For the past 18 months, fourth-year College student Joel Haspel and his brother, first-year College student Daniel Haspel, have owned and managed AliVE Multimedia Group, LLC, a computer services company. AliVE recently launched its first subsidiary company, Bid Outlet, Inc., and launched its first Web site, Auction Octopus (www.auctionoctopus.com).
Auction Octopus is a search engine that finds online auction sites. Auction sites are used to buy, sell and trade anything from collectibles to computer monitors between online consumers.
"Someone puts an item up for auction and they set a starting bid price. Anything you have in your room you can sell, within reason. From there it works like a normal auction, anyone who wants to bid on it can bid on it -- they enter a price they want to pay," Joel said.
"I've seen people bid on anything from baseball cards for one cent to yachts for a couple million dollars, although that's not really common. People sell Pokeman and Beanie Babies like it's going out of style," he added.
During the summer of 1998, Joel and Daniel founded AliVE Multimedia, a holding company that provides the capital and equipment to run Web sites such as Auction Octupus.
Joel is the company's executive vice president and Daniel is a project manager. Daniel said he is responsible for coordinating the efforts of all the employees so the finished product works and looks consistent.
"In addition, decisions about site design and technological enhancements are ultimately my decision, although the decisions are mostly made by consensus of the whole group."
"I am one of the main programmers, routinely adding or enhancing functionality to the site," he added.
Joel explained how the idea of maintaining an online auction search engine began.
"In July we thought it would be cool if we could search all of these [auction] sites automatically and correlate the results for you so you could get to see comparative pricing automatically," he said.
"Sometimes you can find the best deal on one of these auction sites, not on a larger site like ebay," he added.
Ebay also conducts online auctions.
"We hope people will go to us rather than ebay because we want to search everything in the industry, not just a certain selection," Joel said.
He said he believes Auction Octopus will profit in the future because of the growth expectancy of the industry.
"There are a lot of benefits to this type of service. Since this started there are three main auction sites and we are becoming the fourth. The auction industry is exploding. It's huge," he said.
He added that projections for consumer-oriented auctions alone top $29 billion by 2003; the worldwide auction market is projected at $600 billion to $100 trillion by 2003; and business-business auctions are expected to grow by 1,000 percent by 2002.
Auction Octopus hired its first CEO, Jim Senker, this summer. Senker was previously president and owner of Furniture Renters of America. According to Joel, the same team working for Bid Outlet picked Senker through the Monrin Institute, a newsletter that posts entrepreneur opportunities.
Joel also said it is essential for his company to generate more capital in the coming months.
"Right now we are looking for venture capital. The time frame on that is very fluid, because people just don't like to give you millions of dollars without knowing they will be getting something back. Revenue is basically advertising, selling ads on the site," he said.
Joel also said he hopes Auction Octopus will branch out internationally.
"We've had inquiries from people in Australia, Japan and Great Britain about doing auctions. We wanted to use the Bid Outlet name first because, internationally, having a flexible name works everywhere," he said.
Joel and Daniel maintain their course load while still contributing part-time to the company.
"All of what we do from here is not necessarily as time sensitive as what the guys working full time do," Joel said.
Both brothers have said that maintaining school and working for their own company can pose some challenges, but they always put school first.
"My studies just have to come first [and] everyone is very understanding of that," Daniel said.
"[Balancing school and work] is definitely difficult, there are only so many hours in the day," Joel said.
Even though the site is new to the market, it has received positive feedback from users.
"We've gotten overwhelmingly positive responses. We get between 1,000 and 3,000 hits per day, " Joel said.
Currently Joel said he is working to publicize Auction Octopus.
"It's a compelling story because things didn't really happen like this 10 years ago. We're looking for stories in the paper or on the radio. It will hopefully drive people to the site each day, " he said.
First-year College, Emily Harpster said she was impressed with the Auction Octopus site.
"It's much more powerful than ebay because you can compare prices from all the major auction sites from the web," she said.
Joel said he plans on working with the company after he graduates. Daniel also would like to keep working with it, but he plans to keep a "realistic" outlook on the job market.
"I definitely plan to pursue this sort of endeavor in the future, but not really of any desire to be a Bill Gates or anything," he said.
"Running your own company is just tons [of] fun," he added. "In short it beats the heck out of a desk job"
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