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Comment by sthielen | Hacker News Reader

We're actually at three schools in California--Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Chapman in Orange, and the University of San Diego. We've been able to replicate our success pretty similarly in three unique areas, and have plans for Campus Reps/Brand Ambassadors to help us out "on the ground" at some of the larger schools we're planning on targeting.

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I didn't mean to sound dismissive. I think the early success is great. But I anticipate that the biggest question is going to be "will it scale?". Investors know that it's trickier than 1m+ bucks and some ambassadors. So if you can prove out that you have a model that works (and actually prove it to yourself) then you eliminate a big barrier in funding.

This is not a new model. The issue is it's VERY hard to scale. Proving it as much as possible before walking into a pitch will change the dynamic drastically.

You may also find that it does not scale as well as you hopes... or that managing college kids and relying on them to grow your business is not always reliable (that's a tough one).

It seems like your biggest hurdle might be getting local advertisers in an area. Maybe I don't know anything about small-scale ad sales, but I would think that part of the business would really benefit from having local/regional people doing ad sales. Do you have a way to get around that? Is it a solved problem that I just don't know about? For that reason, it seems very obviously simpler to grow into regions, maybe not expand to the whole country at once.

Edit: I would have killed to have this service when I was in college. Props for making it work.

It's what made Living Social and Groupon both valuable (they grew this network of local) and also continues to be their biggest challenge.

It cost big dollars to grow.

Yeah, it definitely seems as though walking in to the businesses dressed nicely and giving an engaging demo has been a big part of our success. We plan to do some phone-only sales and see how those metrics compare, and then hopefully with the money we can get some people with actual sales experience (none of us have any background in sales). We're also planning on experimenting with some kind of referral system for advertising, where anyone can make a quick $100 if they can convince the local pizza shop to put up an advertisement. Of course, this opens up a whole slew of other issues, but it's something we're going to experiment with if phone sales proves ineffective.

And yeah, the 150-school roll-out is divided by region, they're all primarily west-coast schools, and we plan to launch at a large school and then follow with all the smaller schools in the surrounding areas, just because their markets will overlap and it'll make our work easier.

I bet you could find 1 enterprising student at each school to sell all the ads you need for cheap.

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