CollegeMix has gained 500 users for its app to connect students after launching on Sept. 6 during the University of New Brunswick’s orientation week.

Fredericton-based CollegeMix aims to act as a virtual bulletin board for university and college campuses. There are five categories for students to post and peruse on the mobile app: Vent, Spotted, Overheard, Meetup, and Ask. . The app gives students the option to post anonymously or under their own name.

Co-Founder Ashkan Radmand said that he and his cofounders created CollegeMix because they couldn’t find social networks that were tailored specifically to students. Though many students and student groups interact through Facebook and Twitter, users don’t exclusively engage with their classmates on these platforms.

“[CollegeMix] is a safe way for students to engage with their campus community without having to know anyone or engaging in uncomfortable social behaviors,” Radmand said.

Radmand and his two other co-founders, Arash Mansouri and Ali Bagherpour, are all PhD students in engineering at the University of New Brunswick. Another cofounder, Matthew Code, was added to the team in the summer. 

The three original co-founders have been students for the past 12 years, which inspired them to create CollegeMix. After nine months of customer validation they decided last December to build the app.

“You need and want to share information and have conversations with the people around,” Radmand said, “especially when you left a … community and you want to be part of a new community.”

Once they released CollegeMix to UNB’s Fredericton and Saint John campuses and St. Thomas University, they continued to receive customer feedback. CollegeMix has three campus representatives to not only tell students about the product, but also to ask them about their experiences with it. The CollegeMix team also sends out feedback questions to its user via the app.

Yik Yak, the anonymous discussion app, is CollegeMix’s main competitor. The app wasn’t created for students, but that population is its main user. The CollegeMix team has asked users of both Yik Yak and CollegeMix about their experiences with both apps, and discovered that because of CollegeMix’s strict focus on students and ability to post with a name, it doesn’t lose out to Yik Yak.

CollegeMix has a team of moderators and an in-app reporting system in case of user abuse. All users—posting anonymously or not—signed up for CollegeMix with a university email address, so if comments get out-of-hand, the user can be banned.

“I really hope we can make CollegeMix successful,” Radmand said, “not only to be successful entrepreneurs, but also to make a positive change in the students’ lives.”

Radmand hopes that through word-of-mouth—their main marketing tool—the app can garner 10,000 users by the end of the year. The team wants to expand CollegeMix outside Atlantic Canada, and hit all Canadian universities by next year. After that, CollegeMix can move into the U.S.

CollegeMix is focusing more on generating users rather than monetization. Once it starts getting high numbers of engaged users, Radmand said CollegeMix could be monetized through targeted, local ads or data analysis of their users, which they could sell to universities.

The CollegeMix team has already raised $50,000 in funds, of which $20,000 came from the co-founders. The remaining $30,000 comes from New Brunswick programs, NRC-IRAP, the Technology Management and Entrepreneurship program at UNB and the Pond Deshpande Centre at UNB.

By the time they reach 1,000 users, Radmand said the team will start its new round of funding.

CollegeMix is available for iOS and Android. It can be downloaded in the App Store.