Two UA students are experiencing recent success following the launch of a social media application over winter break.
Michael Jacobs, a business management senior and CEO of SociaLink, and his partner, CFO Hector Rosales, a triple major junior studying finance, business economics and French, opened their iPhone-exclusive, free application to the public on Dec. 19. Since then, more than 1,000 people have downloaded SociaLink, which connects all profiles of a person’s social media to one account for easy access.
Social media networking outlets for the app currently include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Jacobs explained that to begin, one would open up the app on their phone and log into all their social network profiles. From there the app will find phones nearby that are open on the app.
“If you would only like to add someone on Facebook and LinkedIn only,” Jones said, “then you would click those and turn them on, press connect and it would send a friend request for both of them.”
SociaLink has had more than ten articles so far with positive reviews, usually four out of five stars or above, Jones said. As far as changes, Jacobs explained that a new version would be coming out within the next few days for minor bug fixes. In terms of expanding, the duo was looking to include more social media networks to the app.
A challenge for the app to overcome is marketing and gaining users, Jacobs said.
“I don’t think we have slept much in the last couple weeks,” Jacobs said. “But that’s not because we don’t want to sleep, it’s because we are excited.”
Sending e-mails and tweets to all the editors and people interested in the app industry are just some of the things that consume their time explained Rosales.
“We have an article in under30ceo.com coming out,” Jacobs said. “Entrepreneur magazine has contacted us. We have a couple really big names; Wall Street Journal has contacted us as well.”
The app is open to users worldwide and Rosales said that there was a recent spike in users from Italy and users were tweeting to them about the app.
“I speak French and Spanish,” Rosales said. “And I told him [Michael] if French and Spanish could have a baby, it would be Italian. I was able to pick up most of it, but I started using Google Translator and it’s very accurate.”
Jacobs added that the two of them utilize Google Translate a lot and it has been a great help.
“What we’ve been doing lately is trying to get our apps on Japan and China sites, but I have no idea what any of them say; it’s a completely different language.” Jacobs said. “But you can actually copy and paste the entire webpage and it will translate the entire webpage for you and we’ve been getting in contact with all the other review sites that way.”
The two have a coding team based in India, but the idea was Jacobs’s and Rosales’s. According to Rosales, the time difference works in their favor with the two wrapping up their day and sending an e-mail to the team in India, whose day is just beginning, with what they want done and vice versa.
“This isn’t something that just happened.” Jacobs said. “This has been something that we really put the time and the effort and all of our energy into just to get to the release phase. What people don’t realize is the fact that this is just stage one.”
