Interview: Zachary Suchin President & CEO of CollegeTonight.com
Written by Milov Patel on December 12, 2007
Today, I got to sit down with Zachary Suchin the President and CEO of CollegeTonight.com. We talked about his journey as a entrepreneur and starting up his new venture CollegeTonight.com. I had a great chat with him, and its basically a good read, check it out below.
Milov Patel: Can you please provide us with a bit of your personal background in business and entrepreneurship.
Zachary Suchin: During college, I provided marketing and branding for several different companies and organized high-profile nightlife events for college students and celebrities. It was a very unique situation because the celebrities loved hanging out with the college students and obviously, the college students were thrilled to party with their favorite artists.
It really was a unique melding of the two worlds that I’ve never seen reproduced anywhere else. Atlanta is a very unique town with a great sense of individuality and so the artists there have a very down-to-Earth attitude. They down sit with an elitist attitude in the VIP- most of the time they were dancing with students, performing etc… those were a very special 4 years.
I’ve since been back to Atlanta several times and the scene seems to have changed for various reasons. Atlanta isn’t the new “mo-town” like it once was in the early “ots” and many of the venues I used to promote have since been turned into condominiums.
Towards the end of college, I started developing the College Tonight concept with my partner Jason after a microcosmic success story in a conference called “Emory Nightlife” on the school’s server. While the server was meant for strict academic and school sponsored extra-curricular, what was started as a conduit of communication between myself and small group of friends, quickly turned into the most populated group on the school server, with hundreds of “add-me” requests being processed each day.
We eventually reached about 80% of the undergraduate populous @ Emory University with a strictly opt-in population. there was even a practical sub-module in the group called “Drunk Lost & Found” meant for those who lost items at various events around town, which ended up becoming more relevant than the official school’s lost and found conference. since nov. ‘05, my partner and I have been developing CT.
Milov Patel: Great, well with that information I’m definitely going to be buying stock in your company; Facebook started out the same way heh. Anyways, can you tell us more about your current venture collegetonight.com.
Zachary Suchin: As you can see, CT was started completely organically, through a natural need at one school in Atlanta. My partner and I realized that this was by no means an isolated vacuum in the market and we each put all of our money into creating version .5 of CT.
He put in all of the money he had made over the years from his web design and development company (PhillyDesigns.com) and I put in all of the money from my promotions and branding company. This beta version of the services was meant to test with the Emory community exactly what features were going to be utilized and would be worth expanding upon.
In September of 2006, we had a beta launch event that attracted many people, including the largest periodical in the South, the Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC). We started to get press that we didn’t expect. At this point we knew it was time to take our knowledge of what worked and what didn’t, and start to raise funding for a more official version of the service. We hustled and finally achieved enough funding for us to develop the current version of the site.
Milov Patel: I saw that you guys received funding of more then a million dollars. Can tell us the experience you had while trying to find funding, and what you recommend to new startups..
Zachary Suchin: After we secured an initial round of private financing, we started to analyze an opportunity that arose in the public arena. Simex Technologies approached us with the opportunity for a reverse merger. This is a fairly unique method of raising funds, as we’re one of the only social networks that has decided to follow this path, but it’s extremely helpful to us for various reasons. We have a certain level of liquidity, which really helps us to attract talent that we otherwise may not have been able to secure. Our open market value is fairly obvious- there are no guessing games to play or $15 billion valuations to argue. The market will naturally value the company at a fair worth. Our company’s vision and wide variety of unique revenue streams will soon begin to dictate our young company’s stock value.
Raising money is certainly never an easy task. It’s actually a very herculean task. Part of the game for an entrepreneur is to live and die with your product. If we were unable to secure the necessary funding, a piece of me would have died with the service. Thankfully, I was able to find the right individuals to share my vision of taking social networking and overall collegiate networking to where it should be in 2007/2008. It certainly shouldn’t limit someone to a physical computer, and mobile WAP sites that simply mirror a service are not taking the necessary next step either. It will take some time to prove to people that the future of social networking is largely mobile, but it’s become part of our mission. If MySpace is a NAVY ship sailing the seas and Funky Sexy Cool is a helicopter patrolling the skies, I see our product as a navy ship with an airbase on board. We are anchored on the physical internet, but the CT experience extends far beyond.
Milov Patel: I have been following Facebook and MySpace for quite some time now and its evident that Facebooks advertiser platform wasn’t much of a success, and the crowded profiles and phishing is tanking MySpace. This comes into play when you mentioned that you have a wide variety of revenue streams, how will you stack up against your competition?
Zachary Suchin: MySpace and Facebook are fantastic online utilities. The traditional banner ad model is an extremely ineffective branding methodology. Every study I’ve read has listed statistic after statistic, stating how poor the click through rate is on both of the juggernaut networking sites. This is why our focus is on eliminating such ineffective campaigns within our service. Those SITES focus on monetizing a user’s sedentary lifestyle. Our SERVICE focuses on branding in ways that are inherently a part of the college experience. Overtly throwing your brand in front of a college student’s eyes is not going to work. No college student is going to be fooled by the “punch the monkey, win a free iPod campaign.”
We have several developments in play that will brand in much more effective ways. We will monetize our users’ mobility. Through a deal we announced last week with Jangl, our click-to-call features will allow brands to MUCH MORE effectively engage our user base. Our revenue is also more dependent on a variety of other streams that are less traditional in the social networking realm such as our venue subscriptions which offer bars, clubs and high end restaurants an amazing opportunity to engage these trendsetters and “tastemakers” that utilize our service. They post their nightly specials, and users can subscribe to their feeds to keep track of venues in a similar fashion to how they can their entourage on our service.
We see ourselves indirectly competing with many sites, but as a service I think we stand alone. We aren’t going depend on monetizing page clicks, we’re much more interested in allowing our advertising partners access to their real life activities, which is what we are doing through our 116 campus tour.
Milov Patel: I particularly like the idea of where restaurants etc can keep local college students up to date - good thinking. How many employees do you have currently? Do you feel its important for your employees to share the same drive that you have?
Zachary Suchin: We have 7 employees and a slew of other contributors who help to make this the special service that it is. It’s as important for your employees to share your vision as it is for you to maintain your own optimism. Every ounce of effort counts and in our office environment, everyone is encouraged to speak up no matter their position or where they come from. I value everyone’s opinion equally, from one of our interns, to our COO. Each opinion comes from a unique place and it’s important to consider why someone has a thought and how it’s applicable to your vision.
Milov Patel: If you want people to remember one thing about CollegeTonight.com, what would it be?
Zachary Suchin: I would want people to know that there is an overabundance of networking options on the internet today and that they’re all promoting the same sedentary concept. It’s time for the next step in the evolution of social networking. We plan to mobilize people to understand that the future is in mobility.
Milov Patel: Great, well its been a pleasure talking to you Zachary. I hope you enjoyed the interview, and I’m sure every one will appreciate what you had to say. Thanks again!
Zachary Suchin: Thanks Milov
Posted in: Interviews
I finally got around to interviewing my long time colleague Collin LaHay President of RssHugger.com and WordHugger.com or as I like calling it, “The Hugger Empire.” Collin is a young entrepreneur that’s still in college and manages to expand his website network along side paying for his college tuition. The interview is short, but gives sight into what Collin does and what his network is all about.