Students launch websites aimed at peers

The formula for online success is simple: keep it entertaining, interactive and social.
That’s exactly what three groups of IU students have been trying to do, but they have found that success on the web isn’t as easy as it seems.

Their websites mimic the witty content and social networks of current Internet superstars, but they are still struggling to break their sites into the “popular crowd” of online hierarchy.

Hypehawk.com, whathappensinclass.com and bootydrop.com are websites founded by students and based on user-generated content.

Hypehawk, a social networking site with a twist, serves to provide its users with a running tally of local entertainment opportunities. The latter two sites, modeled off popular interactive sites like textsfromlastnight.com and damnyouautocorrect.com, were created specifically for college students to share college humor.

“A lot of humor is in the details,” bootydrop.com co-founder and junior Matthew Weaver said. “We wanted somewhere where after a party or the next day, college kids were able to post their stories online.”

Weaver’s concept for the site began in the dorms with friend and then-IU student Kevin Lance, who has since transferred to the University of Maryland. 

After a night out, the two boys would joke around and create witty raps to relive their adventures, Weaver said. They made a rap called “Booty Drop” and thought the name was catchy. Within a week, they had checked the name availability through godaddy.com and bought the URL. Bootydrop.com was born.

The site serves the Big Ten, Atlantic Coast Conference and Southeastern Conference, a group of 36 colleges from the Midwest to the East Coast, and has had 40,000 hits since it launched Aug. 8.

But with only 20 posts, the duo is realizing that marketing is key. Right now they are relying on word of mouth.

“With Facebook and Twitter, it’s a lot easier to spread ideas and sites in today’s world,” Weaver said.

Junior and whathappensinclass.com co-founder Sean Fleming agreed.

“We did some research on textsfromlastnight.com, and their site took off by word of mouth,” Fleming said.

Right now, Fleming and fellow founder Trevor Collins, a junior at Purdue University, are relying only on word of mouth to attract traffic to their site, too.

“We know the chances (of success) are slim from the way we are going to market the site,” Fleming said. “It’s going to be all luck.”

Christian Briggs, a Ph.D. student in the School of Informatics and Computing, said it takes a combination of several factors, such as how witty the content is, reader community and site design, as well as luck, to launch a successful website.

“It is important to note that it is not just one of these factors, but the combination of them, that causes outcomes,” said Briggs, whose concentrations are websites and social media.

Griffin Anderson, one of the founders of hypehawk.com, said he thinks luck has a lot to do with online success too.

But the site’s founding group are relying on more than luck to bring success to their site.

Hypehawk.com, a different type of user-generated content site, is modeled from popular social networking sites like foursquare and Gowalla and serves as an online platform to find local entertainment tailored to the user.

Although it is still in the beta stage, which means its creators are in the process of working out the kinks, the website contains features intended to draw in the user and the user’s friends.    

The idea developed during spring 2011 when Anderson was studying abroad with fellow Kelley School of Business senior Michael Mulica, one of the site founders. They were in Stockholm, Sweden, and grew frustrated trying to find social events in an unfamiliar place.

“We started to analyze different moments in our lives where we didn’t know what to do or where to go,” Anderson said. “We decided to build a platform where people can share events and try to solve a problem a lot of us have.”

The problem is either having no entertainment choices or not knowing which choice is the best, Anderson said.

He said in technology, success is all about speed and timing. For their site to be successful, they need the entire IU community to get plugged in.

Several factors go into creating a successful site, especially a user-content generated one, Anderson said.

“You need a good idea, something that is going to provide value and is attainable, and you need to find good quality people who know what they’re doing and a good team,” he said.

All three students and all three sites have one commonality: they rely on fellow Hoosiers to generate content that will draw in the college audience.

“It might sound really cliche, but if you’re passionate about it, you just gotta take risks and go with it,” Weaver said. “If this thing doesn’t go anywhere then I am perfectly OK with that. If you are having fun, then you should go with it. More people should do that.”