DormNoise and Jay Rodrigues, its 21 year-old founder, Wednesday announced the company has taken a $500,000 investment from DN Ventures LLC and Present e-Learning Systems Inc.
on May 09
DormNoise
is an interactive student calendar system that gives students a series of
interconnected personal, student group, and campus-wide calendars to organize
all of their student events, and lets them sync everything to the most popular
calendar applications and smartphones.
By
implementing DormNoise, colleges or universities gain access to a feature set
that will dramatically improve:
1. Communication on a campus-wide basis
2. Student organization, engagement, and awareness
3. Student participation in events and student groups
Team
Jay Rodrigues, Founder
and CEO
Jay Rodrigues is a 21 year old junior at the Wharton School
of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Jay is responsible for leading
the development of new features, expanding revenue channels, and overseeing
sales, marketing, and operations.
Dan Freeman, Vice
President of Sales and Marketing
From 2001 through the Fall of 2009, Dan worked as the Vice
President of Sales and Marketing at Digital Business Architects, a firm which
specializes in helping companies manage technology complexities by providing
application development, systems integration, outsourcing services, and IT
Consulting. Dan managed a team of 10 salespeople and successfully negotiated
multi-million dollar contracts with CTO’s, CIO’s, and Executive Vice Presidents
of Fortune 500 Companies, including Wal-Mart, General Mills, Gillette and
Ericsson. Over his 9 year stint at Digital Business Architects, Dan increased
annual sales revenue from $3.2 million to $16.5 million. Dan has not only
proven himself as both an incredible salesman and sales manager, but he also
has experience in selling products and services to colleges and universities.
Dan is responsible for leading our efforts to contract colleges and
universities to use our product.
Dustin Stirpe-Operations Manager
Dustin Stirpe, Director
of Operations
Dustin Stirpe, a 24 year old who served in Iraq, graduated
from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in finance in May 2009. Dustin
is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of DormNoise starting
September 1, 2009.
Business model
DormNoise has a
subscription based, SAAS business model.
·Colleges that wish to use DormNoise
must pay a subscription fee of approximately $2 per student per year (see the
“DormNoise_Standard_Product_Pricing” document for a complete breakdown of
DormNoise pricing).
Competitive advantage
Dor DormNoise is the only true interactive student calendar
system on the market. The only productsthat are similar to DormNoise are uHub, OrgSync,
and Collegiate Link:
·uHub is a student event management
software with a feature set far less advanced than DormNoise. For example, uHub
does not give student organizations their own calendars, has no mobile phone
syncing functionality, gives students very little control over what campus
events are added to their personal calendars, and does not have an email
notification system. Further, uHub is only used on two college campuses:
Northwestern University and the University of Maryland.
·Unlike DormNoise, OrgSync is a student
organization management software. It has some calendaring functionality (which
is inferior to DormNoise in every respect), yet it is an ancillary feature of
their product.
·Collegiate Link is an online platform
with four different products: StudentLink Groups, Co-Curricular
Management, StudentLink Finance, and Career and Graduate Portfolio. StudentLink
Groups is the only product that is similar to DormNoise as it is a student
organization and event management software. However, unlike DormNoise,
StudentLink Groups does not give students much administrative control over
their personal calendars, does not allow students to create events with
classmates or upload their course schedules/assignment due dates, does not
feature mobile phone syncing, and has far less advanced syncing to desktop
calendar applications.