Linking DJs and club-goers

"You're at a club, and the DJ is playing nothing but electronic music, and all you and your friends want to hear is the new Drake single." This is how three Skidmore students open their pitch for the Freirich Business Plan Competition (Friday, April 8, in the upstairs conference rooms of Murray-Aikins Dining Hall). "You go up to the table, you shout your request to the DJ, and hope they play your song," they continue. "The problem: It's loud, it's chaotic, the DJ doesn't have the song in his software, and you don't get to hear the new Drake single."

Dhruv Singh '18, Noam Kahn '18, and Zack Jones '18 aim to solve this problem with their development and launch of AuxNation, a mobile app that enables party-goers to vote for favorite songs in advance of an event and gives DJs time to load these songs into their set lists.

Singh, who is skilled in mixing and producing dance music and serves as president of the Skidmore DJ Club, came up with the idea after DJ'ing his father's 50th-birthday party at a local hotel. "Everything was going well until people started requesting songs," he recalls. "It was frustrating. I thought to myself, if only I had received these requests prior to the event, I could have crafted the perfect set list for this crowd."

He explains, "A few apps that enable consumers to request songs during a show are available, but AuxNation will be the first to enable them to request songs before a show." To work on it, he proposed to Kahn and Jones that they pivot from another business they were developing and instead focus on the new app that "lets users be part of the show."

Mentoring AuxNation for the Freirich contest is entrepreneurial physician Kathryn Peper '78. Describing her as a "very resourceful and engaged mentor," Singh says the team has been meeting by phone with her weekly. Peper admires her "Auxies," who show the same "love for the process of building something they believe in" that she sees in her daughters, both of whom are app entrepreneurs. "That dedication to research, creating, problem-solving, and networking is all part of entrepreneurial spirit, and it's why creative thought matters," she says.