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Masterman High School Student Crowd-Sources Second Company In Effort To Raise $50K

By Kim Glovas

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A Philadelphia high school student has started a crowd-sourcing campaign to fund not his first, but his second company.

16-year-old David Zamarin is a junior at Masterman High School in Spring Garden and the founder of two companies. The first one came after he attended an entrepreneurial program in his freshman year.

"I started this company called 'Lick Your Sole,' which was my first company," Zamarin says. Essentially, what we did was contracted with Temple's, Drexel's and Penn's sports teams, to give us their shoes to clean, repair and condition. And then the conditioning service was actually my competitor's product, the competitor of Detrapel."

Detrapel, which makes surfaces resistant to stains, is the second company. Zamarin says the original product was carcinogenic, so he did some nano-research in one night, and came up with a non-toxic alternative.

"I started doing a lot of research," he says, "and in about three hours, came up with my own formula, called the lab the same night, and that lab ended up producing it for me."

Until April, when he had some business questions that ended that collaboration.

Zamarin uses a lot of words like "venture capital" and "bearing margins" and "strategically partnered." And he plans on bankrolling his entire tuition, hopefully at the University of Pennsylvania, through his own efforts.

He has launched an Indie-Go-go crowd-funding campaign to raise $50,000 before October 17th.

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