The only thing on Ulife.com CEO and President Barrett Masso's mind right now is spring break.
Last Tuesday, Masso and Andrew Clark, ULife.com's VP of sales, left their headquarters in Tempe, Arizona, and embarked on a month-long trip to promote their new website, which bills itself as the "premier online portal celebrating the university lifestyle."
Their goal: to board their company RV and take a tour of the continent's most popular spring break destinations, starting in Panama City Beach, Florida, and ending in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
ULife.com, which made its online debut on January 20th, was founded by Masso while he was a freshman at Arizona State University. The site offers college students a wide selection of resources, ranging from sports scores and music downloads to an online dating service, which allows amorous students to meet likeminded individuals, whether they are located across the hall or across the country.
The site, which upon being loaded immediately begins playing the chorus to "Yeah!" by Usher (visitors can change the music or stop it if desired), also features financial services, such as a resume builder and a page where students can auction their old textbooks.
"We started the textbook auction so that students wouldn't have to keep getting ripped off by their school's bookstore," said Clark, who graduated from Indiana University in 2001.
Masso and Clark's goal is to create a site run by college students that targets college students, and that covers every facet of student life. Visitors to the site can check out the latest in college attire in the UStyle section, download music and movies in UMedia, and find travel deals in USpecials.
"I don't want any 40 year-old guys working on the site," said Masso, who is currently taking a year off between his junior and senior years of college to focus on the site.
Upon arriving at Arizona State, Masso's first enterprising idea was to set up a laundry and drying service for students who didn't have cars, and hence could not easily go to the local laundromat.
He then envisioned expanding the business to include other errands, such as picking up students' groceries, thus making it a convenient one-stop delivery service. This is where he first came up with the idea for ULife.com, which he sees as being a high-tech extension of his earlier concept.
"People depend so much on the web, and I realized that no one was making an online community just for college kids," he said.
In 2002, Masso met Clark through a mutual friend, and Clark was intrigued by the idea of the site.
"College students are just so web-savvy," said Clark. "Once they're on there, there's just this huge wealth of knowledge."
Currently, ULife's CEO and VP of Sales are also its only two employees. Having such a small staff has obviously affected the two men's abilities to update the site, which is reflected by the lack of content in some areas (for example, Tolstoy's War and Peace is the only book up for auction on the textbook page). However, Barrett Masso and Andrew Clark have grand plans for ULife.com.
"I want this to be one of the biggest dot-coms out there," said Masso. "That would say a lot to all the people who don't think our generation can do anything."
"The slogan for the RV that we're taking on spring break is 'roughing it smoothly'," said Clark. "And I guess that's what we're trying to do."
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