The College Textbook Market and Daniel Scudder of DormItem
No college student entrepreneur has been successfully able to create a nationwide service that allows a critical mass of college students to sell textbooks, find apartments, or sell other various dorm-related items to students within their school. Many of us have tried, but there hasn’t been anything to talk about yet.
Craigslist still dominates the market, albeit they aren’t solely focused on the college student market. Services such as DormItem are taking a stab at being the first successful college-focused textbook and item selling service.
As we all know, this is the hardest market that any entrepreneur could possibly penetrate, but I and the rest of the young entrepreneur community are rooting for the next college student to really breakthrough with a successful textbook service. Sites such as Amazon and eCampus aren’t making things any easier.
But the fact of the matter is that publishers are many steps ahead of us entrepreneurs as they continue to unnecessarily upgrade school books by the semester, not by the school year; prohibiting students from selling their college books for any significant value because professors are demanding each student to purchase the latest version of whatever book it is.
So how do we as college/young entrepreneurs get around this? What’s the solution, dude? Do we start creating services that allow students to simply “swap” books? Do we partner with the publishers and offer selected chapters from the books in online versions that we push through our blogs and websites for a small fee? How do we disrupt this market? Not sure. But I’m sure that we’ll figure it out sooner or later. That I promise.
Here’s a chat that I had with Daniel about his life as a young entrepreneur and his latest service, DormItem:
How’s entrepreneurial life at Babson?
Babson is a great school for entrepreneurship. I am in the Ugrad business hatchery, and my business, along with 4 others all have offices in the same location. Its fun to meet people with the same business interests, and they are all supportive and helpful of each other. This year, all the hatchery businesses are web based, so we bounce ideas of each other.
Having hatchery space is also a plus because it gives my team and I access to many business resources. I do feel that the best resource that Babson provides is the faculty, as they are all into business and many are experienced entrepreneurs. The freedom and ability to consult professors whenever needed is a great bonus.
Another note is that I am on the Babson Commerce Committee, which gives me the opportunity to license all Ugrad student businesses (not just the hatchery businesses). This is a great time to meet the younger students at Babson who are beginning to develop their own business concepts and give them some guidance. I guess my passion is entrepreneurship, so Babson works for me.
How and why did you come up with the idea of DormItem?
DormItem came to my mind last spring when everyone was complaining about textbook prices, and around the same time Craigslist was becoming popular among college students. I figured I could start a site where students could buy and sell goods – not just textbooks – and connect with each other on the same campus.
I was also very into ‘web 2.0’ and I love the web technology, so I figured I’d take a stab at a site. I wanted to use the best and coolest technology, which is how I envisioned the AJAX live search feature. I also wanted to eliminate the problem of categorization, as many other college classified sites have so many categories and subcategories that it is overwhelming.
Instead, I went with tagging, an easier and cooler (in my mind ?) way of categorizing. My developer (who is at Olin College) and I both have very similar philosophies about the Web, which makes it fun to create something together.
Did you bootstrap your company? If so, how was that process like?
DormItem was and still is a bootstrap company. I actually enjoy this more, as it requires problems to be solved without throwing money at them. It also allows me to be more hands on with everything — I can ‘wear many hats’ as they say, allowing me to save money by not hiring excess people. Sometimes I imagine what I could do with funding, but then I would lose the creative problem solving ability which I like so much. Plus, I don’t like the responsibility of having other people’s money and answering to their concerns. I want to do what I want with the business.
What’s the future look like for DormItem? How do you set yourself apart from Craigslist?
DormItem is doing well, and we are moving fast. We are working on a new product (which for now we will call V2) sometime soon, which will be even more ‘ajaxified’ than the first, and will have some new features that makes buying and selling even easier.
The site also won’t be limited to just buying and selling, but we are looking to add new areas for jobs, apartments, and more. We don’t like to consider ourselves a ‘college craigslist’, because Craigslist will always be ahead of us.
Instead, we want to be considered the best way for students to buy and sell, by solving the specific needs of the college student. We integrated Rapleaf, a portable rating system for commerce, in the hopes of making the buy/sell process safer. We are also working on map features to make it easier to find and locate items for sale. Tackling the textbook problem is our greatest hope, and we have been brainstorming about how to do it better than any site has done before.
Why should a student use DormItem?
As an upperclassmen or international student, if you are moving away, you can sell the goods you no longer need to an incoming freshman at an affordable price. Submitting a listing is easy, with no accounts or passwords to remember. DormItem is fun to use with our AJAX live search and tagging. If what you want is posted on the site, you should have no problem finding it. Rapleaf also adds trust to the buying and selling process, as listings with .edu email addresses receive more credibility. And read our blog, which is usually fun and relevant to college life!
What’s the most important lesson that you’ve learned as a young entrepreneur up to this point?
I would say that a young entrepreneur should never feel they have a bad idea or no chance at business success. In fact, as a young entrepreneur, we have less to lose than anyone else. We can live cheaply, are still in college, and worse comes to worse we get a good experience of opening a business.
Once the real world comes along, you may never have the chance to open your own business, so do it now! It takes a lot of thinking and hard work for no immediate pay, but a belief in the company and a desire to do something that challenges the status quo is what drives me. Mark Zuckerburg of facebook is one of by biggest idols, as he just had an idea, the guts to implement it, and is now living in Silicon Valley in the heart of business. Not that I think I will be there someday, but it is nice to know that a college student actually can do something like that.
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