The team responsible for designing Venture Storm poses for a photo.

Hanging out over winter break two years ago, Tyler Denk and Taylor Johnson had an idea.

“A lot of people have friends who are always listening to really good music,” Denk said. “We wanted to create an app similar to Twitter, where you could scroll and follow other people and listen to clips of the songs and download directly.”

Though they had fleshed out their concept — a music app called JukeTree — the senior mechanical and electrical engineering majors had no way of making their dreams a reality, as they lacked the technical skills to build the app they envisioned.

However, their struggle with finding a developer to build the app became kindling for a bigger, brighter innovation: VentureStorm, a website launched March 30 that empowers student entrepreneurs to connect with developers on their college campuses.

Over the past year and a half, Denk and Johnson — along with Johnson’s twin, senior electrical engineering major Tommy Johnson, plus junior computer science and mathematics major Ephraim Rothschild and sophomore computer science and mathematics major Akash Magoon — took the idea from Squarespace, a website builder, to gauge interest at this university for VentureStorm 2.0, the site’s updated version that launched last week.

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“We found it difficult to find student developers willing to work on a project full time, and through our entrepreneur classes and the Dingman Center [for Entrepreneurship], we found a lot of other people had the same problem,” Johnson said. “We decided: Why not create a Web platform that would enable students to connect to each other?”

In addition to this university, the web platform currently spans other nine campuses, including George Mason University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Southern Carolina and George Washington University.

“VentureStorm is ideal for bigger universities because you need a network,” Denk said. “It’s a two-sided market, so you need to balance a lot of entrepreneurs with a lot of developers.”

The team attracted the site’s first users in the spring by establishing a presence at campus competitions, such as Bitcamp, where 100 developers signed up for their project, and Cupid’s Cup, where they attracted the attention of fellow entrepreneurs by winning the showcase event, Denk said. 

One of those entrepreneurs was Adam VanWagner, a graduate student in the Technology Entrepreneurship program at this university, who later used VentureStorm last spring to create AllPlay, an app that enables users to search for movies and shows across platforms, such as Hulu, Amazon and Netflix.

“Our main goal is to help other entrepreneurs pursue their ideas,” Denk said. “So many people have good ideas and want to pursue their own thing and can’t because there’s so many barriers in the form of technical expertise.”

Although it’s free to use the site, entrepreneurs must pay $10 to post a project, Denk said. They must also agree to pay VentureStorm 10 percent of any transaction with a developer.

There are currently between 25 and 30 projects posted, Denk said.

One of the projects belongs to Zach Fishbein, a senior aerospace engineering major, who found out about VentureStorm through Taylor and Tommy Johnson.

His app, InPin, which enables students to easily meet up on the campus, “should be up and running within the week,” Fishbein said.

“I was on the website maybe a week before someone applied [to work on my project with me],” Fishbein said. “We messaged a little, talked in person, agreed to work together and it’s been great ever since.”

So great, in fact, that Fishbein has already posted a second project.

But despite their satisfaction with VentureStorm, Fishbein and others said they wish the site boasted more developers looking to collaborate.

“The only downside right now is not a lot of people know about it, so there aren’t enough developers on the platform,” said Arielle Bitton, a senior marketing and finance major whose app, Flutter, is scheduled to launch within the next year. “I got lucky, but it’s hard to find a good match.”

However, this problem looks to resolve itself as VentureStorm gains momentum, Bitton said.

“That’s not really the fault of the actual service,” Bitton said. “They just haven’t gotten the word out yet.”