When Nate Lustig lost the lottery for student-section Badger football tickets in 2005, he turned to a year-old online business called ExchangeHut.com to buy seats for campus athletic events at market-rate prices.

Within a year, Lustig and friends John Tucker and Corey Capasso bought the company for $6,000 from founder Matt Stamerjohn, who was graduating from UW-Madison.

Now, Lustig, Tucker and Capasso are graduating from UW-Madison and they have sold the company to CDI America, a subsidiary of CDI Holdings of Korea, in what they will only term a "mid-six-figure deal."

They had built ExchangeHut into a network that serves students at eight universities and has 113,000 members. Annual revenue is $85,000.

Each of the partners learned a lot "that we never would have learned just by going to class," Lustig said. "How to manage our time ... how the business world actually works, how to make contact with people that may not want to talk to us."

"They're gutsy," said Madison attorney Joe Boucher, who is on the board of advisers for the university's Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship and a mentor to the trio. "They're hard-working and persistent. They take advice, and that's part of the reason they're successful."

Lustig and Tucker, of Fox Point, and Capasso, who is from Woodcliff Lake, N.J., are all 22-year-old, fifth-year seniors planning to graduate in May.

"The acquirers have a lot of resources we didn't have. They could take the business to new heights," Lustig said.

ExchangeHut.com, www.exhangehut.com, will be run along with The Daily Jolt, a campus news and events forum started in 1999 by students at Amherst College and Brown University, which CDI America also bought.