Help launch this Temple grad’s phone repair cart by giving him a loan

Jesse DiLaura is looking for some seed cash to launch his millennial-focused phone repair business, Repair U. It’ll be a mobile cart posted up on campus to fix students’ phones.

In a post on peer-to-peer lending platform Kiva, which launched in Philly in 2014, the founder — a former product manager for Jon Gosier’s adtech startup Audigent — is seeking a $5,000 loan to be paid back over 24 months.

“I’ve always been taught that hard work pays off, and so I’ve been working hard fixing almost 4,000 phones the past 5 years,” he wrote.

We first caught wind of this campaign by way of a Twitter share from Temple University’s Ellen Weber:

Support a Temple entrepreneur! https://t.co/uHn08aPYf0
@IEIfox @foxschool @foxalumni

— Ellen Weber (@ellenweber) January 30, 2017

Per the campaign site, the loan will help the startup buy a vending cart that will be posted up at Temple University, along with some specialized tools. Interesting to see a student entrepreneur go this route, which feels like an update of those mall kiosks that fix your phone, when it’s much more fashionable to hop on the software bandwagon.

Here’s DiLaura himself explaining what the company does:

[vimeo 161136351 w=640 h=360]