Good luck, hope it takes off there! I go to Michigan and this space has become annoyingly saturated...there are 3 or 4 student-startups focused on building a 'Craigslist for Michigan students' and none of them have had an edge. My only advice would be to make your loyal users a priority and hopefully more will come...I'm willing to bet there will be at least one more service like yours that already exists at Penn or will exist shortly.
As an upper class student in CS, I've become completely soured on all the students who want to make the "X for UD" and "Y for VT". I feel like I've seen it all: textbook buyback, craigslist, even some students who want to make it so that you can get change back on your credit card (I don't know why that's cropped up twice). Nowadays, I have to roll my eyes internally when a bushy-tailed, bright-eyed youngster describes their plan for dominating the market where so many others have failed (but I have to sign an NDA first!).
It's interesting but it feels like every year for what feels like more than a decade, some student is building either a craigslist for campus, a campus chat board, a campus event system, a note sharing app, or course scheduler, or some student discount system. These ideas constantly crop up over and over again yet I don't remember any persisting or growing to dominate the space.
(Full disclosure: I'm the developer for this site).
You make a really interesting point, and I think the reason for this is that each college's solution is different in tiny ways. In my opinion this is not an insurmountable problem, as seen with Facebook's success. Clearly not every single person has the same exact needs with a social network, but the key is 1. Facebook is typically "good enough" for most people and 2. Everyone uses Facebook, so people look over tiny inconsistencies with their own usage to be on the same network as their friends.
However the difference, as I see it, between Facebook and something like a Craigslist for campus, a campus chat board, or campus event system is that there is only pressure to use it within distinct communities. For instance, if our site grows to dominate this space at Penn, then only students at Penn feel the pressure to use the site. A student at college X will have different classes, different events, and different needs, so even if all his/her friends at Penn use it, they would get no utility out of hopping onto the College X version of our site, if no one at College X used it.
What we have there is a situation where instead of Facebook's virus-like growth, you have distinct bubbles that need extensive, personal attention to break into. You can't just launch to a new college and immediately have users rolling in, you need a personal "in" for each college, someone (ideally multiple someones) to get real students to use it. This, naturally, requires much more effort and a lot of connections, and it's to this that I'd attribute your observation that no one product has grown to dominate this space.
For now, we're considering our site a simple experiment for Penn, and if we do end up expanding, it would only be if we could justify-—with profit from the site—-the effort needed to expand to other colleges.
There is such big market for this because college students are constantly looking for cheap things / trying to sell their stuff. I am surprised no one has tackled that need yet. A lot of universities are using Facebook groups for buying and selling, but a lot of stuff get buried that way. I like how simple this interface is!
I wish there were more information on the first page than just the title post, just so you don't always have to click into the post to see things. Price is also a huge factor that is buried!
Yeah, this is something we're concerned with as well. The reason we have it the way it is now is because we're concerned about having too many category-specific criteria. For instance, price would be nice to show on the front page, but we're hesitant to put a price input on the new post form, because it wouldn't be relevant to many posts (for instance posts about events or groups on campus).
For now, we're focused on keeping the posts as general as possible with only Title, Text, and Category options. In future I could see introducing different parameters for individual categories (price for selling something, location for events, etc.) but for now our priority is in making the new post process as frictionless as possible.
Thanks for the input though! I really appreciate another pair of eyes on a new product.
I'm the developer for this site, and we're using Node.js w/Express, MongoDB, and deployed on Heroku. Mongo might not scale super well for this kind of thing, but for ease of development you really can't beat it.
aashaykumar92|12 years ago
acbart|12 years ago
helpful|12 years ago
maxucho|12 years ago
You make a really interesting point, and I think the reason for this is that each college's solution is different in tiny ways. In my opinion this is not an insurmountable problem, as seen with Facebook's success. Clearly not every single person has the same exact needs with a social network, but the key is 1. Facebook is typically "good enough" for most people and 2. Everyone uses Facebook, so people look over tiny inconsistencies with their own usage to be on the same network as their friends.
However the difference, as I see it, between Facebook and something like a Craigslist for campus, a campus chat board, or campus event system is that there is only pressure to use it within distinct communities. For instance, if our site grows to dominate this space at Penn, then only students at Penn feel the pressure to use the site. A student at college X will have different classes, different events, and different needs, so even if all his/her friends at Penn use it, they would get no utility out of hopping onto the College X version of our site, if no one at College X used it.
What we have there is a situation where instead of Facebook's virus-like growth, you have distinct bubbles that need extensive, personal attention to break into. You can't just launch to a new college and immediately have users rolling in, you need a personal "in" for each college, someone (ideally multiple someones) to get real students to use it. This, naturally, requires much more effort and a lot of connections, and it's to this that I'd attribute your observation that no one product has grown to dominate this space.
For now, we're considering our site a simple experiment for Penn, and if we do end up expanding, it would only be if we could justify-—with profit from the site—-the effort needed to expand to other colleges.
kkl232|12 years ago
kkl232|12 years ago
maxucho|12 years ago
For now, we're focused on keeping the posts as general as possible with only Title, Text, and Category options. In future I could see introducing different parameters for individual categories (price for selling something, location for events, etc.) but for now our priority is in making the new post process as frictionless as possible.
Thanks for the input though! I really appreciate another pair of eyes on a new product.
squigs25|12 years ago
maxucho|12 years ago
unknown|12 years ago
[deleted]
mgingras|12 years ago
gschiller|12 years ago