GoodCrush.com Blog

Below are excerpts from my first blog post in Huffington Post College on the day of the section’s launch - for the full text, click the link

One day during sophomore year, I was walking in front of the campus center when an idea hit me — there needs to be an easy way to offer my peers (read: myself) a risk-free way of expressing a crush wherein their (my) identity is only revealed if there’s a match.

It was then that I built the “CrushFinder.” Within 24 hours of its launch the day before Valentine’s Day in 2007, 30% of Princeton’s student body used it — and it was incredibly exciting and kind of surprising to see it catch on so quickly.

It was from the CrushFinder that GoodCrush.com was born. The success stories I heard and requests from other schools showed that there was a desire for this service beyond our campus. Valentine’s Day 2009, GoodCrush’s CrushFinder debuted successfully at other schools in partnership with the respective student governments.

GoodCrush was forged out of a core premise: simple web functionality can spark new or enhance pre-existing social and romantic interactions in dense and insulated social networks - namely college campuses. The goal is not to have users spend time on the site, but rather complement and catalyze off-line activities and opportunities. Simply put, we are “connecting student bodies.”

We officially launched with a lot of buzz and excitement on February 8th.  Stay tuned, it should be a fun journey.

With over 4400 missed connections posted since our hectic launch 10 days ago, we’ve had the chance to take a step back this week to go over our numbers and look for trends.

So, what have we found?

Boston College is extra frisky.

Despite being a small school with just over 100 missed connections posted, BC’s have definitely been the most interesting of the lot.  Check these out for yourself..

This past Monday (February 8th) we officially launched. We setup partnerships with around 20 schools’ student governments around the country and had campus representatives at several others. Currently, we have over 10,000 registered users, almost 25,000 crushes sent, over 4,000 missed connections posted. We’ve been featured in half a dozen campus newspapers with more articles on the way and we sponsored two Valentine’s themed charity events.

One of the major highlights of this past week was our launch party this past Thursday (with a solid 200+ person turnout) – some pictures are on the blog (blog.goodcrush.com) and more will be added to our FB page (become a fan! Facebook.com/goodcrush). The other major highlight was being featured on TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/12/googlecrush-parisian-love/) for our “GoogleCrush.com – For those without Parisian love – powered by GoodCrush.com.” As you might guess, the website is the same as GoodCrush, but for Google employees. I haven’t checked the number of activated users since last night, but we were up to 21 at that point, including one match at an office in Europe!

Several of the schools we are partnering with had to delay their launches due to the blizzards of this past week and related logistical problems, so we are looking forward to the additional user-ship boost and pending media articles that are set to come out over the next week and month.

One of the most exciting and rewarding elements since launch have been the number of requests by students at other schools requesting/demanding GoodCrush to open up to their schools. We’ve currently received over 35 requests – including three since I began writing this blog post including one new partnership with a student government – in addition to three requests from international schools, one for the military from a soldier in Korea, and one from the company that hosts our website.

Outside users have created a music video, an instructional video, and as you may have noticed on our blog, someone (anonymously, fitting – no?) at UChicago [a school that we weren’t planning on launching at, but did setup a network for] started making posters for GoodCrush and putting them up around campus without our knowledge.

Our first test run with a user-requested school, Murray State, was a huge hit: http://www.thenews.org/features/playing-cupid-1.2151009. Conversations and newly made friendships with Joe, Gal, Trevor, Roger and other GoodCrush users, campus reps, and moderators have been an incredible source of motivation and excitement for our team.

The past few months we have been working on building an exciting offering with more than ‘just’ the Valentine’s Day CrushFinder – profiles, messaging, periodic updates to crushes, missed connections and more – to see if there is a universal demand for a/multiple solution(s) to the problem the CrushFinder initially aimed to address. My favorite feature is the double-blind messaging that registered users can have in reference to a missed connection. There is still a lot of room for improvement, innovation, and expansion on the current GoodCrush site, but it seems we’ve answered our initial test question and we’re excited to tackle the next few items on our checklist!

Read the article here

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Valentine’s Day Update: We already have a GoogleMatch!

Last night’s GoodCrush launch party was epic.

Gallery Bar was packed to capacity with NYU and Columbia students, friends and family, fellow Dogpatch-ers, and beautiful people all around.  There were also a couple of 16 year olds, but we’re not really sure how they got in..

Anyway, much thanks again to our officemates at Scoop St. for helping us raffle off over $350 in salon and dinner giveaways.   Also a big thank you to Gallery Bar for hosting; and for hooking me up with lots of free drink tickets.

Speed-dating event, February 11th, 2010

courtesy of Yale Daily News

Part of our campaign to get the word out about GoodCrush consists of speaking in front of large groups and classes at our launch schools.  With NYU right in our back yard, they’ve naturally the easiest ones for us to engage with.  So, on Monday we spoke in front of the NYU chapter of the Alpha Kappa Psi business fraternity along with our campus rep from NYU, Trevor Owens.

This was the second time we’ve talked at NYU, since we also spoke in front of the class ‘Ready, FIRE!, Aim’ last week.  It was definitely an awesome experience - we gave a brief introduction to the site, shared our experiences with GoodCrush, and took questions in front of a packed house.  It was great to chat with members of the group and offer a perspective on entrepreneurship - and also just hang out with them and chow down on pizza.

Click here to visit the CrushFinder

Its been a long road to get to this point, so we definitely want to take a second to thank all of the student governments and campus reps involved with making this possible.  GoodCrush has been our baby over the past few weeks and months, so its been awesome and rewarding to see it finally take flight.

We’ve gotten great feedback so far from schools and students via twitter, and are always open to more!- So feel free to contact us with your thoughts and ideas. We’ve already received 10 requests for new schools to be added - let us know if you’d like your school to be added next!

Our posters and materials are still in the process of trickling into schools because of the awful blizzard that hit the east coast this weekend.  You can definitely expect the ‘3882 crushes sent’ number above to continue to spike as the week unfolds!

One more thing- We’ve gotten a number of press inquiries, so if you’re interested in a copy of our Press Release you can access it here. If you are in the city, be sure to stop by our launch party on Thursday at 9:30 at Gallery Bar!

Thanks again, and we hope you enjoy the site.

1. GoodCrush was first created two years ago at Princeton University as part of a student government project with fantastic results— 30% of the student body signed up within the first 24 hours!
   
   
2. It’s private and secure –your identity is never revealed when posting a missed connection, and your crushes are kept 100% hidden from anyone unless there is a match (in which case only you and your crushee find out).  Plus— only people at your school can browse your network, so no creepy profile views from people you went to Kindergarten with.
   
   
3. Missed Connection [(misd) (ke-nek’shen)] – a way to anonymously reach out to the girl or guy you passed in the quad, exchanged glances with at the football game, or chatted with for not-long-enough at the party last night. If they recognize your post, you can turn a missed connection into a Good Connection.  For a better idea of how this works, check out our missed connections page at Boston College, which is already thriving after just three days of existence!
   
   
4. Although the full version of GoodCrush launches this year, the original site had successfully launched at schools like William & Mary, Boston College, and Caltech for Valentines Day 2009.
   
   
5. The site has already been through a test launch this year among the freshman class at UPenn, with awesome results!
   
   
6. Once you select someone as your crush, your pending crush request remains active for one month.  So choose wisely!
   
   
7. Facebook Connect makes it super easy to fill out your GoodCrush profile page – just press the Facebook Connect button, and your user information and profile picture will be automatically filled in.  Also— no need to worry, we won’t spam you with any Facebook notifications or post stupid crap on your wall.
   
   
8. In addition to entering your crush’s email address, you can also crush someone by pressing the CRUSH button on their profile page.
   
   
9. The largest school we’re launching at this year is Rutgers University (52,471 students).
   
   
10. The smallest?  Caltech (2,130 students).
    
    
11. For most schools, we’re currently working towards providing a link to your school email directory on the front page of the CrushFinder – so finding your crush’s .edu email address will be easy.
    
    
12. If we’re not currently launching at your school, send us an email with a request – If it’s a right fit, we’ll send you all of the necessary information and materials to get started!
    
    
13. The CrushFinder launches this Monday, February 8^th!

So this is cool: someone at UChicago made their own GoodCrush posters and put them around campus! This is awesome, but we don’t know who it is as it was done anonymously (fitting, no?) - so if you made these posters, let us know who you are so we can crush you back!!!!

If you want GoodCrush flyers for you school - feel free to reach out for our copies, or take a lesson from our anonymous crusher at UChicago: make your own or use this as a template!

Thanks to Gal for the tip!

On Tuesday, we embarked on the tedious task of packing and shipping all 25 of our promotional packages to campuses across the country in preparation of our big launch next week.  These included four varieties of posters (one 18x24, plus three versions of 11x17), postcards, wristbands, cups, t-shirts, and cupid costumes (yes, seriously).

Easy enough, you say?  Not with our t-shirts massively delayed and still yet to be delivered to us.  We needed the shirts in-hand by 5pm if we were to have any hope of making our UPS cut-off time, which was crucially important to our chances of sending our supplies all the way to California by next week.  Could we pull it off??

Yes!  The shirts arrived just in time, sometime around 4pm. Here are some more photos from Tuesday

Don’t tell Jon. We used his desk…

Matt, clearly excited

Peace out, boxes.

The rest of our deliveries, waiting to go out on Wednesday

Part of what makes dragging ourselves to work every day fun is our sweet office, Dogpatch Labs.

Dogpatch was created by Polaris Venture Partners, which also hosts Dogpatch branches in San Francisco and Cambridge.  Their New York location (where we are) just launched at the start of January, so there is still new furniture and goodies arriving on the daily.

At Dogpatch, we work side by side with some of the coolest and most innovative startups out there like Postling, Scoop St, and Local Bacon.  The communal atmosphere definitely makes it easy to bounce around ideas and collaborate.

The overall package lends to a very conducive work environment - There’s super fast internet, lots of free food to pig out with, and a sweet Union Square location that’s great for meetings and also accessible for our NYU and Columbia campus reps to stop by. We also have 24 hour access, which makes it convenient to stop in to use the bathroom at 4AM while out at the nearby bars.

We’ll have more to come from Dogpatch, including a video tour and profiles from some of our neighboring startups!

Btw- we’ve opened the blog up for commenting, so feel free to chime in at the bottom of each entry

Today we packed and shipped dozens of boxes. We’re spreading love to campuses around the country, will you help us spread the love and connect student bodies?

Pictures coming soon…