College Hotlist is a student-exclusive platform that acts as an interactive guide to everything happening on campus, off campus and among your friends. The site allows you to stay in the loop and effortlessly coordinate your social life.

From napkin to reality

It was our senior year of college, and a group of us (four friends) were headed out for a big night in the city. It was one of those bust nights: we paid too much, the crowd sucked and our friends were all over the place. We realized there had to be a better way.

Later that night, we started sketching ideas on a napkin. A few weeks later we launched a small website to help organize our friends. People noticed. Soon after, our tiny site got over 14,000 visitors in one night! The site crashed (we had no money for extra servers) but people kept coming. We knew we were onto something.

So, on a whim and badly in need of cash, we entered the Stern Business Plan Competition. We were the youngest team, but ended up winning first place along with the $25,000 prize. We took the prize and used it to build our vision. Since we couldn't afford an office, NYU gave us a dorm room (Yup, back at Carlyle.)

A few months later, four friends turned into five, then ten. Now we're more than thirty strong. As our vision spread, word of our project hit campus. Hotlist was anything but traditional, wrote NYU's Washington Square News. It was the biggest compliment we could have gotten.

We've come a long way since then, but Hotlist isn't perfect yet. We're working hard to provide you with a useful and unique all-in-one social and academic networking experience. We are inviting NYU and Columbia to join, and to tell us what you think.

So log in, see what's happening and then go out and do it.