This story is part of our August 2026 issue. To read the print version, click here.

But how could this be? She was in college. There were students across campus offering all kinds of services: photography, hair styling, nail art, DJing. All they needed was a platform to make the search easier. So in 2025, Gupta created one.

“The salons cost $100-plus. They can even go up to $200, depending on what kind of nails you want,” says Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Buzzit, an online marketplace where students can earn money for their skills and find affordable services. “There are students on campus who do it for a lot cheaper, but they don’t have that visibility that the salons do, like on Google and Yelp. And students can’t find them that easily.”

She started off as pre-med, but Gupta pivoted to entrepreneurship, which she says gave her a similar rush as performing on stage as a dancer. Research suggested she was onto something with her idea, identifying a $14 million market for barbers and nail techs at UC Davis alone, she says. Through a friend of a friend, she connected with Cyrus Foroudian, who brought the technical expertise needed to build the platform.

Gupta and Foroudian graduated last year, and since then, the startup has evolved. They avoided the inbox model at first to prevent a flood of requests but added messaging to improve communication. They also changed the scope of the platform, expanding from just hair and nails to invite any provider with a skill.

There’s a stigma around founders chasing buzzwords like AI, B2B and SaaS, Gupta says, emphasizing that’s not what Buzzit is about. The startup’s mission is about connecting people more than turning a profit. At this stage, the team doesn’t take a percentage of the booking fee the way a platform like Fiverr does.

“Right now, our focus is not revenue,” she says. “We believe that it will come with users and traction, so our full focus is making sure students can get on this platform, from a more humanitarian perspective. We built this app considering that students already don’t have a lot of money to spend, and we still want them to have access to different kinds of luxuries.”

Buzzit won the $12,500 social entrepreneurship award at the 25th Big Bang! Competition. The team has 300,000 monthly views through Instagram accounts in addition to local partnerships. With countless universities to scale, Gupta says Buzzit represents a new model in the student gig economy. The team also secured a $125,000 investment from Lifelike Capital.

“We believe Gen Z represents one of the largest untapped talent markets, yet there remains a significant gap in platforms that empower young creators to showcase and monetize their abilities,” says Randy Lee, co-founder and general partner of Lifelike Capital.

Having graduated from the Graduate School of Management at UC Davis, Lee says, he looks for ways to support the school, and Buzzit’s passionate team and business pitch won him over.

“They had set up a booth and talked about their product and I hit them with a barrage of questions,” he says, “and although they didn’t have all the answers, they were very eager to learn.”

Part of that learning includes seizing opportunities from new information. For example, if the team hadn’t expanded the platform beyond just hair and nails, they might have missed the chance to contract with Trevor Thai a.k.a. Thai T.

Thai T., whose videos have gone viral, gets booked regularly to pop up at parties, grinding on the floor and serenading an unsuspecting birthday star. Foroudian found him in the quad one day and pitched Buzzit to him early on in his rise. Now Thai T. gets around four booking requests a day on Buzzit and quickly became one of the top providers on the platform.

“I didn’t foresee somebody booking a provider at 12 a.m.,” Foroudian says, adding that those first bookings broke the app for a day or two.

“We sacrificed a little bit of structural integrity and scalability to accommodate people,” he says. “The summer is going to be a great time for us to truly take a step back, deconstruct a few things and integrate it in a more sustainable way.”

Buzzit has its terms and conditions, which comes down to “don’t do anything illegal,” Gupta says. The team also can monitor everything on its end, tracking bookings with the ability to send warnings to users, suspend accounts or delete them if necessary.

At its core, Buzzit is all about possibilities, how individual passions help students discover and build community. For Gupta, that mission’s personal.

“Building this app actually inspired me to start taking dance classes again,” Gupta says. “Eventually I want to teach classes on the side as well. And if we get short-form content on the app, I might put that as a service of my own and meet people through it.”

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