Students and moms are the exact focus group for this app. We decided to support Windows Phone for couple of reasons.
- Prevalence of Windows Phones. Dont laugh but I am in Seattle and with tons of Microsoft employees most of our beta user base had them.
- Android dev cost. Between screen resolutions, ramp up on environment etc I decided on punting this for now. We are planning on outsourcing this app to a vendor (the API's and UX would be very comparable to iPhone so that part is covered)
Since you are a student, would you mind if I contacted you for testing this among your friends? When you say a group exists, does that mean a groups outside of facebook?
Another target audience is kids buying text books. If a freshman had a place to see all books shared with a study/dorm/sorority facebook group, wouldnt that be more beneficial/cheaper than buying off Craigslist or Ebay? Would he choose to check in that place before looking at the other sites? If the answer is a "maybe" or "yes" then we would love to explore that.
YardSale came up while we were in progress and I take it as a validation of the problem space we are trying to address. YardSale makes craigslist posting easier by virtue of an app and adds viral component by sharing with facebook friends and twitter. But thats a wall post to all your friends and like one comment mentioned not all my friends are interested in all my items.
Facebook friends is a small part of the social graph. There is a graph of people who are not your direct friends but share similar interests by virtue of belonging to a group. This aims to tap in to that graph. Thanks for providing your opinion and to be fair we have considered those points. We will never compete with Ebay and Craigslist and for the target market that are successful in selling/buying items there this definitely will not be appealing. Is there a pool of people who would rather put stuff on a virtual garage sale as opposed to a craigslist post? if such a pool exists then this idea would sound appealing. We might be targeting a super niche market and valuable feedback like yours helps us understand how niche that is.
we are a team of 2 with me doing most of the tech work in addition to use case. Working on this on weekends and evenings its been almost 8 months worth of effort.
Fair question and the answer to that is trust/convenience. There are people who dont want the hassle of dealing with strangers by posting to Craigslist. The trust factor is just not there. I have personal things that I will not put on ebay at all because its not that high price of an item to sell. I am part of a sport club where we routinely give off old equipment or sell things if we bought extra or bought the wrong size. We think what if you had a convenient place to list and share such items. next time someone joins a club looking for used gear or new family moves in to the neighbor hood, one can point them to Zapaang app where items shared with the community fb group or club fb group is visible.
Valid feedback. I have made that change..there are other services that I am working on that will be part of this. Having said that I accept that till its not ready to make it explicit.