What started as a classroom idea grew into an award-winning business venture for Springside Chestnut Hill Academy graduating senior Colin Salas, who emerged as the top winner among hundreds of student entrepreneurs in the Expop High School Startup Challenge.
The six-month entrepreneurial program and competition is designed to guide young people to build real-world businesses. His venture, called Soothe Pops, offers chamomile-infused calming popsicles for toddlers and young children, giving parents a medication-free way to ease children into bedtime.
The project earned Salas $2,500 in …
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What started as a classroom idea grew into an award-winning business venture for Springside Chestnut Hill Academy graduating senior Colin Salas, who emerged as the top winner among hundreds of student entrepreneurs in the Expop High School Startup Challenge.
The six-month entrepreneurial program and competition is designed to guide young people to build real-world businesses. His venture, called Soothe Pops, offers chamomile-infused calming popsicles for toddlers and young children, giving parents a medication-free way to ease children into bedtime.
The project earned Salas $2,500 in seed funding while providing him with the opportunity to learn from entrepreneurs within the Expop program. He plans to attend the University of Pennsylvania in the fall.
“Bedtime has been a problem for parents forever,” Salas said. “If I’m able to make that easier for families, that would be an incredible accomplishment.”
Salas, 17, began developing the idea as a high school freshman, refining it through customer feedback, testing and repeated iterations.
“The hardest thing to do is just start something and get it rolling,” he said. “Once I landed on something strong, I felt confident enough to bring it into a real space and actually sell it.”
Salas sought advice from local entrepreneurs, explored retail opportunities, and began selling at neighborhood events, farmers’ markets and festivals in Chestnut Hill.
“The first day I sold at a festival, I sold 120 pops,” he said.
Salas also credited Expop with helping him transform what was essentially a successful student-run venture into a more structured business.
“I was selling my popsicles, but I wasn’t really thinking about things like marketing, customer research and financial tracking,” he said. “Expop pushed me to focus on my target audience, collect customer feedback, document my finances, and build the foundations of a real business.”
Expop hosts a Global Startup Challenge each fall, designed to guide high schoolers in forming real-world startups. It was founded by undergraduate and graduate students from Harvard and Penn.
