
Notehall Chief Marketing Officer DJ Stephan and CEO Sean Conway on ABC's "Shark Tank" last night
The dining room is gone in this Manayunk rowhouse.
The living room, too, will soon be taken over by what will serve as desks and workstations for an expanding Web 2.0 startup that relocated from Arizona to the neighborhood in northwest Philadelphia that has attracted a steady stream of 20-something professionals for a decade or more now.

Sean Conway
“This is home,” says Sean Conway, the 25-year-old co-founder and CEO of Notehall, an online marketplace for study exams, class notes and other supplemental academic material that is already at 15 colleges nationwide and is due to expand to as many as 65 more by the end of the academic year — 20 to 25 this semester and 30 to 40 in the spring.
Students upload their own documents and take a 40 percent commission when sold to their peers, who are allowed to peek at a third of the document before purchase.
Notehall now has seven employees, including five in Manayunk and two executive staff in Arizona, and is looking for more — including a PHP developer — most of whom are being financed by their own revenue, though some investment capital remains. Last month, they debuted their Penn State marketplace and, they’re already generating positive revenue there, “it’s just soaring,” Conway says, though he declined to disclose just how high.
But now they go to work, fighting to get attention among the growing crowd of Web-based startups calling for college-aged attention. They’ve had a good start.
Last night, Conway and his chief marketing officer DJ Stephan appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank, which puts entrepreneurs in front of five investors on national, prime time TV to field offers. In fitting reality TV, there was drama, but Notehall came away with another investor.
Read more