Tuesday, November 22, 2011

CampusLIVE plans growth beyond students

By Kyle Alspach, Boston Business Journal

With good traction on engaging college students for brands such as McDonalds, Boston web startup CampusLIVE plans to expand its service to include non-students in the next year.

“We likely might not be known as CampusLIVE within the next six to 12 months,” said Boris Revsin, founder and CEO of the company.

For the past year, the startup has been selling a service to brands that involves publishing online “challenges” — social games and raffle-style contests designed to increase engagement with student populations.

The venture-backed company has been working with brands such as Ace Ticket and Peter Pan Bus Lines for most of the past year. But in the last 45 days, it’s added several bigger-name customers, including Microsoft and McDonalds, Revsin said.

CampusLIVE now reports a user base of 100,000 college students. The plan is to target new users located off-campus demographically and geographically, with the most revelant possible challenges, Revsin said.

Brands will promote the service on their own Facebook pages, apps and websites. “College kids love these things, but the platform works anywhere,” Revsin said. “I think we’ve got those early adopters nailed down. Now we can bring this new interactive media to the broader market.”

CampusLIVE is backed by $3.5 million in investments from Cambridge’s Highland Capital, Waltham’s Charles River Ventures and angel investors. The company is expecting to do “multiple millions” in revenue in 2012, Revsin said.

The startup is especially glad to be getting traction on this model after several tries at other approaches. Revsin started the company as a student at UMass-Amherst in 2006, as a campus homepage provider for college students. The company later began working with restaurants to publish menus and provide analytics as to student engagement, before moving to the current challenges model.