Fort Lee Grad Co-Founded Localized Social Media Startup

Few cases of juvenile mischief develop into profitable business ventures. Fort Lee native Brian Donohue may be the exception; the one-time preteen hacker is now, at age 24, the co-founder of an up-and-coming Brooklyn-based social media startup called Echolocation.

Donohue started writing code in middle school. “I was writing mostly malicious software,” he admits.

“In middle school I got into some trouble,” Donohue continued over coffee back home in Fort Lee. “The principal called me in. He said, ‘Breaking into a computer is like breaking into someone’s house.’ I never really thought about it that way, but I stopped after that.”

Donohue plowed through the computer programming curriculum at Fort Lee High School, attending three years of elective courses and finishing an independent study in his senior year.

“For a public high school, Fort Lee has one of the best computer programming classes around,” Donohue said, adding that the demand he sees for good programmers in the marketplace makes such programs indispensable.

“Even with my introductory classes, I have students go to college and take computer science, and come back and say, ‘Wow, I already knew everything,’” said Gary Glebas, a computer science teacher at the high school who taught Donohue and points to him as an example of the program’s success.

And even if Donohue didn’t know everything by the time he got to college, he was ahead of the curve, graduating on a fast track from Stevens a semester early in the fall of 2010. He briefly worked at Attila Technologies, but quickly saw an opportunity to set off on his own.

A notification on his phone from Foursquare, the social network that allows users to “check in” and share their location with others, gave him the idea for his own social network.

“I was just like, ‘Wow, that’s awesome. There’s five hundred people at one place in one time using a location-based application,’” he remembers thinking when he saw a friend check in at MetLife Stadium. “But Foursquare doesn’t augment the experience in any meaningful way.”

He envisioned a social network where users could compare interests and converse with people in their location, as well as access a stream of information about their current neighborhood.

Within a month, he says, Donohue had taken a leave of absence and developed a prototype; when the idea attracted investors, he left the job for good.

Echo, the app he developed for the iPhone and is currently developing for other mobile platforms, is like a localized Twitter, where the "feed" changes based on the city you access it from. Users can interact with others in their vicinity and access a stream of information from different sources in the neighborhood.

“You would get not only the people,” Donohue says, “but the organizations, local businesses, and the police and fire departments. So if there’s any information that needs to be transmitted, we’re sort of the central communication channel for that location.”

Capital, the young entrepreneur says, can be difficult to come by in a business where mobile devices have increased the variety of codes that need to be written for a single social network—desktop browsers, Androids and iPhones each require different programming for the application to function. And expanding the user base for his app has been challenging in a crowded marketplace.

“The only thing harder than getting people to use an application is to get them to use it at the same place at the same time. But we had written all this code and we really believed in the vision,” he says.

But while even some of the largest social media companies have faced challenges monetizing the information they provide, Donohue sees a niche in attracting advertising revenues with the localized feed.

“In 2011 it just seemed like a perfect storm. You had all these established social networks, but there was no network that connected people based on location and no easy way to advertise to people while they’re at that location,” Donohue said.

The business model of Echo is to offer more targeted demographics for advertisers than any other social networking site, by virtue of their hyper-local focus.

“If you’re McDonald’s,” he explains, “and you want to reach all the tourists in Times Square, you would be able to do that on our application whereas on Facebook and Twitter you don’t have that level of targeting.”

The company is focusing initially on Hoboken and select neighborhoods in Brooklyn where the demographics are just right: younger, denser populations. But the app can be accessed from any neighborhood, and the company will expand its focus as capital becomes available.

The company is working with investors and has raised about $200,000 already. And as it awaits its potential breakout in the national market, Donohue splits his workdays between programming and pitching, and displays both a quiet confidence in his own ability and an awareness of the challenges he faces in the world of startups.

“I think there are few times in life where you’re set up for failure,” he says. “When you’re starting a business the odds are way against you, and you need to understand that.”