Society Florence
June 2013
It was sometime around early 2013 in Florence, Alabama when Stan Collins and Chris Brown started Society Florence. It began as a website to keep up with what bands were playing at which bars on any given night. The University of North Alabama was engulfed in a deep culture of music and had been since the 50s when Fame Studios and later Muscle Shoals Sound Studio took over the music world with recordings from big names like Aretha Franklin, Rod Stewart, The Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Dylan, and many others.
Stan Collins and his team launched the site by covering the town with thousands of stickers that simply read, “I Know What’s Going On Tonight,” and the rest was history. The site immediately began seeing traffic as it was updated daily with the latest shows at every venue in town. In an effort to promote the website, the group began hosting lavish events in downtown Florence. The Society events were a unique take on social events. There was a strict dress code and tickets were limited which gave the events an air of exclusivity. The lines around the block consisted of a healthy mix of stoner college kids and EDM fans, but also attorneys, professors, and musicians.
One wall of the establishment was a chalkboard with topics ranging from conspiracy theories, politics, music, pop culture, etc., and chalk to add new topics. The other side of the venue had a bar that served only wine and water, all of which was free (or rather included in the price of admission.) There were also several artists live painting throughout the event and most of the art did get sold throughout the night. A series of DJs played a variety of EDM music and Stan Collins would close out each event by headlining.
The Society events were a blast and the website functioned perfectly; there was even a bit of profit. Eventually, Stan Collins graduated and moved back to Harvest, Alabama, thus ending the Society Florence project.
Stan Collins Marketing
June 2015
In 2015, Stan Collins had just arrived in Scottsdale, Arizona, and decided to pursue what he knew best, marketing. The business model was simple, everyone would benefit from having a personal website to brand themselves and build credibility. Interestingly enough, 8 years later and Stan Collins has returned to marketing individuals as the expert in their field.
Today, there is a much more powerful system of branding oneself online and building credibility. The marketing system is called Credkeeper™ and it creates content, attributes that content to the client, publishes the content on educational websites, blogs, and news sites, shares the content across social media, generates leads, engages with those leads, and sets appointments. Stan Collins also still builds personal websites, but now that is just a small part of the marketing system.
Wine and Dine Dating
November 2017
Wine and Dine Dating was a brilliant and fun project that started as a dating app before morphing into more of an event-based company that regularly held soldout mixers and networking events. Indeed, Stan Collins met several people through the Wine and Dine Dating events with whom he would go on start other businesses with.
The mobile app itself was buggy and did not exactly accomplish what it was originally meant for which was a Tinder-like swiping app. However, the Reserve A Table function worked perfectly and would later be the basis of a different app. This first attempt at building and launching a mobile taught Stan a great deal about the challenges involved in app development, and more specifically, marketing a new mobile app.
Happy Hour AZ Mobile App
August 2018
Happy Hour AZ was Stan Collins’ second attempt at launching a working mobile app and it was a huge success in the beginning. The app was clean, fast, useful, and easily monetizable. The basic idea was that you could open up the app and it would give you a list of every bar and restaurant in your area and the results were listed in order of distance to you. All of the happy hour specials of bars and restaurants were listed and users would get further discounts at select locations for showing the app to their bartender or server.
Bars and restaurants purchased featured spots on the app and there was the option to pay for automatic notifications to users that came within a set distance of the establishment. The app launched to much positive feedback but Stan Collins shut it down after only a few weeks due to an unrelated issue with his partner. It is such a shame this project wasn’t able to continue but it was another valuable learning experience for Stan Collins.
Dragon Personal Air Vehicle
January 2023
The Dragon Personal Air Vehicle project is bittersweet. It was a great idea and it was exciting for Stan Collins to be in a position to launch a new type of product. The process of going from an idea to building a prototype to creating a marketing plan, shooting commercials, writing press releases, and pre-selling units was extremely educational for Stan Collins. Unfortunately, the company ran into financial issues and temporarily shut down. Stan Collins is no longer with Rotor X Aircraft, but he does work occasionally as a consultant to the new company that is in the process of resuming production of the Phoenix A600 Turbo, the Dragon Personal Air Vehicle, and the two-seat version of the ultralight eVTOL.