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Get people to post events themselvesManually post the events ourselves
House partiesIndependent hosts (ticketed)FundragersSports partiesFrat party College bar nightFamous speaker on campus (has to be A/B-tier celeb)Large campus event with free food
Find list of orgs from school website (almost all schools have this, super low quality, but could find a couple needles out of that haystack) + find school’s event bulletinSearch up popular org name from other schools for that school (Ski & Snow, Indian Student Association, VASA etc)Instagram surfing (engage with flyers to fine-tune IG’s algorithm)
Get into the school’s Snapchat c/o pages (to use for later)Get into the school’s Fizz/Yik Yak/SidechatDJ’s Instagram pages
Open offer of $20 for every flyer someone sends you$50 to host your private friends parties
Biz Dev
SOURCING | SCRAPING | SELLING
101
Since Poppin is a social-media app based around events, our primary unlock as a startup trying to get off the ground, is get events onto the platform. All social-media apps are entirely contingent on the content on the platform which is predominantly crowdsourced from the user-base. Without the content, the app is useless. Without photos from friends, Instagram is useless. Without short, funny videos, Tik Tok is useless. Without events, Poppin is useless.
Our strategy for developing and procuring this content is multi-faceted, complicated, and creative, but broken down into two basic types.
#1 is more scaleable, effective, and valuable but also very difficult and often takes time. So we start the process on 1 while starting 2 immediately so that we can hit critical mass at a new market as soon as possible. At the end of the day, Poppin is an information platform: information about events/parties and your friends’ social activity. So given our primary customer is college students looking for parties, giving them a central source of parties regardless of how they got there is directly serving our core product value.
We have a myriad of strategies for getting people to post the events themselves (1) but this doc focuses on 2 so below is everything you should need to get started.
KEY
Sourcing: finding sources of events that we will scrape week by week to ensure there is content (either on our Instagram or the app). Sources can be frats, campus clubs, individual party hosts/collectives, party pages, school-official events pages, bars, clubs, etc
Scraping: posting events manually ourselves either on the school’s Instagram page or the app
How to post on Instagram: every Fri/Sat around noon post parties/moves on the story. Can be as simple as reposting the flyer (sometimes screenshot and post because highlighting the source of the event waters down the value of the Instagram as the central source of events), just posting black background with white text with an address/info, etc
How to scrape: follow the guidelines laid out below through the rest of this page to find and determine all the significant sources at your school (can be a direct source such as the Instagram of a club that throws sometimes or a dynamic source like the Snapchat c/o ‘28 group). Do two things with them: input them into the Scraping sheet within your school page (see the column of pages on the left). When it’s time to scrape, just reference the Sources sheet to check the Instagrams of each source to see if they have something going on, then scrape it. Also just logging into the Instagram page of the school account and scrolling through feed and explore page and stories should serve you some event (IG’s algo over time knows you want event content, so just click on every event/flyer post you see and share it to yourself to expedite this).
*non-party events like trivia nights, networking events, etc are permissible but only if they’re a really really compelling event of that category (for e.g: John Green came to LMU to do a talk, we scraped this because even though it’s not a party, if someone opens Poppin or checks our Instagram story and that’s one of the first things they see, it’ll provide dopamine and/or relevance to them, and increases the chances they check Poppin again. But certainly focus on big, open parties in the beginning
if school has already launched:
scrape all events to the app
scrape the week’s best events to the Instagram
if school is building up:
scrape to the Instagram only
What to Source 👇
Formula™️
+ Open/Private
+ Event Frequency
+ Attendee size
+ Clout
S-tier: 3 points (rare)
A-tier: 2 points
B-tier: 1 point
N/A: 0
example Santa Cruz Ski Club
Open: 3 points
Clout: 3 points
Frequency: 2 points
Size: 2 points
Score: 2.5
Breakdown
Open: Binary
S-tier: Yes (3 points)
B-tier: Somewhat approval-required
N/A: No
Size: Range
S-tier: 400+
A-tier: 200+
B-tier: 100+
Clout: Range + Binary
S-tier: Kingpin of school
A-tier: Solid clout
B-tier: Somewhat influential
N/A: Not applicable
Frequency: Range
S-tier: Every week
A-tier: Every couple weeks
B-tier: Every month
N/A: Multiple times a year
How to Source 👇
Listed Sources
Dynamic Sources
Move Reps
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