Olaf Growald
Neha Husein was a student at SMU when she launched a mobile app called Just Drive, which awards points good toward restaurant coupons and insurance discounts for undistracted driving, after she was rear-ended by a distracted driver. Husein, who grew up in North Texas, graduated more than a year ago with degrees in human rights and marketing and minors in advertising and nonprofit studies. This spring, she completed a fellowship at SMU and won a one-year renewal. Last November, she won a Global Student Entrepreneurship Award in the Fort Worth regional competition from the Fort Worth chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. So far, she’s supported the app with $26,000 in winnings from pitch competitions and some of her own money. The company has a board of advisers, including a patent lawyer and tech company CEO, and Husein is looking for a CTO and a way into accelerators. “I think I’ve fallen in love with the entire social impact of entrepreneurship,” Husein said in an interview at a Dallas coffee shop. “I want to continue giving back to the world through that lens. I see myself living my life, actually living in communities.”
Growing up “My dad really was an entrepreneur. He created several businesses, from dollar stores to gas stations. He would bring me a toy register, and I was ringing up orders. I never saw that as entrepreneurship, but looking back, I guess it was. My mom is a home health nurse. She just started after my brother and I graduated from college.”
Study abroad in SMU’s human rights program “There’s a heavy, heavy emphasis on travel. I went to Poland to study the Holocaust. I got to meet some Holocaust survivors. We went to Selma, Little Rock, and Montgomery and talked about the Freedom Rides. We went to South Africa to study human rights and ethics. South Africa is where I came up with Just Drive. I was doing an applied learning class.”
Developing her app “I have no entrepreneurial experience. I have no coding experience. I don’t know the first thing about app building. I entered my first pitch competition, and I won $1,000. I Googled how to build an app, and I hired the first app developer I could find. I paid him almost the entire $1,000. He ended up screwing me over. I entered another pitch competition, and I won $5,000. We launched with that in October 2018. I learned a lot between the first app and the second app.”
How it’s going The app has more than 1,500 downloads and 1,000 hours of driving, Husein says. The original idea was to get merchants to offer coupons on the app as rewards for undistracted driving. COVID-19 slowed things, and Husein is taking the opportunity to revamp the app for a September or October relaunch, adding a feature that allows friends to compete against each other for extra points. “We’re going to really gamify it.”
