It doesn’t matter how prepared you are — course selection day is a gong-show. CRNs get mixed up and you end up in a closed section; your bird-to-hard course ratio veers off course as one of your choices, normally the bird, fills up; you’re in the winter section applying for fall, and none of your courses are valid. Or you sleep through your alarm and miss the entire thing, left to dig through what’s left.
For McGill students, the solution to these qualms comes in the form of a website, with shrouded origins and a dead-simple user experience, called Seat Alert.
Seat Alert, for the shrinking minority that has never heard of it, is a service that notifies students when free spaces open in full courses or their waitlists. Using Seat Alert is a straightforward process that involves paying two dollars to receive text updates as spots open in a class you’re interested in. Because of the demand for certain classes at McGill, that notice is crucial. If at the start of the year you hear a text chime at the library followed by rabid typing, that person probably just got a Seat Alert.
Despite its growing presence on campus, the history of the website remains obscure; some peers I spoke to even thought it was an official McGill website. The interface, anachronistically simple at a time when anyone can build a glitzy website in one or two AI prompts, stands out. The website gives one nod to its origin at its very bottom: the name Ethan McAuliffe, in small print.
To learn more about the story of Seat Alert, and why it looks so unique on the internet today, I decided to give him a call. As it turns out, the complete lack of ads, branding, or any commercial zeal isn’t an accident. Ethan has it exactly as he wants it.
Ethan is from Toronto, and began as a student at McMaster in 2018, where he completed a joint degree in engineering and business. In 2021, as COVID-19 put school online, Ethan opted instead to do a co-op, one of many during his degree. During this time, he found himself driving his sister and her friends to their university of choice — McGill — for th start of term. On the road, the topic of course selection and how difficult it was to get the schedule you wanted came up. A friend in the car then mentioned a service called Get A Seat, where McGill students could pay to be notified when space in a class opened up. This type of service was new to Ethan as nothing like it was offered at McMaster; but was one that he knew would be appreciated, especially given the lack of waitlists at his school. Ethan, armed with the necessary technical abilities, decided to build a similar website for McMaster.
The service was a quick hit, spread only by word of mouth. In time, while McMaster remained the most active hub, Ethan expanded the service to Laurier and other schools, though Seat Alert is now no longer offered at them. Despite having connections at McGill, there was no need for his service here; it remained Get A Seat’s territory, and Ethan didn’t strike me as the Machiavellian type. During this time, Ethan reached out to the creator of the service looking for advice on how to grow his own, but never got a response.
It remained this way until 2023, when Ethan received an email from a student at McGill inquiring about whether he had any plans to spread Seat Alert to Montreal. Get A Seat had shut down, he was told, supposedly because of a routing issue. Ethan figured out how to fix the error and launched his service at McGill that same year. At the start, it was free for McGill students as Ethan expected more errors to come and didn’t feel that charging people during that time was good practice. He also knew that a free service would spread quickly — and it did just that. He attributed this to a market in need, and Seat Alert showing up as the first result when anyone searched for the now-defunct Get A Seat. To get the word out further, Ethan also posted on the McGill subreddit and got his sister to spread the word to friends. He didn’t pay for any marketing, and instead focused on making something that worked reliably.
As his service expanded, so too did the security procedures enacted by many of the schools where Seat Alert was used. Many of them started to require a secure login to be able to access the class information. This is why Seat Alert is no longer available outside of McMaster and McGill, where secure logins aren’t required. With AI posing new risks to institutions’ cybersecurity, this could soon change.
I asked Ethan about the possibility of hiring students with secure logins at these defunct schools to gather the necessary information. Ethan had thought about it, but an experience he’d had in the early days of Seat Alert, where he was called into McMaster’s IT department and questioned about what he was doing, deterred him from putting other students at risk of disciplinary action in this way. Looking at past student-focused startups, his worries aren’t unfounded. OneClass was a startup founded by students at the University of Toronto in 2010, that allowed students to share course notes and lecture materials online. It grew quickly and raised venture capital, but at the expense of its own reputation and certain copyright laws. In 2016, it was issued a cease-and-desist by the University of Waterloo and in 2020 it was fined $100,000 by the Canadian government. The startup has since ceased operations.
Ethan has now graduated from McMaster, and has been working on other projects since then, with Seat Alert covering costs in the background. When I asked if Seat Alert could ever be his full-time job, Ethan laughed and responded that the revenue was far lower than I must think.
I followed up by asking him why he wouldn’t increase the price by even a dollar — a 50 per cent increase in revenue that I didn’t think would deter many students from using the service. He responded that with rising costs related to running the automated texts that are core to the service, he may soon be forced to. Barring this, he didn’t think it would be fair to raise prices arbitrarily in order to make a greater profit. This is what interested me most about Ethan: his idealism and complete lack of self-interest in the face of a culture that values prestige and profit above all else.
Undeterred, I asked him about bundling, which would let users buy alerts for multiple classes at once. This would lower the cut of revenue that Stripe (the online payment platform he uses) takes from each order. He agreed with the principle of this idea, but felt that it might ruin the simplicity that makes the site so user-friendly. Bundling would mean introducing accounts, which require emails and passwords, and storage, which is expensive. I also asked him about waitlist intelligence, an additional service that could tell people how quickly spots typically opened up in a class. He hadn’t thought about it, but was interested in it.
As a big fan of David Fincher’s The Social Network, I found myself during parts of our conversation comparing Ethan to Mark Zuckerberg, who, in his pre-Facebook life, had made a website that showed the courses a user’s friends were taking. Their motivations both centred around making tools they themselves wanted, and both prioritized speed and simplicity for the user. However, this is where the similarities ended. Ethan appears to lack the greed and unsettling guile that has made Zuckerberg a persona non grata the world over. More importantly, Ethan sounds cool. He’s easy-going and doesn’t take himself very seriously, even when being asked about a business he created. At this point in our call — with me pressing him to raise prices on a service for students in need — I was in fact the Zuckerberg, which wasn’t a great feeling. Ethan, as aware of this as I, laughed and said that if he implemented a price hike, he’d be putting me down as the person who had recommended it.
Despite his idealism, or perhaps because of it, Seat Alert has been growing at a pace of about 5 per cent per term for the past two years, according to Ethan. Even so, Ethan has doubts as to whether he’ll pursue it much longer, given other projects on his horizon and his distaste for web development. He clarified that this would just mean taking a further step back from it, and not shutting it down completely unless he is forced to.
I’m confident that Seat Alert will remain reliable, regardless of how deep Ethan’s involvement remains. The website’s continued success is a good reminder to all of us that not everything in life or in business must be made with growth and profit margins in mind. In the end, simplicity and honesty prevail in making the world, course selection included, better. If I’m wrong, or if Ethan cedes control to me, be ready: price hikes incoming.