Like most young people, budding 24-year-old entrepreneurs Adam Cozine and Bob Foster were looking for something to do. So they started a Web site that helps people do the same.
The site was developed last spring by the pair of University of St. Thomas grads as a way to provide a complete guide to fun stuff in the Twin Cities. “We were both sick of using the Yellow Pages and Google to find out what was going on,” Cozine says. “We felt the information wasn’t as organized and accessible as it should be.” Cozine and Foster also believed that while similar sites, such as CitySearch and Zap2It, were adequate for listings and event calendars, none had the thoroughness or local flavor that they thought a local things-to-do site needed.
SotanLife’s homepage offers a series of menus that direct the user to guides about restaurants, bars and clubs, theater, music, and miscellaneous events. Once you click over to the music page, for instance, the site’s search function lets you search for a specific club name, see listings for individual venues by location, or narrow the listings by genre. From there, you can ask the site to comb through listings based on other parameters, such as age restrictions, local versus national acts, and whether the venue is wheelchair accessible. The site also will bring up a map to help you get to the venue once you’ve made your choice.
“The search function is stupid-simple,” Cozine says. “We have 80 different search criteria altogether, so if you’re looking for a wine restaurant within 10 miles of the Xcel Center, where there’s open seating and no smoking, you should be able to find it.”
In order to keep the information in SotanLife au courant, the site offers back-end access so establishments can update their own data. The site also includes photograph-based “virtual tours” of some of its listed establishments. In addition, SotanLife provides reviews, previews, and more whimsical pieces, such as a list of guidelines for making the perfect music mix for home-burned CDs.
The site made its debut in November. Although SotanLife doesn’t yet have revenue figures to report (its income sources are primarily advertising), Cozine says the site averages close to 300,000 page views per month, and that users linger there for an average of 10 minutes per visit—an impressive figure for what’s essentially a hit-and-run information site.
Cozine and Smith plan on refining their site and adding features to it, as well as coordinating a continuing series of SotanLife-sponsored events, such as happy hours. All told, not a bad start for a couple of self-admitted entrepreneurial novices.
“We had a few business ventures before,” says Cozine, then clarifies, “Well, we threw a few parties.”
