Student Startups: McMaster University's DormBooth
Student Startups is a brand new weekly 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 inaugural piece, we've got a trio from Ontario's McMaster University pitching their web venture, DormBooth.
THE PITCH
Want to share your college experience through photos and animated GIFs while winning cash and prizes? DormBooth is a new outlet for university and college students to uniquely express themselves through photos and animated GIFs. It is designed to tackle a very common problem with social networks becoming too rigid and constrained. It’s all about the people you know and has little to do with the people you don’t. In addition, we have added a vital component that users are increasingly demanding which is more than just a social experience—DormBooth provides tools to users and brands to create viral photo contests while offering prizes and cash incentives. We are the only platform that provides brands the right tools to create viral photo contests and generate buzz around their products while targeting a highly valued demographic group.
THE IDEA
This idea started out while co-founder Shawn was attending his first year in University: "I came from a small town called Cobourg. It was difficult making friends because unlike high school you have a very small social circle and Facebook had all my old friends on it but really no way to make new friend. This lead me to create a basic idea that eventually evolved in to DormBooth—an open environment that allows you to recognize and interact with people at your university or college and befriend them."
THE FOUNDERS
Tamoor Shafi, a second year commerce student, is all things business at DormBooth. He was a co-founder of GameDunzo and he has launched several successful campaigns that received over 6 million impressions; he brings a wealth of business building experience, successful ad campaigns, viral campaigns, strategic partnerships as well as media purchase and sales. He is a ninja at marketing and more or less a social media junkie.
Shawn, a third year computer science major, is the lead Engineer at DormBooth, he founded Chat Buzzed that quickly gained popularity and became a medium for meeting new people in colleges. By the time he graduated high school, he already had several years of experience creating websites in PHP, games in Flash(AS3), and artificial intelligence in Java. He now has built up tremendous amount of experience working with various start-ups as a technical consultant or a full time programmer.
Chris Hayes, a fourth year psychology student, is the lead front end developer at DormBooth. He is a ninja when it comes to UI/UX, html/css and JavaScript. He is constantly learning about new technologies and better ways to use them to make things more efficient.
If you're a student entrepreneur and want to tell the world about your startup, let us know.
