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.
