Not our first rodeo. We’ve been partnering with Student Governments since 1998. Here’s our evolution:
Hi, I’m Bruce Twersky and this is my family. I’ve been on an entrepreneurial journey since 1998 and all of my businesses have involved Student Governments, College Students, and Discounts. I just can’t kick it!
College Discount Cards
I (Bruce Twersky), launched CDC as a sophomore at Miami University in 1998 and have done business on hundreds of campuses. You’ve seen these before - maybe your high school had a fundraiser. My model is that SGA’s purchase the cards that have 40 local student discounts. Then, they typically hand them out free as a way to get their name out on campus and show students that SGA cares! Still going strong today! I had less orders this year because of COVID, that’s why I started an app…checkout collegediscountcards.com Heck, you can even order some for spring!
College Mobile Deals
In 2008, SMS messaging platforms blew up. I launched ‘College Mobile Deals’, which sent a text deal of the day to students at over 30 colleges. I live in Phoenix and at Arizona State we had 7,000 students sign-up in the first 3 months. The local businesses paid us to be the exclusive ‘deal of the day’ that was sent out. I quickly ‘licensed’ (basically franchised) the business to entrepreneurial students at other campuses. It was a huge success, and within 18 months I had an offer to sell the company to a group of private investors. So I sold the company in 2010, which was probably a good thing because students (and the general public) started to get annoyed with all those texts. There’s no website to link this to because the private investors I sold the company to ran into the ground within a couple of years. Oh well.
College Discount App
College Discount Cards was blowing up again in 2019, but that silly COVID in early 2020 was no bueno. It’s a lot harder to distribute Discount Cards if you’re a virtual or hybrid campus. So I thought to myself “Bruce, let’s start a virtual Discount Card. Just put the discounts in the app. Great idea - I knew you still had it in you!”
So, how it works is that the Student Government pays a fee to join the College Discount App network. Then, we go find 50 local deals around campus, and pair those with hundreds of online and in-store nationwide deals.
It’s been very successful! Most colleges have a 25% adoption rate. They just put the word out via e-mail and social media. It’s still incredibly successful - in fact, you can download the College Discount App right now and save BIG time!
I was having so much fun making my own app, and got pretty good at it. So the company I license the software to make the apps told me I could ‘white label’ the software. Meaning, I could create apps for my own clients.
Since most colleges would rather have their own app that features all things SGA, Student Services, PLUS the discounts - I decided to offer a custom app as an alternative to the College Discount App. And that’s how I got here.
After a lot of brainstorming, I came up with the name App Builder U (like University, duh). I specialize in building apps only for Student Governments. Most app builders offer a cookie cutter templates for restaurants, church’s, gyms, etc. This is totally custom, and it’s ONLY FOR STUDENT GOVERNMENTS. There’s only 3 other apps for SGA’s that I’ve seen outside of mine, and they are from 2016 and not in use.