Help us spread our site to your school
So it’s been 4 months since we had our interview with the YC in Mountain View CA. It was a really exciting experience and although my partner and I were really upset that we didn’t get funded, I decided to continue developing the project. I remembered reading a bunch of posts after the interviews were over from many of the teams who did not make it. What I haven’t seen thus far is the story of what happened after the rejection, so here it is…
My co-founder and I were both seniors nearing the end of our college careers when we applied for YC. By the time we heard the amazing news that we had been invited to interview in Mountain View neither of us had even a potential job offer lined up for after graduation. We were pretty much banking on getting accepted.
After we were rejected we pretty much put the project on hold as we scrambled to find jobs. Luckily I was able to get a position as and my co-founder got accepted into the google summer of code program. My employers wanted me to start work at the beginning of June (only a few days after my graduation) but I knew that once I started work I would have no time to continue development on the potential startup. Luckily, I was able to push off my starting date for a month. At this point my co-founder was busy and wasn’t able to help with the programming. But where he failed to deliver in lines of code, he made up in sound advice and encouragement. I moved back home and coded away for the first 3 weeks of June. At that point I had a buggy version of what I had hoped to create, minus a few features, that I chose to drop/postpone. I started my “real” job early July and have been fixing all the bugs up until now.
So if you’re still reading at this point here is a description of the idea from my YC application:
“Our product is an anonymous social network geared towards the college community. The site is centered around a forum where students can vent their frustrations, talk about taboo subjects, or tell stories about their lives. However, as users interact with one another and post their thoughts to their community at large, they have the option to reveal their true identity or request the true identities (verified by University e-mail) to and from people whom they would like to reach out to in real life. It is our hope to connect our users not by their already established social identities, but by their common interests and character.”
PG and company were worried that it would be too difficult to spread our idea. We have observed an incredible viral effect when launching the site at a few test schools. Usually we are able to reach 50% or more of the university within 3-5 days. The problem is that the viral effect does not spread from school to school, only within the specific school. It requires a friend or other contact at the school in order to spread the word. That means that we need a friend or contact for each school we want to launch at.
So this is where I do the shameless plug for help. If there are any college students out there who had the attention span to get to this point then we would love it if you would help us spread our site to your school. We are willing to offer you 100% of our advertising profits (from your school) for the first 2 months for your help. Usually all that it takes is for you to create a facebook group and invite all of your friends, and maybe put up some fliers. Were expecting that our contact will make between $25 and $500, so its not a bad deal for the little amount of effort it takes.
If your interested in helping out please email me: aaron [at] collegeacb [dot] com
Here a link to the site if you want to check it out: http://www.collegeacb.com. I’d definitely love to hear feedback (especially on design and usability or other ways to spread to new schools).