Chegg goes beta with marketplace

What do you get when you cross a chicken with an egg? Why Chegg.com, of course, the online marketplace for students to buy and sell local items. Fashioned after Craigslist and geared toward students, Chegg Inc. has just gotten a bit of a finanacial boost from investors to the tune of $500,000, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

The marketplace was created as Textopedia by Stanford senior Vinay Mahagaokar, who got tired of being ripped off by the university bookstore. College bookstores buy back textbooks for very little and then turn around and sell them to students at a huge markup. He sold Textopedia to Chegg last February, which is integrating the marketplace service with a larger vision of merging eBay, FaceBook and Craigslist.

“The values that Textopedia had were very similar to the values Chegg has,” said Chegg Inc. Chief Executive Officer Osman Rashid in and article in the The Stanford Daily. The whole idea is to try and help students save money. Chegg started out as a book site back in 2003. But we used to get a lot of requests from students to sell items other than books. So we went from books to furniture to apartment subleases to ride exchange. We want to launch the Web site on the West coast and Stanford is where we want to start.”

Chegg is expanding to other services as well such as a text message system for books. Students will be able to text message Chegg while they are at the Bookstore to find out if the book they are looking to buy is available for less on the site.

“From what we know about the campus classifieds, it’s very fragmented,” Rashid said. “No one has really pulled it together with an overall solution, as one big network among students. We’re going to unify. Our approach is unique in that we’re working with students who have already built systems on their own campuses.

ww.chegg.com">Chegg.com, of course, the online marketplace for students to buy and sell local items. Fashioned after Craigslist and geared toward students, Chegg Inc. has just gotten a bit of a finanacial boost from investors to the tune of $500,000, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The marketplace was created as Textopedia by Stanford senior Vinay Mahagaokar, who got tired of being ripped off by the university bookstore. College bookstores buy back textbooks for very little and then turn around and sell them to students at a huge markup. He sold Textopedia to Chegg last February, which is integrating the marketplace service with a larger vision of merging eBay, FaceBook and Craigslist.

 

“The values that Textopedia had were very similar to the values Chegg has,” said Chegg Inc. Chief Executive Officer Osman Rashid in and article in the The Stanford Daily. The whole idea is to try and help students save money. Chegg started out as a book site back in 2003. But we used to get a lot of requests from students to sell items other than books. So we went from books to furniture to apartment subleases to ride exchange. We want to launch the Web site on the West coast and Stanford is where we want to start.”

Chegg is expanding to other services as well such as a text message system for books. Students will be able to text message Chegg while they are at the Bookstore to find out if the book they are looking to buy is available for less on the site.

“From what we know about the campus classifieds, it’s very fragmented,” Rashid said. “No one has really pulled it together with an overall solution, as one big network among students. We’re going to unify. Our approach is unique in that we’re working with students who have already built systems on their own campuses.