Alan & Sasha
There have been many new posters up in the business building regarding something called iDeal Campus. We sat down with the two co-founders of the company, Alan Hu and Sasha Yelisyeyev, to learn more about the business, and how to be an entrepreneur in university.
in Groupon ever since it came to Edmonton. I was looking at doing something like it because I thought, “How hard could it be to market businesses to people, and to get deals from those businesses to give to consumers?” That idea evolved into iDeal Campus. At that point, though, I knew I couldn’t do it all on my own, so I called up Sasha. Sasha Yelisyeyev: For me it was around March and it hit me that I needed a job. I was looking at opening up a business and had prepared for it, but it all fell through. At that point I applied to 30 jobs in one night and I was sitting and waiting for something to come up. Alan called me and asked, “How is the business going?” Well it wasn’t going. From then on I was a part of iDeal Campus.
LF: What challenges were there in starting a business? SY: Pretty much everything. It’s easy to say that you want to open up
a business, but hard to do everything involved in it. There are so many things to consider. Do we need a business card? Do we need a new phone line? How do we do market research? Who are our consumers? How do we reach them? We are so fresh in all of this, and are just in university. There is nobody out there who just tells you exactly what to do and how to do it.
AH: One of the hardest things was that we were two guys getting into the tech. industry that had no idea what to do. SY: Exactly. I am a finance major and Alan is an accounting major, and we didn’t have lots of that experience in technology at all. The thing is that everyone thinks you need a lot of connections and money to start a business, but that is really not the case. When the idea is intriguing enough you will get people interested.
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Lazy Faire: When and how did this all start? Alan Hu: It started back in early April. I’d always been interested
Our discounts are usually pretty huge too: over fifty percent off
LF: Explain to us exactly what iDeal Campus is. What do you guys do? AH: Basically, we talked to local merchants around campus at places that students go to all the time. These are the businesses that really want to market themselves to students. We try to secure great deals from the merchants that we can then offer to our subscribers. The discounts are usually pretty huge too: Over fifty percent off.
Lazy Faire’s One-on-One with: By Braden Lauer SY: Our role in the company is everything. Both of us talk to busi- of working all the time. nesses and answer phones and emails. We write the deals and we feature the deals. We do have a website guy who does some of that work, but other than that, iDeal Campus is all us.
LF: How do you go about getting deals? Is it hard to convince company’s to work with you? AH: We had two different approaches from the start. The first thing
we did was we found full lists of Whyte ave. and Jasper ave. businesses, and businesses close to the campus. We would email them a big “journal” email about what we wanted to do. That approach was not very successful. After that, we just went out to the places on our list in person. We pitched to the managers exactly who we were and what we were trying to do, and that worked a lot better.
SY: We actually went through some friends and their families, as well. It didn’t work so well, but one of our friend’s friends had worked in the bar industry for a while, so we were able to use him to get our foot in the door at some places. It worked pretty well, but it was still very hard to start attracting businesses. We are university students. We had little experience and few stats to back what we were doing. Lots of the places didn’t want to make the deals right away because we didn’t have the track record of businesses that we have now.
AH: It’s the same for me. There is always something on your plate you need to get done. I have iDeal Campus, five courses, two clubs, and I am in The Manitoba International Marketing Competition. With all of that combined, I am in the same spot as Sasha. You have to learn to sacrifice your social life, hobbies and free time. What is good about this is that we’re so used to being busy all the time that when we do need to work almost a week straight, we are able to do that. It is going to help in the future. SY: On top of that, we are doing Canada’s Next Top Ad Exec, and al-
most every business competition that we can do. We are pretty much doing everything. We can take lots of stress and little sleep, and still function properly. I did a prep course this weekend with only eleven hours of sleep in three days. I took nine hours of learning excel financial modeling in a day, and I did that for two days.
LF: Sounds horrible. SY: Just a bit. We get used to it. LF: Finally, if you could have one superpower what would it be? SY: To not sleep. So I could keep going.
LF: Any holiday deals coming up? What kinds of gifts can business students go out and buy? AH: Teleportation. I could cut back on wasted time from bussing and driving. SY: We have some ideas in mind for the holidays. Our best idea is to take a little break from iDeal, but our other idea is pretty much the opposite. We are thinking of, “Twelve Days of Deals.” As far as specific deals, we usually come up with concepts about a week before, so it is hard to say. Sometimes it is literally 3 hours before the deal is supposed to go up and we somehow work a deal out.
LF: How hard is it to keep up the business now that summer is over, and how does it affect your life as a business student? SY: Basically, we don’t have any extra time. We’ve cut down on our sleep quite a bit since school started. Time management techniques have been pretty helpful, though. Lots of times I am getting my homework done on the way to or back from school. I don’t waste time because I don’t have any time. It is hard to juggle everything and, really, if it was possible to have negative spare time, we have that. It is kind of a good thing, though, because we are getting into the routine
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