High school performing arts standouts are benefiting from a new tool that helps them faithfully demonstrate their talents to prospective colleges while allowing those colleges to make better admissions decisions.

These mutually beneficial developments come courtesy of Acceptd, a company that provides the online platform onto which the students upload videos of their work, and with which colleges can streamline their assessment of the mountains of admissions materials they receive.

Importantly, each successful connection will carry UC’s distinct fingerprints, because Acceptd is the brainchild of a trio of UC young alumni — Derek Brown and Don Hunter, Bus ’07, and Jerry Tsai, A&S ’08 — who conceived, researched, nurtured and sold their idea right on the UC campus.

“Don, Jerry and I have always had a passion for entrepreneurship, the next big idea,” said Brown, Acceptd’s CEO. “We wanted to help students find the right opportunity for them — to hopefully attend the college of their dreams.”

The actual idea was hatched one day while Brown and Hunter were talking in TUC: Use video technology within the college admissions process. They had seen a number of universities starting to accept video essays as part of the admissions process, but this would take it to a new level.

Lindner College of Business professors Tom Dalziel and Bob Dwyer helped Brown and Hunter, each a marketing major with a concentration in entrepreneurship, understand how to prepare business plans and sample business models.

“When an idea is so young, it’s easy to get discouraged, but the support and advice we received in the early stages was absolutely critical and pushed us to continue,” said Brown. “That’s when it became obvious that Acceptd was a product of the ‘UC community.’”

Another part of Acceptd’s corporate DNA is the UC co-op program.

“We studied actual corporations, getting our hands dirty, taking it beyond an academic platform and into the real world,” Hunter said. “That helped us really hone in and develop our skills. And it’s one of the reasons we chose UC and its business program in the first place.”

As Acceptd moved further through its gestation period, Hunter and Brown visited a number of areas within UC — Honors, DAAP, Athletics, and the Lindner Honors PLUS program from which Brown and Hunter graduated. In endorsing the idea, people around campus steered them toward CCM, believing that the audition component made it a natural. And everyone benefited from that first meeting occurring while the Acceptd product was still in its embryonic stages.

“Don and Derek came to me and asked, ‘If we were to build this product, what would you want to see in it?” said Paul Hillner, CCM’s senior assistant dean for admissions and student services. “They came back a couple months later to show us what they had developed, and it was just what we needed.”

Hillner couldn’t play favorites; CCM’s non-negotiable need was a product and follow-up service that provides a state-of-the-art, manageable, high-capacity, shareable platform and database. But it was a happy bonus that Acceptd was essentially a UC creation.

“These guys went after it — they applied for grants, they got seed money, they did it the right way,” he said. “The UC Business school prepared these guys well, they saw a niche in the market, and they have worked tirelessly to improve the product so that it’s very successful.”

As CCM and Otterbein University in Columbus became the first pair of clients, Acceptd was no longer “great in theory” — it beautifully filled a real need.

“It’s incredible how quickly we’ve grown and how receptive the market has been,” said Tsai, the VP of Sales. “We’ve received $1 million in private investment in the past year-plus, those first two clients have become 52, and we plan to double that by the end of this year.”

Acceptd is exploring new vertical markets as well, and is establishing a partnership to help U.S. universities recruit Asian students, and also set up some Asian institutions to accept digital interviews and auditions through Acceptd.

“Our goal is to become a global brand,” Hunter said.