While many Binghamton University seniors will be hunting for jobs upon graduation this May, one BU student will answer to just one boss: himself.
After graduation, entrepreneur James Spinosa, a 22-year-old senior majoring in computer science, will continue expanding the two Internet-based companies he started as a student here at BU.
These companies, Fourth Floor Marketing and Group Reviews, generate enough combined revenue for Spinosa to support himself financially. Last summer, Spinosa took a trip to England with some of his earnings.
“I feel that everyone should start some sort of business while in college, even if this just means starting a blog,” Spinosa said. “Even a small business has the same issues as a big company, and it will give you great experience with things such as managing expenses, contacting other professionals, finding advertisers or clients and marketing.”
There are Internet start-up companies that have become wildly successful in the past, and one professor thinks that they are a viable way for this tech-savvy generation of students to generate income.
“Google began as a research project in 1996, Facebook was started in a dorm room in 2004, Twitter first appeared in 2006 — these were all started by students,” said Eileen Head, a BU computer science professor and Spinosa’s adviser. “Every year there are Binghamton CS majors who either contract themselves out or have small businesses to help pay their way through college.”
However, these profits do not come easily. Spinosa started Fourth Floor Marketing in October of his freshman year and it took over a year of hard work before he started to see any revenue. That year, Fourth Floor Marketing made only $7.
But for Spinosa, that was no reason to give up.
“Find a way to do what you love and worry about finding a way to make money off it afterward,” Spinosa said.
Influenced by the example of his father, who owns and operates his own grocery store, Spinosa decided early on that he did not want to work for someone else. He brainstormed ideas for his own business and came up with Fourth Floor Marketing, a search engine optimization company.
Search engine optimization is an Internet marketing strategy used to increase the number of visitors to a webpage by increasing the frequency with which it appears in search engine results through usage of popularly searched words, terms and content.
With affiliate marketing, Spinosa has accounts with different companies spanning a broad range of topics. If he links to a company on his websites and a visitor clicks that link and makes a purchase within a set range of time, Spinosa receives a percentage of the profit.
Group Reviews, Spinosa’s second and larger endeavor, works in a very similar way. Spinosa dreamed up the idea several years ago, but it was when he discovered the availability of the domain name www.groupreviews.com that his vision became a reality. In October 2010, he recruited his close friend Alex Weiser, a recent BU graduate, to help run the site.
“It is a type of user review site that is different from any other currently on the Web,” Spinosa said. “Instead of reviewing specific products or well-established companies, www.groupreviews.com focuses on those smaller niche companies of which there are tens of thousands in existence.”
Spinosa thinks that many of these niche companies have innovative ideas and products, but that many people are not aware of them or don’t know if they are reputable, which is where www.groupreviews.com comes into play.
Spinosa’s vision for the site is that it will ultimately become a community in which users frequently post about the niche Web companies they encounter, as well as use it as a tool to find new ones. Due to Group Reviews’ fast growth, Spinosa and Weiser hired two unpaid interns at the start of this semester, juniors Seth Lipper and Moreen Ang.
“A lot of people, when they find out I have my own businesses, tell me I’m lucky,” Spinosa said. “But they weren’t just handed to me. You have to make your own luck.”
More information on Group Reviews is available on its Facebook page at www.facebook.com/pages/GroupReviews/164100543621031.