University of Idaho senior Whitney Lippincott and UI graduate Ben Hofferber met some new people at a casual volleyball game.
But this was not just an average volleyball game — this one was set up with an app of their own creation.
Lippincott and Hofferber spent the last 15 months creating the YoRally app. The app allows for users to create events called “rallies” for others to attend. It has the ability to create public, private and invite-only events, without sharing an exact location.
About a week ago, the two tested it for the first time by setting up a volleyball game. When not only a friend of theirs, but two strangers, found the game with the app, Hofferber said they finally knew they hadn’t wasted their time.
“Even though we’d been working on it for so long, that was the first time we actually went out and rallied with someone,” Hofferber said. “It was really stressful. I was definitely near panic attack mode.”
YoRally has been available to download for about two weeks and is currently limited to use on the UI campus. Lippincott said expanding to other campuses isn’t as easy as some might think. Adding more campuses is their next big step. He said if they could get 1,000 users at UI, the concept would be proven worthwhile enough to move to other campuses.
Lippincott said they want to stick with university and college campuses as the focus point for the app because the areas are densely populated communities.
The app also allows for community posts even if they aren’t events. Hofferber said after seeing an article in The Argonaut about the Latah Parks and Recreation director wanting to be sure to include UI students in their parks survey, he posted a link to the survey on YoRally.
“We want to find ways to make students feel like they’re part of the community,” Hofferber said. “When I went to U of I, I felt like there was the university and there was Moscow. Yeah, you can go to the Farmers Market or the bars and interact with locals there, but I never really felt like part of the community.”
The two have posted a variety of university and off-campus events, snapshots of their own lives and links to articles. Other user posts have included events on Greek row and an indoor football game.
The focus, Lippincott said, is for users to interact with their community.
“We wanted to push a positive side of social media I don’t think exists,” Lippincott said. “We wanted users to jump into the app and jump out. The point is to get out there with the community.”
Lippincott and Hofferber’s project was full of surprises.
It took six months longer than expected to release the app. Lippincott said the logo took them about 40 hours to design. Hofferber said he spent about 35 hours per week working on the project in between work at his day job.
“We didn’t start with the skills for someone to have bet on us that we could do it,” Lippincott said. “It took a lot of learning to do things we’d never done before.”
If they can succeed in obtaining investors, Lippincott said he would become Chief Executive Officer of the company and Hofferber would become Chief Technical Officer.
“When you’re working on something and you want it to be great you never think it’s done,” Hofferber said. “We have to be confident about it and show that it is a good thing.”
Nishant Mohan
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