UPDATED: Sept. 3 at 11:10 a.m.

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High school best friends Fabio Xie and Christopher Shih attend different colleges – Syracuse University and Tufts University, respectively – but while speaking during their freshman year, they shared a similar observation. They noticed that there was a lack of information and resources regarding student clubs on both of their campuses.

Xie, who studies environment, sustainability and policy, as well as entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises and political science at SU, said that he’s creating a solution to this out of necessity. The SU junior compared shifting student clubs onto an app platform to shifting CDs and cassette tapes to online music streaming services.

“I was just thinking, `Why don’t we have an app specifically targeted for clubs and recreate the experience as if you’re searching for a song on Spotify?’” Xie said.

So Xie and Shih created an app called C!ub to facilitate and simplify finding student organizations and their information. The app also aims to make it easier for club leadership to post information that would normally get lost or go unnoticed in emails or GroupMe messages.

The app launches on Monday and will be available on iOS and Android devices. Initially, students will just be able to see the platform with no clubs, but the goal is to add 10 clubs a week until they have every organization onboard, from Greek life to art, physics, sports clubs and more, Xie said

The friends started working on the app in August 2020, and one of the catalysts for taking the app to the next step was Xie’s receiving a D’Aniello Freshman Merit Scholarship through the Martin J. Whitman School of Management. With the grant, they would be able to fund parts of the technical side of creating an app like paying for a developer.

The app’s team is made up of 15 college students from schools across the country, including SU, Tufts and the University of California, Berkeley. Despite banding together to create their app, the biggest struggle the team has faced is simply being in college while working to build the app from the ground up.

While managing the app’s progression, as students they are simultaneously swamped with papers and exams, in addition to the burden of communicating across campuses and time zones. They look forward to expanding their team to distribute more of the workload and allow the students to manage their studies better, Shih said.

“Sometimes communication can be hard over the internet, but then we have a great team (and) we have a great bond, so it really stopped becoming difficult,” Jan-Michael Marshall, the app’s marketing lead, said.

Xie (left) and Shih (right) will launch their app on Sept. 6, in time to pick up some clientele at SU’s involvement fair.
Courtesy of Fabio Xie

The app has three main functions: Moments, Search and Announcements. The Moments function replicates an Instagram feed, where clubs can post about all of their events and upcoming meetings, Xie and Shih said. The Search function allows students to find specific organizations available. Once a user is accepted into a club, they will begin receiving announcements on the app. The different clubs on campus that are registered can edit their profiles and announcements on the app, making it easier to notify their members if a meeting is canceled or rescheduled.

The team has proposed their product to 20 different schools, many of which did not think that a student-run app was legitimate, Shih said. The schools wanted more data to back up the student’s claims that the app is going to benefit student organizations and make communication between club leadership and students more efficient.

But the current club landscape can be difficult to navigate, Ben Austin, the president of the business fraternity of SU’s chapter of Delta Sigma Pi, said. Students can find information at club fairs, but approaching booths can be intimidating for some.

“I think that mobile aspect is really huge because you can just do it on your phone, which makes things really easy,” Austin said

The current ‘Cuse Activities platform isn’t an effective way to find valuable information, Austin said. Potential members will email based on the information they find there, but since there is so much within a president’s inbox, that isn’t the best way to communicate with an organization. But on C!ub, all these different features being in one place would benefit both current members and prospective members

The C!ub App founders hope to add a chat function in a later version, where students can chat with the different clubs on campus and in a network with clubs on other campuses. That way, if you have Delta Sigma Pi at Syracuse, they could communicate with Delta Sigma Pi at Cornell University, learn from one another and ultimately create relationships with branches from other campuses.

C!ub has an active Instagram account with different infographics promoting the app and explaining what it is to potential users. Gaining engagement through those posts is key, Marshall said.

“Little things every week, we have meetings and go through the app and go through the current version,” Marshall said. “It’s a very holistic approach.”

On the marketing front, a big task is making cold calls, reaching out to club leaders and having interviews, Marshall said. They try to figure out what kind of problems student clubs are facing and then work to propose a solution to those struggles.

With club fairs coming up at both Tufts and SU, both schools have allowed the app to participate and to gain clientele with the different student organizations on campus.

“Last year, Tufts had a virtual fair,” Shih said. “It actually went very badly for them. So they do think that our app is a good way for students, especially first-year students to learn about different clubs and join them. And this year, we actually have a physical club fair, and they have allowed us to participate.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, the name of C!ub was misstated. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on September 2, 2021 at 12:55 am