September 24, 2007

StudentStuff.com kicks off its video competition: an interview with founder Geoff Gibson

Today’s college students are more business-minded, goal-oriented, and network-conscious than ever. They have to be; being a full time student is like holding a full time job, and navigating the world of academia is just like climbing the ranks of employment: it’s a group effort. Masses of today’s college students have flocked to community websites like facebook.com and myspace.com in order to access college information, meet other students, and rate professors. But the community website experience doesn’t cater to the college minded; these sites house more twelve year olds and their mothers than twenty-something school folk. Twenty one year old Geoff Gibson, a Political Science student at Cal Sate Fullerton, finally got fed up with the limitations of typical community sites and created his own internet hot-spot for college students only. Studentstuff.com is the perfect combination of college plus community, offering students their own exclusive social sphere while giving them the opportunity to make connections, do business, access information, and promote their own music and art.

Launched in late August, Studentstuff.com has already made a name for itself by doing what it’s promised and giving students the chance to market their creativity. The site is holding its first ever video contest to promote its world-wide-web-debut, and it’s already garnered quite an impressive collection of contestants. Nine videos are currently in the running, each promoting StudentStuff in their own unique way. StudentStuff account holders are presently voting for the video they like the best and the submission that proves to be the favorite of the StudentStuff members and creators will win a ten thousand dollar prize when the contest closes September 27. The video submission from filmmaker, Chris Barrett, has taken the competition’s early lead. Barrett, who owns the production company, Powerhouse Pictures Entertainment, with actor Efren Ramirez, is currently wrapping up his first documentary, After School, which investigates the student/teacher sex scandals sweeping the US. Having been the 'first corporate sponsored college student' (chrisandluke.com) himself, Barrett says he’s excited about StudentStuff and was more than happy to contribute to the site’s promotion.

StudentStuff.com is off to a great start, so before he becomes the ‘Tom’ of higher education, we got to ask StudentStuff’s creator Geoff Gibson a few questions.

Could you tell me a little bit about yourself and your educational background?

My name is Geoff Gibson, and I am a 21-year-old college student from Fullerton, California. I am currently studying Political Science at Cal State Fullerton/Fullerton College. Once I get my Bachelor's degree, I plan to head off to law school, hopefully at the University of California - Irvine.

What was the inspiration behind creating studentstuff.com? Was it a group or a solo effort?

My inspiration for StudentStuff.com came originally as an idea to mass-market metal sporks (spoon and fork combined) to college students. As my friends and I considered the idea, we found that there was a lot of stuff (like sporks) that would make college students’ lives easier and that a website would be the best way to bring these things to students. We brought together a little part of each of the most popular websites onto our website with the promise of more to come.

StudentStuff.com was definitely a group effort. My initial funding came from my mother, who owns a business of her own. I am infinitely thankful for that. In addition, I have two employees who have been awesome in helping with ideas, suggestions, etc. Finally, I absolutely could not have come this far without my web developer, Mark Friedman, and his team at Polaris Blue. They are the best web developers I have ever worked with.

What makes studentstuff.com different from all of the other community websites out there?

That's just it. StudentStuff.com isn't just a community website. Sure, we have the whole communal feel and we provide many of the same features as Facebook and MySpace, but we are primarily focused on the college experience. Studentstuff.com is an overall one-stop location for college students. Members can sell items to other students directly through our shop via PayPal; this is much more effective than using ‘for sale’ ads around campus or listing personals online. Studentstuff.com also has an extensive college database with over 3500 colleges and universities, an entire section devoted to emerging musicians, and a similar section promoting student art. In the next couple of weeks, we will begin developing phase II of our website and adding on a ton of new features. In addition to StudentStuff.com we are planning on launching a similar website for parents – a site that will offer more information about college financing while providing a social network for parents of college bound kids. It's all very exciting.

What are your aspirations for the site? Where would you like to see studentstuff.com a year from now?

I want StudentStuff.com to bring together 20,000,000 college students. I fully expect to hit that goal, eventually. In the next year, I plan on adding tons of additional features such as scholarship opportunities, complete and total customization of student profiles, easier to navigate shops, a video-uploading section, and whatever else our members suggest. Within the year, we will also have our parent site up. We are very big on requesting and receiving suggestions about the website; if we receive a lot of requests for a new feature, we will make adding that feature our next project.

How did you come up with the idea to hold a video contest? What are you looking for in a winning video and how do you plan to use the top contestant's content?

Well while the website was in development we thought it would be a good idea to start getting our name out there before the website actually launched. We knew, from the beginning, that we wanted to do a television commercial as part of our advertising blitz. It just made sense that our contest should be a 30-second commercial advertisement for our website. The video will be shown, on air, down the road (once we get some more advertising dollars). All of our contest entrants have been excellent and the votes keep pouring in. During the competition, we will see which video we love the best and on September 27th we’ll announce the winner.

Any future contests you plan to hold?

Yes, absolutely. The next contest won't be a video contest, however. I am actually going to start piecing a contest together next week. I eventually want to hold art and essay contests, because I really want to give all our students on our website an opportunity to enter a contest. In addition to contests, we will be launching a referral system soon where our users can refer their friends and family in order to win awesome prizes. There will be more information on that on Tuesday.

For more information visit: http://www.StudentStuff.com

Taylor Brooke