Needing a product or service to market digitally over the holidays, Luke Moberly settled on Buddy the Tech Elf.
Buddy the Tech Elf always liked the movie.
His family watched the Will Ferrell holiday classic every Christmas Eve.
His dad even bought an elf costume and dressed up as the movie’s main character for Halloween.
So when Luke Moberly was presented with some holiday break homework — to digitally market a product or service and donate the proceeds to charity — he slipped into the elf suit, stuck a curly wig and a pointy hat on his head and stood in front of the family Christmas tree. His mom snapped a picture and he posted it on Facebook.
Buddy the Tech Elf, at your service.
Tech the Halls wasn’t his first choice for the challenge that pitted five NMotion Accelerator Studio entrepreneurs — four individuals (including Luke-Buddy-Moberly) and one team of Iowa State grads — against each other the last two weeks of December. (The four-month program helps participants develop a startup from scratch and then pitch it to investors.)
The youngest of the bunch, 19-year-old Moberly, had initially planned on baking and selling dog treats.
“It went terrible,” he said. “We have a dog and he’s not a very picky eater and he wouldn’t even eat them.”
And then he thought of his tech-challenged grandpa, who was getting a subscription to Audible for Christmas and didn’t know how to download the book-listening app and make it work.
And he thought about all of the other people who might be getting gadgets and gizmos for gifts — people like Grandpa — and who might also be on Facebook, social media home of the tech-challenged demographic. (And the Country Club Neighborhood Association's Facebook page has 3,000 members, so one post of an elf gets lots of eyes.)
Buddy got busy. (In real life, Moberly is a 2020 Lincoln High grad and National Merit Scholar in the middle of a gap year before heading to Stanford to study computer science and aerospace engineering.)
He fixed Grandpa up with the Audible app. “Not a momentous thing, but to him it was a big deal.”
He helped set up a home theater system and installed a Peloton app and solved a few more smaller tech jobs — there was only one he couldn’t solve — collecting fees to hand over to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
Moberly had been in band for four years at Lincoln High and had the opportunity to play for Make-A-Wish families. “I thought it was a pretty good fit for the holidays.”
The $335 he raised will get an extra cash boost from NMotion if Tech the Halls and Buddy are deemed the winner by its program director later this week.
And true to his “Elf”-inspired tech mission, he showed up for his gigs in the Buddy wig, although he left the green suit at home.
This week, he headed back to NMotion for the last three months of the four-month program.
And Moberly, the self-described “tech nerd” who made himself over into a Tech Elf, even learned a thing or two.
After spending 40 minutes checking and adjusting settings for a family who couldn’t get their Prime Video audio to work right on their Samsung TV, he reset the cache and the data.
Then he turned the machine off and back on again. Which might have made a lesser Tech Elf feel like a cotton-headed, ninny-muggins.
“I learned my lesson,” Moberly said. “I’ll try that at the beginning next time.”
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Reach the writer at 402-473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.
On Twitter @TheRealCLK
January 05, 2021 at 04:55AM
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Lincoln techie becomes Tech Elf, providing holiday service for the gadgets that outwit humans - Lincoln Journal Star
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