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A Thriving<br />
Start-Up<br />
Stephen Carlson (SHP‘02) & Andy<br />
Ramsay (SHP‘02) have recently<br />
jumped into the dot-com craze head<br />
first, by starting their own internet<br />
company: MyCollegeMarket.com<br />
Q: What exactly is MyCollegeMarket<br />
Stephen: Basically, MyCollegeMarket is an eBay-like<br />
website for college students. Itʼs a college-only, online<br />
market where students can buy and sell anything. However,<br />
our site also integrates the social-networking capabilities of<br />
websites like FaceBook.com and MySpace.com. Anyone<br />
with a valid .edu email address can register.<br />
Q: What inspired you to create MyCollegeMarket<br />
Andy: First and foremost, the success of FaceBook.com<br />
awakened us to college studentsʼ intense desire to network<br />
with each other in an online format. We thought these robust<br />
social networks could do even more for the students<br />
that use them.<br />
Stephen: Our second source of inspiration was the<br />
equally robust piles of junk that accumulated in our rooms<br />
after two years of college. Extra-long sheets, textbooks, old<br />
movies, and hangers cluttered our rooms. All this stuff was<br />
perfectly good, there just needed to be a venue for me to<br />
sell it. The only online forums we could find were poorly<br />
publicized and severely under-used.<br />
Then we realized, the active online commerce community<br />
of a site like eBay, mixed with the college-only, networking<br />
capabilities of FaceBook.com would be the perfect<br />
venue for college students to sell all this perfectly good<br />
merchandise that they no longer needed.<br />
Q: What are your roles in the company<br />
Andy: Stephen is the boss. His job is to keep all of us in<br />
line. We have five staff members, plus “ambassadors” at<br />
several college campuses, who are in charge of promoting<br />
MyCollegeMarket at their own universities.<br />
Stephen: Andy is in charge of marketing. When we<br />
launched the site, we needed to make it cool and start a phenomenon<br />
that would spread by word-of-mouth. Although<br />
Andy had no official marketing experience, I knew he had<br />
the magic touch. Back when we were at SHP, he founded<br />
the SHP Swedish Culture Club— if there ever was a successful<br />
phenomenon, the Swedish Culture Club was it!<br />
Andy: Yeah, the Swedish Culture Club was all about just<br />
having fun, welcoming anyone, and just doing cool activities,<br />
purely for the sake of doing them. I learned that people respond<br />
if youʼll just make it fun. Iʼve really tried to capture that<br />
same spirit of fun in our marketing for MyCollegeMarket.<br />
Stephen: Our SHP education has come in handy in many<br />
other ways, too. First and foremost, the writing skills we<br />
gained at SHP have been invaluable to our work. Anything<br />
we put up on the internet has to be polished, and we learned<br />
how to write and edit and re-write from the absolute best<br />
teachers at <strong>Sacred</strong> <strong>Heart</strong>. Plus, our SHP education taught<br />
us to work hard, but stay balanced. Almost all SHP students<br />
find time to participate in drama, sports, and other stuff.<br />
In our growth stage, we sometimes worked almost eighty<br />
hours a week on MyCollegeMarket, but we always tried to<br />
balance the work with school, travel, and leisure.<br />
HARD AT WORK: Stephen (far left) and Andy (far right)<br />
with the rest of the MyCollege Market executive team<br />
Q: How do your five staff members work together<br />
when they live all over the country<br />
Andy: Yeah, it isnʼt easy— Iʼm in LA, Stephen is in Maine,<br />
and the others are in New York and the Bay Area. We stay in<br />
touch via email, instant messaging, and internet telephony.<br />
Q: So whatʼs next for MyCollegeMarket<br />
Andy: Bigger and better. Weʼre still in our infant stage,<br />
but at this point weʼre about ready to get some funding<br />
and prepare the site to handle exponential growth and<br />
to become profitable in the coming months. With this<br />
growth, I am also really thrilled about the potential for<br />
MyCollegeMarket to do some charity work. In the new<br />
site, we will definitely give students the option to donate<br />
proceeds from their sales to some form of charity.<br />
Stephen: We also hope to empower student artists with<br />
MyCollegeMarket. Itʼs a great venue for song-writers,<br />
bands, painters, sculptors and authors to get some exposure<br />
and sell their art. Weʼve created a whole “MyArtist” plan<br />
that will really make MyCollegeMarket a great tool for any<br />
budding student artist.<br />
STEPHEN CARLSON is a junior at<br />
Bowdoin College, studying French and<br />
Economics. ANDY RAMSAY is a junior at UCLA, majoring in English.<br />
The <strong>Heart</strong> of the Matter 9
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