A team of two Cox School of Business undergraduate students and one MBA student won first place in the SMU Business Plan competition last Friday.
Junior Jennifer McNab, senior John Cole and MBA student Rick Collins took home the first prize of $6,000 and will represent SMU at Rice University’s national intercollegiate business plan competition in March.
The team’s winning concept is a Web site called “Follow My Band,” which will include a comprehensive concert list providing information and communication services to bands and fans.
“This is huge, because music fans won’t ever have to miss a concert again,” Cole said.
Music fans can register with the Web site and select their favorite artists and choose to be notified when tour dates are announced in their home city or any geographic location they specify. The database will include both mainstream and independent artists.
“I got tired of missing concerts that I didn’t know about, and thought, ‘There has to be a better way to know when bands are coming to town,'” Cole said. “So we came up with a plan for artists and fans, the ultimate product being a website that shows tons of information about bands.”
The Web site will also focus on helping independent music artists gain greater exposure.
Artists can sign up with the Web site to use tools such as the tour syndicator.
Instead of a band submitting tour dates onto MySpace and other Web sites or having to fax a press release to any local tour guides or newspapers, the tour syndicator feature of the “Follow My Band” Web site will do all the work for the bands.
Most of the money generated by the site will come from advertising, which, according to Cole, will be non-invasive. This means that unlike some sites such as MySpace, there will be no pop-up advertisements.
The advertisements on the site will be similar to those on facebook.com, with two advertisements to a page.
The Web site is set to roll out in three phases.
The first phase, set to occur next month, will target independent artists. Phase two, which will roll out in nine to 12 months, will focus more on the fans.
Cole believes that by combining multiple sources, the “Follow My Band” Web site will be a more complete database than anything currently available.
“There are lists out there now but none of them are comprehensive,” Cole said. “We’ll plug them all in to our Web site.”
Cole’s team will compete against 36 other business teams from across the country on March 22, at Rice University.
“It’s a great opportunity for us to represent the school as well as an opportunity for us to get start-up capital to fund the company for the first two years of our growth.”
Cole currently works as a Web site coordinator for various businesses, but if the team is successful in acquiring the start-up capital, he will work full-time for “Follow My Band.”
“One of the judges said that 18 months from now we’ll either be flying high or it will have flopped and we’ll have moved on to something else,” Cole said. “Hopefully it will be the first one.” Students interested in the website can go to http://followmyband.com and sign up to receive an e-mail alert when the site launches.
