For Mississippi State University alumnus and Starkville resident, Brad Fuller, Friday’s Bulldog Bash event will be the beginning of his hard work’s pay-off.
Fuller is the co-founder and chief executive officer of YeHive, a new events-focused social media platform to be launched Friday during Bulldog Bash.
According to Fuller, YeHive’s unveiling could potentially be one of the biggest launches of a social media platform yet.
“If we can get 5,000 downloads that night we’ll be one of the largest social media launches in history,” he said. “And over the course of that day if we can get 10,000 we could surpass Instagram as the largest social media launch in history.”
Fuller said YeHive has received positive feedback and that he is hopeful it will make history.
“I think we can do it,” he said. “I think we can be up there in the top few as far as social media launches, and I think that’d be pretty neat right here out of Starkville.”
Fuller graduated from MSU in 2004 with a degree in agribusiness and teamed up this summer with co-founder Gary Butler, who is also founder, chairman and CEO of Camgian Microsystems Corporation, to turn the idea for YeHive into action.
Fuller said YeHive began on the golf course.
“He (Butler) and I were playing golf one day, and I had an idea for a website and he had an idea for a website and we kind of merged them together and decided to build it,” he said. “Then once we started building it, we added features and things like that and it just kind of emerged.”
Fuller said he and Butler began building the site in July and started fundraising Aug. 27 and raised $300,000 to fund the development of the project.
Fuller said when developing the site, he and Butler drew inspiration for YeHive from elements of current social media sites that have been the most successful.
He pointed to photos as the most utilized element on most social media avenues.
“The biggest thing that has made most social media sites successful is photos,” he said. “Photos made Facebook and photos are Instagram.”
Fuller said in addition to photos and videos, he and Butler wanted to incorporate elements similar to FourSquare’s location service and Twitter’s timeline and bring them together for specific events on YeHive.
“We kind of took elements from each one that are successful and tried to put those all together around the event,” he said. “So you can still look at what you want to look at on social media and have all of that that you would have from these different avenues, but they’re all in one place.”
When asked why YeHive would focus specifically on events, Fuller said no other social media platform has had such a focus, so YeHive would bring something new to the table.
“There’s not really anything in that space right now. There are some people on the fringe of that space but nobody is really doing what we’re doing,” he said. “We just saw it as a large, untapped market.”
He said any user can create any event, whether it be Bulldog Bash or a birthday party, and can use the “Events Near Me” feature to locate events that have been created.
Fuller said the site’s focus on events makes it easier for users to see specifically posts they are interested in.
Fuller said users can find an event he or she is interested in and all photos, videos and comments related to that event will be shown on the event’s page.
He said YeHive is similar to a Twitter hashtag because it gathers all of the posts related to an event in one place.
“You’re in the event, it’s whatever you want to look at and once you post there, it’s there,”  Fuller said. “Even with a hashtag you’re missing a lot of stuff. Not everybody who tweets about Mississippi State on a Saturday uses #HailState and so this is a way that you can get all of that together.”
Fuller said the first release of YeHive mobile apps will be for Android and iPhone users.
He said the goal for YeHive is to grow and show social media businesses can grow out of small towns like Starkville, not exclusively large cities such as San Francisco or New York.
“What we hope for the future is just to grow it and bring some business like this to the south,” he said. “We can do that kind of stuff here and that’s kind of what we’re out to prove.”