The Group Runner: Management Simplified

Congratulations to The Group Runner for placing 2nd in the Boston College Venture Competition. College Mogul competed against them and know it was a very close call. I was particularly impressed with Gerren Scoon's coding and design skills; the site is indisputably well put together. For those of you looking to enter a similar competition, the judges emphasized that they placed high due to their ability to actually showcase a product that is well produced (not necessary, but always gives you an edge), present a clear value proposition, a coherent and confident presentation, and understanding of the market they are entering. The Group Runner is an application for campus clubs and organizations offering a suite of tools including calendaring capabilities, messaging, event management, document sharing and an interface to build customizable t-shirts, which can then be ordered right on the site (Group Runner splits the profits with the printing companies). The site offers a comprehensive approach to group management, yet it is incredibly intuitive and the Ajax integration makes it easy to navigate and edit. We just covered another group management application, and may see both of these companies competing. But at least for the short run, GroupTable is focusing on study groups while the Group Runner aims to take organizations and clubs. The biggest key for Group Runner is to acquire all or as many organizations on campus. Campus information is typically fragmented and difficult to find, meaning it will become increasingly valuable when a user can search for all club activities and events on one page. To achieve this goal, it would be smart for them to partner with student government organizations to deploy a top-down marketing initiative at universities. Group management applications for college students is a very fragmented (and growing) market with many players. I would really like to see a couple of these startups who offer different services partner and leverage each other's marketing efforts to form a powerful conglomerate. Without this, I think it will be hard for anyone to gain any significant market share across the country due to the fact that these applications may be viral within a campus, but not from campus to campus.