Kyle
We constantly hear about Google alumni and Facebook alumni who have moved on to greener pastures with their own startups. Today we turn to Las Vegas and a new mobile startup called Rumgr. It’s founders are alumni of online shoe site zappos.com
The startup was born out of an idea from co-founder Dylan Bathurst. Las Vegas’ 8newsnow.com (which for a tv station does a kick ass job of covering Vegas startups) reports that Bathurst was looking to unload some old housewares that he was storing with a buddy. He didn’t want to wake up early and have a garage sale, and most likely didn’t want to deal with a bunch of fake buyers wanting to paypal him $5,000 for his microwave in Nigeria, using craigslist.
So what he decided to do was take a bunch of pictures of the stuff he was selling and put those pictures on his phone. He showed off his wares to his friends and was able to sell everything. That’s when he thought to himself that this kind of thing would make a great app.
Bathurst teamed up with Ray Morgan and Alex Coleman two other developers who previously worked at Zappos the Las Vegas online shoe retailer. The three co-founders liken Rumger to a gigantic yard sale on a free app.
More after the break
The Rumgr experience is very easy. The user simply takes a picture for their listing and then the pictures are delivered back to other users based on proximity to the location using the phones GPS. The app of course shows the items that are closest first.
Everything from museum quality snake oils to a fire hydrant have been sold on Rumgr. They’ve had 14,000 downloads to date and about 4000 items for sale. While that may not seem like a lot, put into consideration that the app just launched in February and you can see these three entrepreneurs are definitely onto something.
Their former boss, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh along with Zappos executives Fred Mossler and Arun Rujan and Resort Gaming Group CEO Andrew Donner have invested $500,000 in Rumgr. Rumgr plans on adding employees including an Android developer to bring their app to the hundreds of millions of Android users.
Linkage:
Check out Rumgr here
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