DormItem: Regional College Classifieds in Rails

cute.

Nice but I like this better.

Better

Why are Chegg and CollegeMedium “a nightmare to use” they look pretty straight forward to me?? Chegg looks really well done for a basic collegiate classified site.

Their commercial is hillarious too! Doesn’t even slightly resemble Boston though. Click on grandma.

Funny! Plus it’s exactly what 90% of college students would do.

The above are all great sites, but I feel that they are lacking in the feature set.

One thing I tried to do with CampusTrade was to really build a community element to the college classifieds scene.

Disclosure: I own and wrote most of the below site:

http://www.campustrade.com/

what’s cute about all these sites are that not one has yet to tip.

it’s like watching every year after summer the optimistic and idealistic kids setting up a book exchange and plastering the campus with flyers saying that THIS ONE, yes THIS ONE, is the one that works. the one that’s cheaper than book store. the one that’s going to free everyone the burden of buying books.

not much has changed. everyone still resorts to craigslist. everyone still prints out flyers, cut out the little notches, and staple it everywhere they can.

OpenPosting.com has been around for at least a year…

today i discover a link blink this site… did you know, it´s very easy to me to same my favorites, and it is a big solution, at this morning for me to save my favorites, first i send one e-mail for me and after i organize all in excell today it have close 8000 links… is my treasure ; ))

Hmmm…. I’ve used to Chegg for 2 years in college - recently graduated. Never been hard to use since all my stuff used the sell right away… Isn’t that a what a site should be all about? Look at Craigslist - ugliest interface ever but we all love it. I tired other sites, but they seem to have all their friends posting things and that’s about it…

See http://www.boso.com - just got funded by Y Combinator. They are direct competitors here

The critical factor to success with an intercampus collegiate marketplace platform is to reach critical mass at each campus. Do not move on to other campuses until you have saturated one. I’m speaking from experience. I’m the founder of an intercampus textbook exchange that in its first year generated nearly $20k in revenues on GMV of approximately $200k. Those are the best figures in this space and we, nonetheless, decided to completely restructure our platform and business model. You will be hearing about us soon. Stealth

I respect and admire Marshall Kirkpatrick, but anyone who says collegemedium.com looks like “a nightmare to use” obviously has never used Craigslist, and as such should probably not be reviewing classified sites.

I just wanted to point out my own competitor to this service: http://blockrocker.com. It aggregates geotagged info from upcoming, eventful, youtube, MS expo, flickr, del.icio.us, etc etc.

Point being, with everything nicely geotagged, you can do wicked local searches:
http://www.blockrocker.com/saved/10
There’s Berekely, for example.

You can also search by tags… here’s stuff tagged “party” around Berkeley, for instance:
http://www.blockrocker.com/saved/11
(note: tags are still finicky in IE6)

Dorm Item is nice and the college focus no doubt has a lot of value to students, but my original intention was to provide this type of targeted service on a more granular level, thus providing greater value for students on campus with limited transportation options - i.e.: the ability to find things within walking distance.

Who cares if this application was built with Rails? An expert PHP developer like myself can build this in about two weeks, and I’m a full time college student.

The only way these “college” specific classified ad sites will work is if, like someone said above, you focus on one school at a time building the critical mass needed before moving on to another school.

Or better yet, Facebook adds this type of functionality which would make all these other sites obsolete.

There is nothing wrong with operating a licensing business. Obviously some of the largest technology companies (Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) are in the licensing game, but it’s not an easy, or sexy, business and it sounds like the DormItem founders might be a little naive as to the realities of running such a business. Their application looks fairly basic and perhaps $2,000 is a reasonable cost for it. Personally, I don’t see anything special that would justify a cost that’s much higher. But there are other costs and challenges of running a licensing business that make me think this type of pricing, and the target market they’re going after, are a recipe for failure. The biggest challenge in running a licensing business is the sales cycle. If you’re targeting organizations like universities, which are about as bureaucratic as you can get, the effort and time required to make a single sale can be significant. When the cost of the product you’re selling is low (i.e. $2,000 range), a difficult and lengthy sales cycle makes for a unattractive business.

Again, a quick run through the application leaves me unimpressed. The functionality is very bare bones and I would be surprised if this took more than a month to develop. I don’t know that their hosted model will appeal to colleges, who are more likely to want to purchase the software and run it themselves, with possible integration with their student portal and database. As a hosted solution, they’re likely to be asked for evidence that this is scalable, that the company has the financial and infrastructure resources to run as an ASP that can be relied upon, that they have adequate staffing to support each licensee, etc. While I would not be surprised if they sell a few licenses, I do not expect their licensing business to suceed as they don’t seem to have a product and company that lends itself to a significant licensing opportunity.

Comments from Chegg (as in Chicken or Egg!).

Hello Marhsall, shouldn’t the standard for comparision be more than whose pretty but about which site is actually being used by the students. Alexa rankings for the site will answer that question for the readers. Or maybe if the team reviews the dates of the items being posted on the sites.

Chegg is the leader is this market niche. We don’t compete against Craigslist or eBay since we are not a classifieds site for all users in any city but for students on campuses.

Since we didn’t get a chance to speak before you wrote about us, we would welcome an opportunity to meet with you/Michael so that TechCrunch can present a factual review of Chegg to the readers. We are based on Santa Clara and are 10 people strong. (osman@chegg.com).

Hey Osman, thanks for commenting. I just meant to briefly mention market leaders in the same space as the newly launched site I was reviewing. Our readers are of course welcome to click through the links and make their own decisions, which I’m sure they are.
best wishes
Marshall

#6 - alaska…

your comments about the kids who every year decide to create the new/next great website to sell textbooks is humorous at best…

but let’s be serious for a second. the fact is, the used textbook market is ripe/ready to be taken online and pretty much kill the local collegiate bookstore for the used textbooks.

the college bookstore generates more profit on the used book, than the new book.

the reason that the sites that have been created haven’t worked to date, is that the sites are simply that.. just sites.. there has been as of yet, no real business focused on building this opportunity into a real business. to build the site into a real business requires driving traffic to the site.. this requires strategies that the avg person creating a booksite in a few weeks isn’t going to ‘get’!

there’s probably a good $5-10 million business doing this, if done correctly.

later…

sam

Coburn is an Olin College student (www.olin.edu), much like many of yesterday’s mentioned Y-Combinator companies. If you’re young, I’d look at Olin for school, and if you’re older, you should sure as hell pay attention to these graduates.

Techcrunch is having an off day! This write up is a plug about Rapleaf (maybe TC guys put funding in, or got options or are buddies with them) or Rails (not sure why a plug on Rails so must be the former). Funny that TechCrunch would write about a kid project and say Craigslist/eBay competes with it!!

As the name implies, Dormitems was intended to serve one purpose: providing a marketplace for students. Comparing this website to others which serve numerous other purposes like CollegeMedium and Chegg is like comparing the weather channel to CNN.

Collegemedium was built to be a destination not just for students, but also for individuals who would like to reach students.

One quick glance through Dormitem’s blog and you’ll notice the following ‘coming soon’ features:

1. Phone messages – do you want to be notified of a new buyer with a text message?
2. Facebook– how would you like to login to DormItem with your Facebook account?
3. More categories – do you want to see more than just items for sale? If so, what?

One would most certainly assume that Dormitems is playing a quick game of catch-up, as CollegeMedium already has all those features and is less than 3 months old.

One thing that’s great about blogs is that the truth can easily be uncovered. I challenge anyone reading this to go to both http://CollegeMedium.com and http://Dormitems.com I am not here to disparage Dormitems, but I assure you, you will certainly disagree with Mr Kirkpatrick’s eloquent but misguided conclusion about CollegeMedium.com.

But, most of all, thanks for the recognition.

As an angel investor closely associated with both Chegg AND RapLeaf, I am convinced your audience would greatly benefit from a bit more fact checking, fairness and objectivity in your reporting. While the blogosphere often leads reporters to provoke their audience to instigate animated conversations (and traffic!), it also helps magnify the areas that need to be improved, and emphasize what perspective actually is important (the user’s, not the reporter’s). I would encourage you to follow up with both companies, and ultimately map the respective competitive landscapes of student classifieds and portable reputation management with some more critical thinking…

As a student I like to post my things on more than one sites coz I want to sell it quick. I have used multiple sites over the years including CL and Ebay and it all depends on what you are selling. I have looked and used Chegg before and I feel its a great service. I mainly use Chegg to sell all the studenty items and use CL and Ebay to sell items that are on the expensive side. I don’t agree with the fact that Chegg is hard to use. I am not sure how a person who has never used the service before and writes for such a reputed publication can make such comments. As a student I feel its a great service that helps me save tons of money on textbooks, furniture and mostly everything I have ever sold on Chegg and other such college websites.

I hate the layout of dorm item. It is very busy and all over the place. The pictures are good but I am sure all these pictures are put by the people who own the site coz its tough for all students to post pictures. Not everyone has the right tools (camera) and the time to make their post pretty. And other sites like Chegg do a great job of listing stuff according to the categories. I think its funny that dormitem made it to techcrunch. All the best to other college websites.

Interestingly, a little bit of peeking into Marshall Kirkpatrick’s facebook friends reveal that he is friends with the founder of dormitem.com’s co-founder Dan Scudder. Now I understand all the positive stuff written about the crappy website. And I am sure he doesn’t add everyone he writes about as friends coz then he would have a lot of them.

Marshall, as a reader of techcrunch I would expect more from you and the blog.

Thanks

Interestingly, a little bit of peeking into Marshall Kirkpatrick’s facebook friends reveal that he is friends with dormitem.com’s co-founder Dan Scudder. Now I understand all the positive stuff written about the crappy website. And I am sure he doesn’t add everyone he writes about as friends coz then he would have a lot of them.

Marshall, as a reader of techcrunch I would expect more from you and the blog.

Thanks

This is where TechCrunch is heading? We’re now reporting on college-niched sites whipped up in 2-3 months of part-time effort? Wow, that’s sophisticated AND professional.

I’ll now wonder how legitimate any up-and-comer is here…and whether there are other motives involved in selecting them to profile for readers.

Brad, that’s funny - I had to go look at my own profile, it’s actually Zack Coburn that’s on my friends list - the other co-founder. I just started that account when FB opened up so I could test it, if you look I have accepted loads of random people on that list. Sometimes I accept peoples’ friends requests because I feel like a jerk saying “actually, I can’t remember who you are at all!” Don’t read too much into it.

Sorry I did mean Zack. But your loads of random people only translate to 45 friends. I can’t help but read too much into it. And thanks for confirming that you have the co-founder on your friends list.

I am very amazed at where techcrunch is headed. I think twice before adding someone to the friends list… specially when its a freshmen. If you are in a certain age group, who has freshmen as their friends?

Sorry Marshall, there is a lot to read into this.

Show me your site, Bradly.

C’mon guys stop profiling these crapy/basic sites on this forum …..

They had to review DormItem. Madhens received the following praise from Marshall in its TechCrunch review:

“I like Madhens. It’s well thought out.”
“It looks like a good service and advertisers might want to get in quick while the bids are low.”

Hindsight is 20/20 and nobody’s going to call it right 100% of the time, but you would expect that Marshall might exercise a little more restraint given that the same person who built Madhens is behind this. There’s nothing wrong with failure, and most successful entrepreneurs fail multiple times before succeeding, but what concerns me about Zack Colburn and Madhens was that they were reviewed on TechCrunch on July 26 and Madhens was up for sale by mid-September. Obviously, as an entrepreneur you need to know when something isn’t going to work and cut your losses, but two months is not a serious effort. Most business have to make changes to the business model and fix things that don’t work. These things should always be attempted before shutting down. There are many highly successful companies that would not be around today had the founders pulled the plug when they didn’t hit the jackpot overnight.

It’s also interesting that Zack is involved with DormItem because he stated in an interview with Steve Poland about his sale of Madhens that “With college invading my life, I haven’t been able to continue to actively recruit publishers and respond to feedback as quickly.” Zack may be a smart and talented guy (I don’t know), but I think he has a lot to prove on the commitment side. As a potential investor or business partner, I would not get involved with somebody with the track record of giving up easily and then coming up with a new a venture a couple of months later after publicly stating that he didn’t have time for his old one. As a potential licensee, you’d have to ask “Is this a company that is going to be around in 3, 6, 12 months if things don’t go as well as expected?” Hint to anybody wanting to start a licensing or ASP business: if your most notable previous business lasted a few months and sold for $5,000, you might want to consider another type of business before asking organizations to trust you to provide them with software, hosting and management/support services that you hope they will rely on you for over a long period of time. Frankly, as I noted in my previous post, the sales cycle for selling something to organizations like universities is often longer than the two months Madhens was kept running.

Good luck to DormItem and I hope if it goes on eBay they make more than $5,000. If there’s anything to be learned here, it’s that a nice review on TechCrunch doesn’t lead to success. It didn’t do anything for Madhens and it won’t do anything for DormItem. If TechCrunch wants to continue to lower its standards by writing about products that are not worth writing about (yet), who cares?

Free advice to Chegg and its investors:

• Alexa as a poor metric for defining success in the intercampus marketplace space - some good ones are:
• Active membership/campus – at a minimum 15% of the student population
• Textbooks listed/active member/campus/term – 2 to 3
• Successful inventory (textbook) turnover/campus/term – at a minimum 35% of the total books posted by members from that campus
• Revenue/transaction - $3 is a good start

Simple math:
Student population = 20,000 = 3,000 members = 7,500 textbooks listed = 2,625 successful transactions = $7,875 in revenues

Start with textbooks. Other product categories will not work. Trust me! Achieve the above with textbooks at one campus before you consider claiming a leadership position or moving on to other campuses. Your key competitive advantage over the “big guys” is that you eliminate the time and monetary cost of shipping.

This can be turned into a $50M business, but it will require a lot of ingenuity and at least a $15M investment. Need some help?

Give the kid a break, he’s experimenting. Hell, he’s just a freshman; these are simply his early years, before he advances into larger, more stable ventures I’m sure. The fact that said he was ‘too busy’ with his college start for Madhens is acceptable–as college freshman we’d all have given the shuffle reason why our attention had shifted without giving away our current project. He’s excited about this one. Tell him constructively what he can do, don’t put him down, he’s done some interesting things for someone his age, and I for one am excited to see where DormItem goes and what comes next from the duo. Best wishes.

Stealth, Thanks for the advice. Please feel free to email me with you contact details at osman@chegg.com. Let’s hook up.

Comments on Alexa were meant to show usage not success. We have a long way to go!

JayGuy: I’m not criticizing Zack. As I pointed out, most successful entrepreneurs fail several times before achieving success. Nobody’s saying that Zack can’t or won’t be successful. I laid out my thoughts on what should have been done with Madhens: you have to put in more effort than two months on any business venture, as most just won’t take off overnight. Anybody wanting to start a new business needs to know when it’s not going to work, but also needs to expect that there will be a lot of hard work required. Challenges will come up and most businesses take a lot more than two months to really gain traction. Some changes in business model, strategy, etc. are the rule, not the exception, and while I don’t know the intimate details of Madhens, I do know that two months from start to finish is not enough time to create a real business.

What you need to realize is that in the real world, nobody gives a damn whether you’re a college freshman or a seasoned executive. If you want me to license your software and/or have you host it for me, you need to convince me that you have a quality product that’s easier to license than to build myself and you need to convince me that you’re on solid footing and that I can rely on you over the long-term. I don’t see much of a product here that couldn’t be built from scratch by a single developer very quickly, and based on Zack’s track record with Madhens I certainly wouldn’t entrust him with hosting a service that I want to offer my university’s students for many years. What happens if they sell 10 licenses at $2,000 each? That’s $20,000. I’m happy with the service but they’re not probably not making enough money to remain in operation as a viable business, so what happens to me? Even if they give me the software and data, I’m now in a situation that is different from the one I bought into. As an investor, do I invest in a person that gave their previous venture two months to work? Do I invest in a person that gave a contradictory statement about how he basically didn’t have time to support his previous venture but is now starting a licensing/ASP business?

I’m sorry JayGuy. I don’t care how old you are, in the real world people are going to call it how they see it, and I not only think DormItem is going to fail (especially when you look at how competitive the market is), I think it’s pretty funny that TechCrunch would write about it this early on when they have absolutely no traction, a very basic product and a lot of grand plans that haven’t been validated.

Drama 2.0 - Way to tell it like it is.

It shows poor integrity when you barely put a few months into a business before calling it quits, and show up a month later trying to push a new concept. Results matter at the end of the day.

It is ridiculous that TechCrunch cuts the guy a break just cause he’s a college freshman and continues reporting on him.

I’ll look out for this venture on eBay in a few months…

Marshall, boy oh boy,

swallow your pride and tell us truthfully that you made a mistake, you did not look at collegemedium closely before you happily wrote this because you somehow know or had connections or was referred to by someone who you know to the founders of DormIterm. Feature-wise, it lacks big time against Collegemedium. Stop kidding us your readers, and be responsible for your post.

Osman, chegg is cool but collegemedium still rocks.

And by the way. YOU, not Mike, reviewed Madhen and they couldn\’t even get themselves auction cheap on ebay. So how are you related to Cohan?

Man marshall you certainly made the blog spicy. I keep coming back to see who has replied. Mr. Boss I just looked at your site collegemedium. I have to agree you have done a good job but hey seems like you just copied Chegg and changed colors and the layout and removed the Chicken haha…

I will try to use your site bro but I cannot even find items at my school. The market is too competitive so what is your plan?

http://www.acollegetrade.com is a very good site to use for college students. It’s like ebay but is for college students.

Alexa rankings do not show usage. There are multiple strategies that websites use to get their ranking high. It is quite easy. I agree with everything Stealth said. There is a lot more to it then just starting a website. There is a reason to this day why there is not a national site. Do you guys think you were the first to try? Not a chance! I have over 50,000 users and several working models.

Stealth - do you want to put your money where your mouth is? Right now I have over 7 figures, but 15M can do some serious damage.

i would check out http://www.secondsemester.com it is a lot easier to use

I would like to get some feedback on my site. It sounds like most everyone in this forum is brutally honest, so I don’t have to worry about anything being sugar-coated. Thanks in advance for your help.

http://www.collegeswapshop.com