Connecting local collegians
When Ted Reimers attended the University of Washington, he felt lost in the crowd. “It was too big. It was hard to feel a sense of community,” he said.
His startup Web site, www.CampusGrotto.com, is all about giving area college students tools to keep them from feeling similarly isolated.
Launched this fall in Spokane, the free-subscription site provides helpful information, and some fun reading, to students at Gonzaga, Washington State University, Eastern Washington University and the UW.
Reimers, 26, says he knows CampusGrotto is small and incomplete, but he’s doing it by himself on 12-hour days, without any outside investment.
After graduating from UW with a business degree in 2003, he moved to take a job as sales manager at the Little Loan Shoppe, an online payday loan company with a Spokane office.
It didn’t take long before Reimers realized he needed something more challenging.
“I’ve always wanted to create things. Plus, I really enjoy the idea of finding ways to help others,” he said.
He doesn’t like to compare CampusGrotto with Facebook.com or MySpace, the two best-known social networking sites, which draw heavily on college-age Web regulars.
CampusGrotto does have forums where students can chat, call one another if they have Skype accounts, or post articles of interest.
Other sections include news, a scholarship search, a job-search category and a college sports forum.
Eventually, Reimers would like to add video tours of area campuses, making the site appealing to prospective students instead of just current students.
But like it or not, Reimers understands people will compare CampusGrotto with bigger competitors.
GU Senior Taylor Black took a test-drive of CampusGrotto and didn’t find as much there as he had hoped.
“It looks like an attempt at broadening www.facebook.com. I wouldn’t use it because it is too similar to Facebook and doesn’t have any real perks in comparison to Facebook,” Black said by e-mail.
Another GU senior, Spencer Abel, spent an hour reviewing CampusGrotto and said he found things he liked and things he didn’t.
“The most useful feature is probably the job search. I already have a job for next year. But if I didn’t, that would probably be something I would use.”
Abel said he found the site’s design, however, rudimentary and unappealing, requiring excessive use of scrolling to find items.
Reimers said he’s learning as he goes. He’s taken no classroom courses in computer programming and is developing CampusGrotto as an ongoing project.
He hasn’t sought outside financial backing or venture investment, for now. He prefers to get the game plan firmed up, then expand the company when the moment is right.
“I’ve spent a whole lot of hours and maybe a couple hundred dollars on it so far,” said Reimers.
The modest revenue to date is being generated solely through Google AdWords, coupled to college-related articles Reimers posts on the site or writes himself.
His guiding light, added Reimers, is to stay in touch with college students and discover what they want. The focus today is on regional schools, but Reimers said he eventually hopes to expand the site to major schools nationwide.
Reimers said working alone makes him crave the social contact that going to a university once gave him.
“Being a one-man effort does make it hard, and sometimes I wish I had another individual or two with just as much drive as me on the project,” he said.
“But what I like best is the challenge and the fact that every day, every moment is different, where I can be a writer one day, programmer the next, and work in marketing the next.”