I was a freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill, studying in Cobb dorm late on a Friday night. It was past midnight when I heard my dorm mates thundering down the hall outside, crunk as could be.
“What are you guys getting back from?” I asked.
“Late Night – you didn’t go?”
“Uh no, no one invited me?” I responded
“Dude that suuuuuckkkks you missed ooooouuuut”
Turns out they weren’t exaggerating. Late Night with Roy is the UNC basketball pre-season hype up event and scrimmage — something of a university tradition. I had missed seeing the first public debut of 5 star recruit Tyler Hansbrough.
Missing it revealed a larger problem — the communication of local events, even major university tradition level events, still relied on paper marketing, aggregation newsletters, and word of mouth. Why in the age of Twitter are we not having this information pushed to us? Why were we still having to seek it out?
Imagine if we still communicated status updates this way! So, the idea for Hypestarter was born. Smart calendar social accounts that you subscribe to that pushed local events to your feed that matched your interests. You could follow venues, teams, aggregators, people, and interests. I mean the #freefood interest alone should put a platform like this on the map on a university campus.
A couple years later — the final platform was launched that we would raise investment with, achieve product-market fit, sell to some of the most established local venues in the Triangle, NC, and notify thousands of local users of tens of thousands of events — Hypestarter 3.0 was born.
To hear about the years of iteration, user testing, fundraising, and ultimately successful sales and user adoption, subscribe to the newsletter, the blog, and the podcast.
And while Hypestarter eventually ran out of runway, the lessons we learned from it have proven invaluable to our modest success ever since.
I look forward to sharing these insights with you as you journey into the realm of technology, digital product, and entrepreneurship.