Inside WeHUB Messenger’s grueling quest to sign up college kids

Robbie Stone hasn’t been home in almost a year.
His friends back in Los Angeles have all but disowned him. They don’t invite him places anymore. That trip to Paris? “We didn’t think you could make it,” they said.
It’s the same for Hagen Lee, with whom Stone runs angel-backed mobile messaging app WeHUB. When we last saw Lee, he said he had just seen his wife, who lives in North Jersey, for the first time in four months.

“Now I’m good to go for another four months,” he said last month. “She’ll forgive me.”
So what have they been doing with all their time? Launching the latest version of their app, which now features a Tinder-like location-based aspect that lets you do things like add people to a group message with the touch of a button and create groups that anyone can join based on topics like “Spring Fling” or “Best Classes at Penn.” (The company’s 20-person tech team is based in Seoul, South Korea and headed by CTO and Lee’s childhood friend Sangwon Moon.)
But, perhaps more importantly, they’ve been trying to get users for their app. That means spending an inordinate amount of time with college kids. On spring break. At Cinco de Mayo parties. At the campus bar. It’s just another part of the job.
They spent five weeks in Panama City Beach, Fla., this spring, alongside apps like Spotify, Secret and JustSayHi, giving out scads of neon WeHUB coozies and crudely sloganed tanktops (“No curfew, get some.”) (A very tan Stone, 33, said the trip made him feel old.)
They might have had the smallest tent of all the startups (bought at Walmart for $49.99) but Lee said, “We won the fight.” Post-Spring Break, they had more than 30,000 users, up from 20,000 last fall.
They hired four temporary staffers for the trip and paid the beach an undisclosed amount to set up their tent, they said.

After that, they launched a partnership with Penn Relays. The track and field competition was meant to use the app to communicate with participants but it didn’t go entirely as planned because of wireless network crashes, presumably because of how big the event was, Stone said.
Stone wrote in an email: “We actually accomplished about 1/5 of attempted downloads during the daytime each day at Penn Relays… We tried, hotspot, wireless, and all 4 major networks… but everything was slow.”
They still came away with about 1,000 new users, he said. They also had a giant game of Jenga going at their tent.
The pair said that there was no money exchanged between WeHUB and Penn Relays initially but that if WeHUB generated any revenue through sponsored messages, the revenue would be shared. They did not disclose if they made money off the partnership.

Most recently, they celebrated Cinco de Mayo with the University of Delaware, where more than 500 people came to their event.
They also closed another undisclosed six-figure angel investment. Despite that, they’re still sharing a small room in Germantown. (Stone takes the bed, Lee’s on the floor.)
“Rent is just too expensive in Rittenhouse,” Lee said. Plus, they want to stay “forever hungry,” he said.