Zankit – Revolutionizing Online Classifieds
8 Jun
This past weekend I participated in Startup Weekend Indianapolis, and the experience was even better than I was expecting. The premise of Startup Weekend is to leave on Sunday evening as part owners of a new business. I’ll be honest, I had my doubts that we would be able to get a business started in about 30 hours of work. But we accomplished a lot more than I thought we could, especially considering we chose the daunting task of launching a competitor to Craigslist.
Zankit is an online classifieds marketplace where anyone can share listings to their social networks on Facebook and Twitter. If your link produces the buyer you earn a referral commission. Now you can have thousands of people helping you sell your big-ticket item like a car or a condo rental. They’re happy to do it because they know they can make some money if someone from their network buys the item.
Take a look at our Zankit demo video to get a better understanding of the full experience.
I also learned a few things at Startup Weekend that were pretty cool. First, web development skills are definitely not a commodity that can simply be outsourced. The development guys on our team did some amazing work in a short period of time. They formed the plan for the site and then executed on everything. Being able to design the functionality of the site, and then build everyone of those features is definitely not a skill that many people have. Second, you can accomplish a lot more in a short period of time than you think when you bring people together with different disciplines that are committed to the same goal. While the developers were hard at work building the features, the marketing team was busy creating content around our brand, scripting and producing our demo video, and designing the look and feel of the site. It all came together in our final presentation, and it felt pretty cool to show off our new business to all the other teams.
I’m looking forward to pushing Zankit forward. Let me know if you have any suggestions or feedback!
Agreed! It was a great time this weekend and it was FUN to see everybody working in parallel on the different tasks. We had the best mix of skills and people on the team… by far!
Hopefully the sky will be the limit for us!