http://www.collegeswapshop.com

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 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?

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.

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…

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.

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

• 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?

“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?

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.

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.

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

Thanks

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

Thanks

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.

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.