TriFame.com founders Navid Zolfaghari and Kyle Haines have been friends since the first grade. They graduated at the top of their class at Coral Gables High School in 2004, Zolfaghari as valedictorian and Haines as salutatorian.

While Zolfaghari went to the University of Florida and Haines went to Boston College, the two of them tried their hand at online advertising with the site ownonlinerealestate.com, attempting to copy the success of 2005's milliondollarhomepage.com, where advertisers paid $1 for 1 pixel of space, with a total of a million pixels on the page.

UNDAUNTED

Ownonlinerealestate.com didn't make it, but it didn't stop the two from trying other ventures. During their senior year of college, they began working on a business plan for TriFame and sought a Web developer in August 2007. Friends and family have helped with funding by investing $125,000 so far, and they have been able to get labor from college interns.

The focus of the site is to find the top talent in music, dancing and modeling, giving rewards to top performers in each category. They plan to add other categories such as comedy, acting, broadcasting, animated shorts and extreme sports.

As far as prizes go, the founders plan to partner with companies that can offer career-advancing deals. A current competition is for the top female model, and the winner gets to be on the cover of Strobe Magazine's January issue.

The focus is on building traffic, Zolfaghari said. The goal is to start making money by late November through video ads and a store where users can sell their goods, with TriFame keeping 3 percent of the revenue from sales.

Their vision is for the site to be acquired for $100 million three years from now, Zolfaghari said. But the more immediate goal is to get 25,000 registered users, 250,000 unique visitors and 10,000 uploads by the first six months.

MANY IMPRESSIONS

The site now has about 5,000 registered users and 5,000 uploads. There have been 250,000 impressions on the site since it launched, which is counted every time a page has to reload. And there have been 50,000 unique visitors since the site launched.

''We're not going to sell just to sell,'' Haines said, adding that this could be the launch pad for something bigger, such as a record label.

Zolfaghari said his biggest promotional tool has been guerrilla and grass-roots marketing. He and Haines have spoken to about 100 professionals for advice and each spend more than 70 hours a week working on the company.

And with everything they've experienced in launching, Zolfaghari said ''it does not even compare'' to what they learned in school.

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