In college, I remember a surefire way to put a damper on parties was when some middle-aged alumni or even neighbors decided to crash, acting like they belonged there. There’s just something about having an outsider infiltrating the student Circle of Trust that’s kind of creepy.
A share of startup founders feel the same way and have purposefully designed their apps or sites so that they require users to have a .edu email address to partake. Their reasoning has ranged from safety concerns to the pure allure of exclusivity.
A secure place for students
All of this isn’t a novel concept. As most of us more mature folks can recall, Facebook used to be solely reserved for students. (Those were the good old days when you wouldn’t have to deal with mortifying comments from your Great Aunt Mary). And while I wouldn’t call a handful of companies limiting their availability to college students a trend, it is intriguing that some startups keep trying out this business model and narrowing their sights to such a specific pool of users.
Two Boston-based startups come to mind when I think of young companies currently employing this practice. Coincidentally, they’re both run by BU students.
UNItiques, a startup founded by now BU alumna Alexandra Shadrow, is an online marketplace. Through this site, college kids can sell any unwanted items - including clothing, furniture and electronics - they may have other students. In the past, Shadrow has told us that requiring users to have a .edu makes UNItiques a less sketchy option than Craigslist.
Then there’s Sub-It. BU students Mara Onita Lenco and Joanna Kimszal are working on a platform that allows students to sublet from each other. During two of their pitches that I’ve heard so far, they’ve emphasized that the foundation of their company is to keep it .edu only. The founders maintain that an exclusively college environment will enable students to find more pleasant and safer living situations - once again, unlike Craigslist.
The first time I met Onita Lenco at the BUzz Lab, she explained, "We want to give students a better option for finding sublets than Craigslist. We'd be more of an Airbnb for subletting, except everything would be peer-to-peer so it's more reliable."
But does it work?
Now, let’s stop and think here.
Facebook, after years of being limited to .edu users, eventually decided to remove this requirement. In 2006, it opened its doors to everyone else. The social media powerhouse was going strong well before it became available to everyone, but would Zuckerberg’s site have become the empire that it is without having done so? Maybe.
At the same time, look at the recently tanked startup Wigo. The app let students find out where their friends were going out for the night, and for most of its existence was only open to .edu users. The exact reasons behind Wigo vanishing are unknown. However, I can’t help but think a bigger user base could have kept it around. (The startup did open up its "Wigo Summer" app to non-.edu users earlier this year, but it apparently was too late to preserve the company.)
So it begs the question: Does .edu exclusivity really help student startups, or does it end up hindering them? There’s no doubt that students make up a most-coveted user demographic. But in my opinion, the jury’s still out on depending solely on college kids to build a user base.
