UIUC Team Profiles: Shoutout

Founders and College Entrepreneur here with another team profile. Every week we’ll be providing you with a profile on a UIUC student startup. This time, we’re chatting with Shoutout. Their app is available for download on both the App Store and Google Play at getshoutout.co

Name

Shoutout — The Social Map

Description

Shoutout allows you to see where everyone is around town and check how crowded places are. Shoutout uses your location to broadcast where you are on the map, what you are up to, and to connect with anyone.

Mission

To enable people to connect more closely to the community around them

Team Members and background

Mayank Jain and Mehul Goyal

How did you meet?

We originally met freshman year playing ping-pong in the ISR basement. Fun fact, Mayank won 14 games in a row and to this day has yet to lose to Mehul. We’re now roommates, which makes it really easy to spend time on Shoutout and talk about ideas.

If you could give your past self advice, it would be to….

Talk to as many smart people as early in the process as you can. Getting smart mentors on board and thinking about your product early on really helps, not only because of the experience and ideas they bring, but also because they know how to push you to move faster and get the product into the hands of users.

Progress so far

We have the product available on iOS and Android. We’ve started partnering with local businesses and bars to try and run some promotional events to grow our user base. We ran an event with Joe’s last semester where anyone who had the app downloaded got in for free and we’re hoping to do that again and with more bars on campus. We also received a $1k grant from 1517 Venture Fund when they visited campus to talk to teams.

We send out notifications to all our users on the app when we have free cover deals like that and we hope to do it pretty frequently this semester.

Next Steps

We want to continue to run and expand the marketing promotions we’re doing with local businesses, along with trying other ways to get the word out there, like Facebook ads. We’re also working with different community resources to apply for more funding and learn from the mentorship opportunities that they provide. We’d also love to bring on some team members who can help us spread the app around campus into different social circles.

Download Shoutout for iOS and Android at www.getshoutout.co