Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

This article is a bit old and I first spotted it a few months back when I was in Canada. I love stories like these and when I recently stumbled across this article again I thought the readers of Entrepreneur’s Journey would probably enjoy it too.

The New Yorker: CollegeHumor.com was started in 1999 by Josh and Ricky, who grew up in a suburb of Baltimore called Timonium and have been friends since sixth grade. The site began as a place to collect all the jokes, links, and silly photographs that college students like to e-mail around, and served as a kind of nerdy diversion for Josh, who went to the University of Richmond, and Ricky, who was at Wake Forest. Eventually, they recruited Jakob, a student at Rochester Institute of Technology (whom Ricky and Josh met online, although he also grew up in Timonium), to help manage the site; Zach, a college friend of Ricky’s from Wake Forest, joined later.

The site came to dominate the waking hours of all four collaborators, whose formal educations were neglected. In certain instances, this was probably not a bad thing: the textbook used for one class in e-commerce that Josh took toward his degree, in finance, had been rendered obsolete by the dot-com crash of 2000; according to its calculations CollegeHumor.com should have been bringing in fifteen million dollars a month.

The numbers were nowhere near that good, but they were good enough for the friends to decide that they could attempt to make the site their full-time job. In the year and a half since Josh, Ricky, and Jakob left college, traffic to the site has grown three hundred per cent. In December of 2003, CollegeHumor.com generated $45,400; in December of this year, the revenues were $405,000, nearly half of that coming from sales of faux-vintage T-shirts with slogans— “What Would Ashton Do?”; “I Gave My Word to Stop at Third: 1987 Teen Abstinence Day Suffolk County Public Schools”—which they started marketing last spring under the brand name Busted Tees.

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$405,000 in revenue in December 2004, half of that coming from a website selling t-shirts…nice.

The questions is why can’t we all replicate their story? Let’s analyse what exactly it takes to have this kind of success:

1. Traffic, lots and lots of traffic.
2. Sell something that your traffic would buy.

Wow, rocket science it’s not. Okay maybe I’m over simplifying things a bit here.

The hard part is getting the traffic. Now maybe these guys got lucky, maybe they had first mover advantage and a unique understanding of the market they were targeting. They were smart in one way - what CollegeHumor does is capture the pictures and content that millions of students forward to each other every day. What’s another word for email forwarding? - Viral Marketing. So these guys tapped into a topic that naturally lends itself to viral marketing and no doubt their URL was circulated around colleges all over the world.

The site is not pornography but it does have a lot of pictures of girls kissing girls and exposing their breasts. That’s a formula for success if I ever heard it. The nice thing about this is that it’s all classed as humor, not smut. Sure you may not agree with this but when girls are fighting to expose their breasts on the site and guys are scrambling to get a look you have a recipe for a popular site.

If you went ahead and tried to duplicate their idea you would probably be scratching your head wondering why people are not submitting pictures to your site and no one knows about it. It’s just too late, these guys own this marketplace. In CollegeHumor’s case I think it was a combination of viral marketing, first mover advantage, a very sticky website concept (people spend significant time gawking at the photos) and a market that is very lucrative (college kids have ample disposable cash - they may not necessarily be rich but they do not have many expenses yet either). CollegeHumor also manages to remain “cool and funny” which is not easy when you service the 18-24 year old demographic.

The monetisation clincher was when they started the t-shirt business. The product matched their marketplace perfectly. The shirts are funny and unique (well maybe not now that they have sold so many) and no doubt anyone wearing one would have been considered “cool” by their peers. Heck I would buy these shirts myself if I didn’t have to import them from the USA and pay the shipping costs. Without the targeted traffic coming from CollegeHumor the t-shirt sales would not be nearly as good as they are.

Anyone want to start a funny t-shirt business in Australia?
Yaro Starak