College students Mike Perino and Dan Beneventado went from college students to Discord entrepreneurs. Mike Perino’s side hustle made him some money and taught him a lot about entrepreneurship.
Discord is a free voice, video, and text chat app that is used by millions of people to talk and hang out with their friends. People use Discord mostly to talk to their friends while they play video games. While systems like PlayStation and Xbox are able to play cross platform, the chat capabilities are still limited. Discord allows people from all over the globe to communicate with each other. It also allows for users to find people to play games on different platforms, while still having all the capabilities of the normal chats on a gaming system.
Perino and Beneventado were working on a start-up company virtually, not due to Covid, but because they live in different states and wanted to get involved in a project together. While Perino attends Saint Joseph’s, Beneventado is a sophomore at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado.
“Dan did the programming for our server, and I contributed new ideas, features, and other tactics to ensure we had an efficient platform,” Perino said. “We handled the business and financial sides of the platform together since those were typically bigger picture decisions.”
When Perino and Beneventado had Comet up and running, they managed to get discovered by people on Reddit. The company Discord saw it on Reddit, and they were able to go viral and get a lot of attention to the server. Eventually after being discovered, Beneventado was hired by Discord to work full time and they decided to shut the server down.
With Beneventado getting hired full time, Perino decided he did not want to handle the server on his own as he wanted to focus on his degree at Saint Joseph’s University.
“Dan is more interested in taking his career in that direction,” Perino said. “I’m really proud of what we accomplished, and Dan and I enjoy talking on other Discord servers to this day.”
