive MBA\u201d.<\/p>\n

When he turned 23, he was soon off to a code camp in search of more technical knowledge \u2013 an experience that was a major detour from his History studies. During his first weeks of study at the code camp, Juriaan\u2019s mentor suggested that he should go to a start-up event hosted in the same building. \u201cThe guys from the code camp joked that we could get a job as a software engineer, which was unlikely because we were just starting out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t

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Read more<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t