What It Actually Takes to Run a Startup as a Full-Time Student

A startup is usually judged by its product. Ours should also be judged by who built it: a rotating group of Appalachian State students who had never run a beverage company before, learning most of it in real time.

The barn that became a factory

Every early-stage company needs a place to actually make the thing it sells. Sweet Carolina Water found theirs almost by accident. Max B. Smith, a Walker College of Business alum, sat in on one of the team's meetings and offered up something the students badly needed: a 2,100-square-foot barn sitting mostly empty on his property, ready to become a base for warehousing and manufacturing.

That offer came with months of work attached. Smith spent the following months renovating the space so students could package water there safely and in line with FDA regulations, turning an empty barn into the company's actual production facility, built specifically around what a small student-run beverage brand needed.

What it's really like to run a startup as a full-time student

Ask the team what the hardest part has been, and the answer isn't water sourcing or packaging logistics. It's coordination.

Gabriel Baerreis, the operations manager, has talked about the challenge of leading a team where everyone is also a full-time student with their own classes, jobs, and schedules. There was no clocking in at the same time each week, instead, the work got done in pieces, with each person owning their slice of the business and trusting that everyone else would handle theirs.

Kiera Murphy, who runs the production facility, has described a similar adjustment: learning to rely on teammates instead of just pushing through tasks solo. For someone used to getting things done quickly on her own, handing off pieces of the work to other people was its own kind of growth.

That's really the point of the whole project. The Association of Student Entrepreneurs didn't set out to build a perfectly run company, they set out to give students a real one to struggle with, mistakes and all.

Why the people who run this keep showing up

It would be easy for a student club project to fizzle out once the initial excitement wore off. This one hasn't, and the team's own explanations for why tend to circle back to the same idea: watching something become real.

Baerreis has pointed to seeing the team grow and the product actually land on store shelves as the most rewarding part of the process. Murphy has described the club experience as genuinely encouraging, a chance to find out firsthand what it feels like to build something from nothing. And Smith, watching from the sidelines as the barn's new tenants got their first production run ready, has framed it as proof that App State's business students can take on a real project and make a tangible difference in the surrounding community.

A revolving door, by design

Because every student on this team will eventually graduate, Sweet Carolina Water was never built to depend on any one person. Roles get handed off, new students step into design, sales, operations, and finance, and each group adds its own chapter before passing the brand to the next.

That's also why buying a can does more than quench your thirst. It funds the next student who gets to go through exactly what this team went through, the barn renovations, the scheduling headaches, the moment a production run finally ships, and comes out the other side with something most classroom case studies can't teach.

Follow the current team's progress at @sweetcarolinawater on Instagram, or pick up a 4-pack and support the next group of students before they've even started.