Got a problem? Build a business.

Most prospective college students submit several applications. Allen Gannett fired off just one, to George Washington University, then threw up his hands and crossed his fingers.

“Looking back, what frustrated me was there were so many schools I could have gotten into ... but I was so overwhelmed,” said Gannett, now a senior at GW. “That’s solely based on the fact that information gathering is so hard for college search.”

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So Gannett turned his problem into a business opportunity. Last month his Web startup, CampusSplash, debuted an online question-and-answer forum for prospective students.

The idea isn’t exactly novel. Plenty of resources claim to be the go-to college guide. But Gannett tapped his own experience as a college student to find a niche between U.S. News and World Report rankings and the promotional materials put out by universities.

The result is an open discussion where any question goes — “Is Cornell really the worst Ivy?” or “What percent of New York University is LGBT?” — and the answers come crowd-sourced from students, alumni, admissions reps or anyone else with an Internet connection.

“The beauty of the crowd is you can have 30 people answer one question, and you can have 300 people vote for which answer is the best, and in the end you have a pretty darn good answer,” Gannett said.

Gannett is hardly the only student launching a business these days. A growing number of young entrepreneurs have been bit by the startup bug, and many find their inspiration from their personal experiences.

College students tackling their own education-related issues through entre­pre­neur­ship is something Neil Shah sees everyday. The recent Georgetown University graduate and several friends founded Compass Partners while they were still students to help college students turn ideas into businesses.

Now he serves as executive director of the organization, which received a $500,000 grant from fashion designer Kenneth Cole earlier this year and has chapters on 10 campuses nationwide.

“Every entrepreneur thinks, ‘What’s the problem I can solve?’” Shah said. “But their problem is usually pretty localized and [students’] local community is their college campus.”

That’s part of the reason Farhan Daredia, also a senior at GW, built his textbook rental business. Bookstore Genie guarantees lower textbook rental prices than competitors by purchasing used books from the start and leasing Amazon warehouse space.

“Not owning a warehouse and having the employees associated with it helps contain the costs,” he said. “It’s all about penny pinching to build a business.”

But the venture has attracted more than mere pennies to get up and running. Daredia won $20,000 earlier this year in GW’s business plan competition and raised additional money from investors, part of which was used to hire two salespeople.

“I need to start making money so that I can continue doing this and right now it looks like I’m set, so I’m looking forward to doing this for years to come,” he said.

Statistically, far more startups fail than succeed. But as more students launch businesses while still in school or shortly thereafter, and gain experience, Shah at Compass Partners said that entre­pre­neur­ship can be a viable career path.

“A lot of young people see that [career] as just being a few steps away, so the idea of being an entrepreneur coming right out of school is getting more and more popular,” he said.