Valley startup puts garage sale in palm of hand

Want to sell your unwanted junk?

There's an app for that.

Local entrepreneurs Ray Morgan, Dylan Bathurst and Alex Coleman began offering their free garage sale iPhone application Rumgr through Apple's App Store about a month ago. Rumgr has been downloaded 2,500 times since its launch.

The idea sprang from a dilemma Bathurst faced when moving from his friend's house to his own place.

"I had all this crap in the garage -- a carpet, a microwave," he said. "I didn't want to have a garage sale, because I'm too lazy to do the whole Saturday morning, lay everything out (thing)."

Bathurst posted photos of his wares on Twitter instead, but the seed for Rumgr was planted in the Zappos employee's mind.

He brought the idea to Startup Weekend, a 54-hour event in June that brought together local entrepreneurs. It was there that the Rumgr team of Morgan, Bathurst and Coleman coalesced and the development of the app began in earnest.

If you have junk to sell, you can snap a photo and upload it to the app almost instantly. If you're in the market for secondhand stuff, Rumgr finds items near you using the iPhone's location finder. People can sell almost anything, as long as it's legal and relatively family-friendly (no adult paraphernalia allowed). IPods, clothes, furniture and guitars are now for sale through the app. Some users have even photographed items at their ongoing garage sales to expedite the selling process.

Rumgr allows buyers and sellers to contact each other to work out the pricing and transportation arrangements.

The Rumgr team works out of a downtown work space at the Ogden on loan from Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh. The three worked at Zappos until Morgan and Bathurst left the company two weeks ago to devote more time to Rumgr.

Some software developers sell apps as side projects, but Morgan, Bathurst and Coleman want to run Rumgr into a business.

Choosing to develop Rumgr for the iPhone rather than for Android operating systems was a "technology decision as well as a business decision," Bathurst said.

Morgan, who was on the mobile development team at Zappos, was already an experienced iPhone app developer, and the group would have had to hire an Android expert to be able to launch Rumgr on Android phones.

"You can go with what you know or learn what you don't know. It's definitely going to take a lot longer to learn what you don't know," Morgan said.

Once Rumgr gets off the ground, the team plans to hire an Android developer.

The free app doesn't bring in any money at the moment, but there were also few startup costs -- just a business license and the $99 Apple developer fee. The biggest investment in the company was the team's time, Morgan and Bathurst said.

The team plans to add money-making features, like taking commissions from in-application purchases, after attracting more users and building critical mass.

"I think there's this myth that it's a gold mine. Finish an app and make $1 million," Morgan said. "That's very not true."

Morgan and Bathurst decided Rumgr could only be successful if they turned the app into their full-time job.

"No one will ever see your product unless you go out and hustle it," Bathurst said.

Though Rumgr faces competition from hundreds of other apps, the team hopes to differentiate the app with its user interface, which is simple, clean and easy to figure out.

"We want to be the easiest and safest way to buy stuff from your phone," he said.

The team credits the budding Vegas tech community for its support, both by tweeting about Rumgr and offering feedback at the biweekly Vegas Jelly meetings at Emergency Arts.

"This community of people helping each other out has been huge for us," Bathurst said.

For local entrepreneurs seeking community and resources to launch their own businesses, the second Startup Weekend event is Nov. 18-20.

Contact reporter Caitlin McGarry at
cmcgarry@lvbusinesspress.com or 702-387-5273.