King's Students Launch Platform Connecting App ROLA
The ROLA startup team | Photo by Lucas Drumond
In a three-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, four students of The King’s College are beginning to roll out their platform connecting app ROLA, a business idea that has been four years in the making.
“It’s all about how we can make connecting across platforms with multiple people easy,” said Tyler Sells, ROLA CEO and Co-founder, about the app’s purpose.
ROLA is the brainchild of Sells and Cedric Paige who is ROLA’s chief technical officer.
“I had the idea for ROLA for the first time over four years ago,” Sells said. “At the time we wanted to do it, but the market and social media just didn’t quite seem right–like how people were using social media at the time. So we kind of put it on the back burner.”
According to ROLA’s website, ROLA is an app that is dedicated to removing the “tedious and time-intensive process of connecting with other people.” Users can link their social media accounts, email addresses, YouTube channels, etc., to their ROLA account. When other ROLA users are in the area, they can access each other’s linked profiles, making it easier to connect with users over multiple social media platforms.
In a world where building an app can cost up to six-figures, building ROLA cost virtually nothing due to Paige’s ability to build and code the app independently. While the app might have a few bugs—taking a while to load, occasional glitches, minimal features, etc.—it is a valuable, tangible starting point that most startups fail to acquire in the early stages of development. According to Forbes, Robinhood and Dropbox were successful in acquiring hundreds of thousands of users just by offering a prototype version of their apps and websites.
In January of 2021, Sells brought the idea of ROLA to his roommate Sam Johnson, a King’s junior majoring in Business Management, who joined the team as a Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO).
“I’m working on everything from monetization strategy, fundraising and looking for venture capitalists, to writing blog posts,” Johnson said.
After Johnson joined the team, the group realized that if ROLA was actually going to take off, they needed an even bigger team to help with creative ideas, marketing strategies and developing a tight business model.
Johnson and Sells’ three-bedroom apartment turned into a makeshift ROLA headquarters; the table in their living room quickly became their conference room table, and the white boards on their walls began filling up with ideas written in blue EXPO marker.
“I tell people about it [ROLA] all the time, but there are few people who say, ‘Oh my God, I want to work on this,’ and, so that was Ben and Marcos,” Sells said. “When it comes to needing things to get done, they work just as hard as we do, and that’s huge.”
ROLA debut at King’s | Photo by Lucas Drumond
Ben Oldham, King’s senior and ROLA’s Business Strategy Director, and Marcos Cabral, King’s senior and ROLA Communications Director, are what Sells refers to as “missionary people”: those willing to not just provide support, but to go out and make things actually happen for the startup.
However, the ROLA team needed more than just dedication to the startup. They needed feedback from a professional in the field to be sure that their business idea was one worth pursuing. That’s when the team sought out Robert Myer, a Fellow of Technology and Entrepreneurship at The King’s College and the founder of Nowait, a restaurant wait-time app acquired by Yelp back in 2017.
“Tyler and Sam are starting out like many founders I know,” Myer said. “They are solving a real problem for themselves and their friends. My first thought was: How large is this problem? Do I have it? How many other people share this frustration? I’ve actually heard similar app ideas before. This tells me it is a hard problem to solve, a segment of people are still experiencing it and there is an opportunity to try a different approach to solving it.”
Myer also confessed that it is difficult to discern whether an app based on consumer assumption and network effect will be successful or not, but the ROLA team is ready to try.
ROLA launched on Tuesday, Feb. 16, advertising the app mainly to the King’s student body. It only made sense that an app formed by mainly King’s students would reach the King’s community first. It was an easy starting place.
“I think what we’re trying to do is test out how we effectively break into a college,” Sells said.
And, testing they are. After their launch at King’s, Sells, Oldham and Cabral took a trip to Arkansas to receive feedback from three colleges and universities, including Ouachita Baptist University which Sells’ father is currently the president of, about how ROLA can best meet their needs.
“We went down there with the intent of learning about our product and how much value we could bring to admissions departments, marketing departments, and fraternities and sororities,” Oldham said when asked about the success of their trip.
Their next goal is to host a new student event at Ouachita Baptist University with ROLA as a basis for connecting prospective students with each other and current students. Their more ambitious goal is to break into 10 to 15 colleges this semester and start securing funding by summer 2021.
“The thing that’s gonna get tough is, for it to work and to do what we need to do this semester, we probably need to spend a lot of time traveling to different colleges, meeting with people, and trying to get as much traction as we can,” Sells said. “So, this is in a lot of ways, the calm before the storm.”