~ 11th July afternoon

Hi, so for those of you who don’t know me, I am Hardik, a UG2k21 dual degree CLD student. I had been interested in tech and entrepreneurship from the first year of college, learnt from many sources, made connections with CIE people, got some mentors to help me in case I ever wanted to build something. Thought and ideated about a LOT of ideas, but due to some or the other problems, all the ideas never seemed good enough to put my 100% into and thus nothing as such materialised.

During one of the these ideation sessions, Arjun Mihika and I were sitting in Kadamb and I was telling about this idea where the problem with Olx type models is the issue of trustability amongst people, like I am very sure there is so much random waste stuff people have at homes that they want to get away with, but dont want to throw either and ofc on the other spectrum of it is the very likely probablity that a person in a small proximity of distance would be looking for the exact same thing. So the idea for Olx was perfect to capture that, but due to the trust issue, there is always the reluctance to buy something 2nd hand from a person you do not know at all. Thus, my small addition to the idea was that we can make Olx groups for socities and communities, that they can only see about things being sold between the group of people they know or atleast trust to be living in the same society as you do. The idea seemed good, but while deciding the revenue model we realised, that technically a whatsapp group can solve this problem.

So just to do a pilot study of making a whatsapp group about this, and observing what problems people would face, which we can then work on to make a revenue model around solving those problems.

And thus in that corner of Kadamb at a table during dinner, the IIIT community was made.

Initially, I just put Buy Sell Rent@IIITH, Lost and Found @IIITH, Spam@IIITH and added a dp for Buy Sell Rent

and shared the link in different batch groups, seniors, juniors, ours.

And waited.

My friend texts me, “Bro I have these extra AA batteries I want to sell, can you put it in the group?”. I asked him to start the convo himself because someone had to, and he did and then after then the momentum started building, with the randomest, funniest things being sold.