Peter Frank, College Entrepreneur

Peter Frank is a busy man these days. Three months ago, his company closed a major deal that increased their business and his workload tenfold overnight. Right now, he’s designing a vision, developing new product features, and selling space to advertisers. Afterwards, he’ll take a business call and reply to emails.

And once he’s done with that, he still has to study for a Psych final and get dinner before the dining hall closes.

A freshman at Wesleyan University, Frank is the owner and operator of the popular college discussion website CollegeACB.com. The Anonymous Confession Board, or ACB, allows users to anonymously post and respond to topics on individual pages for hundreds of colleges and universities. Popular topics include rankings of fraternities and sororities, gossip about students, and the occasional earnest question from a prospective freshman.

Frank was selected by previous ACB owners Aaron Larner and Andrew Mann to take over what was then a well-known Wesleyan discussion site after their senior year. But when the previous college gossip king JuicyCampus.com shut down due to financial difficulties in February 2009, Frank saw an opportunity to take his site beyond Wesleyan. He contacted JuicyCampus and arranged a deal for the website to direct their traffic to his site. Since then, the daily website traffic on ColllegeACB has skyrocketed from about 60,000 hits to over half a million (the site received 580,000 on April 28th, 2009, for example).

While JuicyCampus creator Matt Ivester relied on a staff of paid employees to maintain his site, Frank operates CollegeACB with help only from a team of friends at Wesleyan and an outside coder. A major portion of Frank’s support comes from fellow freshman Phillip Hall-Partyka, who responds to complaint emails and consults with Frank on major decisions. Even with this help, running the website still requires an immense commitment of time. Frank spends several hours a day working on the site and decided to drop one of his four classes after the JuicyCampus deal. Frank says that the change in workload was not too difficult due to his experience from running businesses in high school, but concedes that CollegeACB is “by far the most intensive operation I’ve run.”

JuicyCampus was notorious for the overwhelmingly negative tone of its posts and its near-complete lack of moderation. This is one area where Frank aims to distinguish his site from its predecessor. Unlike JuicyCampus, CollegeACB has a post moderation system that removes offensive content flagged by users. “We aim for a higher level of discourse,” said Frank, noting that while the site was not “anywhere near where we want to be,” he was hopeful that “over time, the quality of discussion will get better.”

Another area where CollegeACB aims to outdo JuicyCampus is profitability. Frank believes that this is possible. “We have much lower overhead than did JuicyCampus,” he boasted, citing intelligent coding and the limited use of images as factors reducing sever requirements and bandwidth usage. The site currently earns relatively stable profits from one banner ad per page, but Frank hopes to attract local advertisers (such as local restaurants) to individual school pages in the future.

Other than an increase in workload, Frank says that his life is relatively similar to the way it was before the JuicyCampus deal. He still has time for basketball and hanging out around campus (where, he concedes, he is “somewhat more well known”), and points out that his job “probably takes up less time than playing a varsity sport.” However, his job does come with unique responsibilities, including dealing with business taxes, advertisers, the press, lawyers, and angry parents.

Looking to the future, Frank predicts expansion for CollegeACB. New features are being developed for the site including chat, classifieds, and user profiles. Additionally, with the planned implementation of better advertising models, Frank believes the website could be very profitable.

Frank has this advice for aspiring college entrepreneurs: “Go for it. The internet has given us all opportunity with an incredibly low cost of entry. Be creative: you know what you want, you know what your friends want, create it. If you don't know how, find someone who can and partner up. We can compete with and do better than adults-use the tools that we know (Facebook, Myspace, etc.). Do something you love, and will actually want to do.”