

Show HN: We made Craigslist for the university that I will be attending. - gschiller
http://www.penngems.com/

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aashaykumar92
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.

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acbart
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!).

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helpful
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.

~~~
maxucho
(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.

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kkl232
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!

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kkl232
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!

~~~
maxucho
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.

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squigs25
Nice! What stack are you using?

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maxucho
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.

~~~
degenerate
I really like how speedy the site feels -- searched your source and found
this: [http://instantclick.io/](http://instantclick.io/)

Preloading pages on hover before the user clicks? Genius idea for a library.
I'm gonna give this a try soon.

~~~
maxucho
Yeah we found that library posted on HN a few days ago, and figured since we
have very low traffic right now we'd have nothing to lose with a library like
this (even with the additional requests it sometimes incurs when a user hovers
but doesn't click). It's so fast now I'm not sure I could ever bear to build a
site without it ever again.

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mgingras
Is there a search/filter? Can't spot it on mobile.

~~~
gschiller
Currently there are categories but no search.

