College Guidebooks by Students : Unigo

31Aug2009 Filed under: Entrepreneure Stories Author: Bikash

Unigo: The New Type of College Guidebooks

Who: Jordan Goldman, 26

Founded: 2008

Projected 2009 Revenue: Undisclosed

Unigo.com is a site for college students. It houses tens of thousands of college reviews, photos, videos, and articles generated by students. Using the site, both students and parents can get an uncensored look at college and University lives. They can find out the economic, social and political scenario in the colleges and universities throughout the United States.

Unigo.com has received over 10 million page views to date. This site has changed the college resource landscape into a democratic free press control by the real experts- students. Earlier, college resource was dominated by print guidebooks, college admission offices and magazine rankings. Unigo.com has change it completely, where students can actually find out what is happening inside a college or a university in the United States and decide accordingly whether to get admitted in that college or university or not.

Unigo.com is not only attractive to residents, it is also attractive to the companies that target students. Unigo has attracted lucrative advertising deals from companies like Apple, Best Buy, Dell, and the Wall Street Journal.

The Startup Story

Jordan Goldman was 17, when he tried hard to find a good college search resource that answered the questions he had. He found it difficult to understand, how could anyone make so important decision in life by just reading one or two pages in a traditional print guidebook. He found the decision of getting into a college or university, a very big one to decide based upon few pages of administrators written reviews. All he wanted was an entirely student written guidebook.

At 18, Coleman penned the pitch for “how to write a book proposal,” and sent the unsolicited packages to the top 5 publishers in the US. Probably he was lucky; Penguin Books responded to him and commissioned him to produce a book series on his concept. The first Students’ Guide to Colleges by Jordan was released and it became one of the top five best-selling college guidebooks in America.

Coleman should have been happy, but he was not. He wanted something better, more widespread and evolved.

At 23, Coleman started writing this business plan. He had no business background, and very limited savings at that time. In the next two years, he met hundreds of alumni from his alma mater. It took him seven years since he first conceived the student written guidebook to raise several million dollars from private investors and launch Unigo.com.

Impressive Statistics

On an average, Unigo.com has user-generated contributions from 2 to 10 percent of each college’s student body.

Funny or Sad?

When Coleman was hunting for an investor for 20 continuous months, he survived in New York City on less than $20,000. He divided Chinese lunch specials into multiple meals. He also lived in 18 different sublet apartments that covered every neighborhood in NYC.

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