#comarket

hello kitty

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A ping on my phone distracted me from the tasty lunch my mom had made. I looked at the screen, half avoiding it. When I saw the name, I knew it wouldn’t do well to ignore it. The chat window opened into a bright sunny picture of a girl, beaming widely at the camera, posing with a ‘CoMarket is at NIT Trichy’ poster stuck on the wall right beside her. I grinned at the photo and sent her a thumbs-up back. Anupama had become our rockstar for our launch at NIT Trichy. With her friend Alden, she scouted for the best ways to publicise at her college. And deliver, they did. NIT Trichy has been one of our most successful college launches.

Closer home, Shreshtha became our solid support for everything DU related. We had met her long back, randomly cracking bad jokes and having chai. Suddenly she turned into a serious hero for CoMarket. Through the many midnight phone conversations we had and a hilarious meeting on a metro ride between stations, she took over the charge to make it work for SRCC. At the same time, she put us in touch with a couple of other amazingly talented DU students- Srishti from Daulat Ram College and Sherry from St. Stephen’s College- who put in their own bit for us.

Most people, out in the world, would call this networking. Nah. Networking makes it sound so bleak and grim. Instead, our connection with these young, beaming, go-getters and college goers, pumps in more blood into our system.  Their enthusiasm to work is so infectious; their ‘work-is-fun’ bug bites us too! Among other things, we are glad that we have struck great friendships with so many of them.

Warm hugs go out to our friends Aashna, Anjali, Anwesh, Amo, Mahima, PG and innumerable others who helped us out by putting us in touch with their awesome juniors, kick-ass friends and crazy siblings.

There are times when you are moved. Then there are times when you are inspired. The team met two such awe-inspiring people yesterday, both seemingly ordinary like us, both exceptionally extraordinary in their fields. 29th January 2015 was a big day for CoMarket.

We had lunch at Ashoka University’s Board Room with Mr. Arindam Bhattacharya, Senior Partner and Managing Director, BCG India and dinner at Hotel Leela Palace, Gurgaon, with Ms. Vani Kola, a highly esteemed VC and Head of Kalaari Capital, India. The day was a rush of adrenaline, fixing meetings and timings, a vortex of laptops and Formals and streams of excited conversations. And to top it all, the meals were great too! By the end of the day, we were left with a warm fuzzy feeling about the people we met, about the conversations we had, about our life and work and about ourselves.  It’s great to have such friends and mentors, shining their light on us and guiding us with their smiles.

Amongst the many words of wisdom, something stuck on with us. “You aren’t building this to impress investors. You’re building this for yourselves. You just got to believe in it.”

Spot on, Ms. Kola, spot on!

It was a chilly evening yesterday when the call came. The wind blew around the Ashoka University campus, making everyone hurry their steps towards their destination. Some decked up in layers of wool walked under the street lamps searching for hot pakoras. Some others took refuge in the Mess, a haven in the January cold. As we opened the doors to this refuge, we saw Chandrashekhar Bhaiya, one of the people working for the caterers at Ashoka, waiting for us beside one of the pillars.

He had been looking for a cheap mobile phone for a while and he got to know about CoMarket from all the posters and other publicity that had been going on in the campus. He made his account on the platform on the 14th of Jan and checked out the catalog of phones available and messaged one of the sellers the next day. Yesterday at night while the team was working, Aditya mentioned that someone was interested in buying his Moto G 2nd Gen and had arranged to meet in the mess.

As Chandu Bhaiya took the phone from Aditya and swiped around the screen, we stood there in wonder at what had just happened. He gave an advance amount yesterday and paid the rest today evening. While CoMarket had already had successful transactions before, this one engulfed us with the kind of warmth that is tough to put in words. In that small moment as Bhaiya beamed at his new phone happily, surrounded by five other Mess Bhaiyas smiling with us and all the students cheering on, we realized that what we had built, had reduced boundaries. We realized that what we had built, transcended business plans and business talks.

In that small moment, we realized that CoMarket was touching lives and bringing everyone together. And the smiles that we receive are what get us going.

In the last couple of days, we found the following two things on the Ashoka Campus -

A pair of earrings

A pair of spectacles

We also saw about 6 emails in the last one week announcing lost ID cards, notebooks, earphones etc. That got us thinking.

What if we had a feature up on CoMarket that could help you track down ‘Lost’ stuff and give back ‘Found’ stuff within the campus?

Do you think it will help? Let us know in the poll below. The poll is open till 23.59 hours, 10th January, 2015.

In the meantime, also checkout the interesting stuff we're selling on http://comarket.in

Suggestions? Drop in a line at [email protected]

PS: If you have lost a pair of spectacles or earrings, do write to us. We have it safe. :)

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Should we build a 'Lost & Found' feature for your campus?

Yes

No

A midnight post for the night crawlers on the web by another midnighter at work. We’re in dire need of a cup of coffee while working and someone to rescue us from the security personnel trying to lock our workspace for the night.  

The last seven days have been a crazy race. 2015 gave way to 2016 and with it, came excitement, anxiety, resolutions and dreams. The team typed away to glory, all working remotely trying to hold their wits together for the launch at the stroke of the New Year. Aditya became a hermit away from civilisation holed up in his room, working furiously like a madman into late nights and early mornings. In an entirely different part of the country, Anant and Poorva simultaneously turned into superhero tech wizards, almost to the verge of self sacrifice, continuously coding and debugging for the deployment of the website. Nitesh planned a trip to Manali away from the madness, only to realise that he couldn’t stay away, ending up working on his mobile phone and the measly 3G connectivity. Medha got flak from the crowd of family and friends for working through the New Year’s Eve get-together, straining her brain to make different edits to different graphics.

It is day four and we’re standing tall. We’ve got 478 users onboard till date with a total of 5078 page views. Generating the right traction is crucial right now and however much we want to sit back and rest a bit, we’re on overdrive trying to make sense of mails and meetings, graphs and graphics, campaigns and conversions. We’re hooked on to this heady rush of working late nights.

Come by to grab some coffee with us and we’ll fill you in on the exciting new stuff we’re planning up ahead.

Until next time,

We’re really excited to launch our first version of CoMarket today on the web. CoMarket makes buying and selling of second-hand goods, a frictionless thing to do.

When we sat down three months ago to start designing our product, we looked at the second hand marketspace and realized that very few exciting things had happened in the last 5 years. We’re setting out to change that, and this release is our first step along the way.

Some of the problems with second hand we heard from users that we tried to solve:

Trust Issues - Since the platform operates within the confines of your community, users are acquaintances, effectively breaking down barriers of trust among prospective clients.

Distance Issues - Buyers and sellers belong to the same college campus, thus reducing the distances.

User Experience - Our platform has a minimal, supportive and engaging UI, ensuring the privacy of the user. Also, the user can directly bargain with the seller and get better deals due to absence of any middlemen.

We’re looking forward to seeing you buy & sell and hearing your feedback on our platform. We’re all ears at [email protected]. You can also learn more about us, and, if you’re a rockstar developer or designer, give our jobs page a look.

A huge thanks to our mentors and fantastic beta testers, who have given us the tough love that every product needs as it’s being created, and helped us strategize better.

Here is wishing you a very happy new year from everyone at CoMarket.