Seven Handle Circus may be one of the hottest startups to come out of the Georgia Tech community in quite some time. You can’t download its source code, and it’s not the product of countless hours spent tapping away on a laptop in the Clough Commons Starbucks. It’s no app—it’s a band. Still, the guys behind it consider the endeavor “a business, like any other.”

Members of most young bands would balk at their frontman describing their act like this, as Seven Handle Circus lead singer/guitarist Shawn Spencer does one late-summer evening on the patio of Cypress Street bar in Midtown Atlanta. But the members of most young bands don’t include two graduates of Georgia Tech’s College of Management.

“We don’t want to approach it necessarily like it’s a traditional band,” says Matt Norris, Mgt 04, who plays bass for the bluegrass-inspired outfit. Four of the six bandmates are gathered at Cypress Street for beers, each just off the clock from their respective office jobs. “We want to approach it like an innovative startup.”

“We had a class called Strategic Management,” adds Spencer, Mgt 10, chiming in from across the table. “And that was a great one that taught us, just look at the market as a whole and where it’s headed and meet up with it later instead of trying to follow these niches.”

The band, whose members also include students of computer science, engineering and building construction, has spent the better part of the last two years carving out a niche of its own. It all started on the front porch of the Sigma Nu house in early 2009. Colin Vinson, CS 10, and Spencer had always enjoyed jamming with their fraternity brothers at parties and on lazy afternoons, but when Vinson was gifted a banjo for his 21st birthday, a more serious musical partnership crystallized.

The two friends, fans of bluegrass greats like Doc Watson and more recent acts like New Grass Revival and Alison Krauss & Union Station, began collaborating on simple, twangy acoustic songs in spare time carved out between classes.

When they were ready to record, the pair could’ve easily assembled a makeshift recording setup in someone’s dorm room, but instead took their tunes over to the music studios at the Couch Building. Thanks to having taken professor Chris Moore’s Media Production course, Spencer had both access to the studio and the know-how to set his and Vinson’s songs to tape.

It wasn’t the last time the Tech community would prove useful to the young band. When Spencer and Vinson started playing live shows around campus they borrowed PA systems from Under the Couch, the student-run club and muscian’s network now housed in the Stamps Student Center.

And when it came time to recruit new members, a few fellow Yellow Jackets seemed like obvious additions. Mandolinist Steve Bledsoe, a mechanical engineering student, and drummer Jeff Harrison, CE 09, fellow fraternity brothers, had been early collaborators on the Sigma Nu porch. Richard Burroughs, an architecture student, joined on the fiddle. And after the band’s original bass player moved out of town, Norris was recruited—though he’d already played an important role in the band’s formation.

“[In middle school, Shawn] asked me to teach him guitar lessons, but in like two months he was already way better than I was,” Norris admits. “Then it was like, ‘We should be friends.’”

Seven Handle Circus’s collective talent was evident, too, to the crowds they began playing for at bluegrass nights and other events around Atlanta. At parties sponsored by fraternity contacts, they might bust out a cheeky rap cover, but for the most part they play from their ever-growing original catalog.

“We’ve gotten to the point where there are lots of people coming up to us after shows and it’s awesome,” Spencer says. “We don’t even know them.”

Fans now sing their lyrics back to them during concerts, and their song “Georgia Man” has become something of a local hit.

This is mostly thanks to the band’s own hard work, but a particular lucky encounter earlier this year certainly didn’t hurt.

In June, Seven Handle Circus was playing an afternoon show at Publik Draft House in downtown Atlanta when they caught the ears of a few members of the British folk-pop band Mumford & Sons, who were headlining at the neighboring Fox Theatre later that night. Lead singer Marcus Mumford and his crew were impressed, and they asked the Seven Handle guys to open the show for them.

“We’d been joking about it for weeks because we knew … they were playing that night, and we were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if they walked in and saw the set?’” Vinson remembers. “None of us had tickets to the show, it was completely sold out. It was amazing.”

In early August, the band spent a weekend in Asheville, N.C., recording instrumental tracks for its first proper album. Backed up by Eldest Only, the production group behind recent releases from bands like Atlanta’s Manchester Orchestra, they hit the mics at Echo Mountain Studio, where artists as diverse as the Smashing Pumpkins and the Avett Brothers have recorded. After recording vocal parts in an Atlanta studio, Spencer says they hope to have the record self-released by November, available in both physical and digital form—a decision not made lightly.

“Until recently, I was totally about not pressing because everything’s available for download,” Norris notes. “But I read recently that almost 63 percent of indie record sales are still CD. So it kind of changed my mind. We still have to do that side, too. But we definitely want to push more towards online distribution.”

They briefly considered turning to Kickstarter, a relateively new “crowdfunding” website that allows bands and other artists to fund projects by collecting donations from fans and offering small tokens of appreciation (like free CDs and autographs) in return, but ultimately decided against it.

“We’ve been bootstrappin’ this whole way so far,” Vinson says.

“We’ve only been funding by internally investing, reinvesting our own money,” Spencer adds.

“And that’s our plan for the time being,” Vinson affirms. “If we’re going to treat this like a start up we’re going to act like it.”

Once the album is out, the band plans to play a few mini-tours of the Southeast, taking off work and class on Friday and packing in as many shows possible from Thursday night to Sunday. That’ll do for now, they say, but they’re well aware a tipping point might be looming not so far down the line.

“There will be a point where some risk has to be taken,” says Norris. “And I think it’ll be [a situation where] we definitely won’t have all the money to do it but it’ll be enough that we’ll be like, ‘OK, this is too good not to pass up.’ And I think we felt that way in Asheville. After we recorded all weekend, I think all of us are feeling like we want to do this for the rest of our lives.”