Student Startup 6: Reddit Meets Pinterest with Kwantlen University's Boxnutt
Student Startups is a monthly series created by Techvibes to highlight Canada's talented student entrepreneurs. Across the country, bright minds with brilliant ideas are launching businesses before they even graduate from school. We want to recognize and celebrate these ambitious youngsters, who refuse to let studying for exams hinder their drive to succeed as entrepreneurs. Student Startups profiles cover both the startups and the students behind them—in their own words.
In our sixth edition, we've got Kwantlen University student Brandon Kruzeniski pitching his new venture, Boxnutt.
THE PITCH
Existing social news sites have proven to be aesthetically unpleasing, behind-the-times in terms of innovation and features, and in some cases have put the needs of corporate sponsors too high—alienating their users by not having a core focus on community.
Boxnutt.com seeks to fill this void. Imagine a site that allows you to share and discover the things that matter most to you, with an engaging, simple user interface.
Boxnutt is a place to discover what's new and popular on the web, with news, photos, and videos tailored to each person's specific interests. Whether one is interested in insightful articles, beautiful photography, engaging videos, or simply just wants a laugh, Boxnutt has a home for everyone.
THE IDEA
Boxnutt was created to fill a void in my own online experience. As an avid user of social news sites, I've always felt from a design standpoint things could be improved greatly.
There has not been much improvement or innovation with social news sites in recent years. I thought I could do better than what was currently online, so I created Boxnutt.
I started playing around with possible designs for a new social news site about six months ago and then began aggressively pursuing the idea three months ago, launching the site on May 4. Boxnutt allows people to share things on the web that interest them. People use Boxnutt to discover what's new and popular on the web.
When browsing the site, you will find news, images and videos on a wide range of topics like technology, gaming and music to your favourite musicians, sports teams, and television shows. If a particular interest page does not yet exist, anyone can create it.
Similar to the popular website Reddit, members can subscribe to pages that interest them and get a customized feed tailored to their interests. Members can rebox and downvote content to help decide what's popular, or they can submit things they find interesting themselves.
THE FOUNDER
Brandon Kruzeniski is the founder of Boxnutt. He is a second year computer science student at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
Future features of Boxnutt may include the ability to follow people that share similar interests. The main focus will be on building Boxnutt's community to make sure people have the best experience possible as well as grow the number of interest pages so Boxnutt can appeal to a wider variety of people. The algorithm used to display what content shows for each user will continually be improved so users are always seeing the most interesting and relevant content possible.
If you're a student entrepreneur and want to tell the world about your startup, let us know.
