Roopit's Voice

This person found a house for rent for himself using Roopit & also managed to sell his mobile through it.

Here is what he says:

I really liked the site and concept. I am neither a good web developer or tester These are few suggestions from an internet laymen users view.

Few quick suggestions ..

‘YOUR PRODUCT’ TAB

I would prefer to see the products under a major categories and sub categories(Aligned columnar format) given the variety of products will be increased gradually.(How about ‘olx’ view)

‘YOUR LOCALITY’ TAB

I guess the position of the locations is based upon the Bangalore map.As we already have a map option ,I would prefer to see this under major tabular categories e.g NORTH,SOUTH, central Bangalore etc .From UI prospective it can improve user experience, i believe so

‘ON A MAP’   TAB

As there is already a Locality option,How about positioning the map in the same page instead of a new tab.The ultimate goal is same.

For future enhancement

You can think of adding a ‘upload image’ option for sell options. A lot can be improved in search rank/page rank logic.Google couldn’t locate few of the available items in the site. How about making the web page more colourful and catchy ?

If i will come across something else ,will glad to share with you guys. My best wishes with all the roopit team ..keep up the good work. keep improving keep rocking !

Thank You So much for taking the time to give such elaborate feedback. All points noted. Some of it will show up in due course of time.

Just another day went past for most people in Bangalore. Slightly chill. Rains on and off. Traffic Jams. Lots of Noise on the road. A two hour power cut.

Today,  A test match victory, thanks to Laxman, and 4 Golds for India in CWG happened too.

Was special at our office here though. We have managed to connect 5000 Buyers with Sellers in a little over four months since inception. We hope you were one of them.

Today was even more special, actually. We have also connected 100 buyers with sellers on a single day for the first time.

This double whammy was possible because of the faith & trust you & thousand others (who are not online & are probably not reading this) put in us. On this special day, we resolve to make Classifieds in Bangalore, really “realtime” and really “location based”.

Please celebrate with us. Listen to the “Love me do (Beatles released their first record today in 1962)”,  get yourself a piece of chocolate, Tell one friend of yours about Roopit, Eat healthy &  Sleep well. We promise, the next chocolate is on us.

Thank you for 5000 & 100.

Roopit was designed “also” to be a place where people give away stuff that they no longer use. For Free. And initially, that did happen. Books, Room Freshners etc. came up and we were very happy. We added a “For Free” tab to further motivate the generosity and to make it easy for people to find these items. Without much thought, That tab showcased any notice that had the word “Free”. Lame, yes. But, we wanted to wait & see if the generosity persisted before adding intelligence.

But, these days, Roopit has become extremely commercial. Much more that we thought. And not many “Free” Stuff comes up. So, “For Free” will go away in a few days.

There are a few items still lingering there which is actually free. This is a last call to pick it up, if you need it. Feel free to continue to give things away at no cost. Just that there wont be a separate tab for it.

If you need an alternative, we also suggest Freecycle

Got something to Sell?

In Bangalore? Looking to buy something? Now is a great time to throw your browser away for classifieds.

Classifieds? SMS Roopit.

Lets do this together:

1) Pick up your phone.
2) Now type something you want,

example: “iphone 4” or “2 BHK rent“.

3) Send it as an SMS to +91-9916-ROOPIT (That is “9916766748“).

4) Wait for about a minute and then Head over here for a discussion.

Roopit – Classifieds on SMS. Like it?

pic courtesy

Visiting a website often to be abreast on what is happening is long dead and gone. For a while now, the Internet is being served to us as RSS in our Feed readers.

Some really good deals at Roopit get picked in minutes. The shortest one I know is this laptop that got sold in about 5 minutes after posting. In this case, the buyer happened to stumble upon Roopit around the same time as the seller. But, lets not leave these things to serendipity.

A little while ago, we introduced RSS feeds on Roopit. A few of you have subscribed to it. Hope you are liking it.

Now, Powered by Feedburner, we can deliver all these great deals to your inbox as a nice email once a day. This is how it looks:

Roopit Deals on Email

Watch out for the “Subscribe as email” section on the right pane or visit, roopit.com/code to see how to make Roopit work for you.

Happy Shopping.

Hey,

I am hey@roopit.com speaking. I want to be your GTalk IM buddy. Infact, You can add me as your buddy on any Jabber supported client. Can I be your friend?

Once you add me, I will be waiting to hear from you about anything that you want to sell or give away for free. Type in a sale notice like this:

house-rent@koramangala Perfect Vaastu, 2200 sqft, duplex bangalow. Commercial use. 1 garage + 2 car parks. near BDA complex. Rent: Rs 45,000 – nego. Call 9916766748

With this, I will understand that you have a “house” for “rent” at locality “Koramangala“. I will use this for categorizing your sale notice in the right place. Further, I understand that the rest of the text in your IM ( Perfect Vaastu, 2200……..Rs 45,000 – nego) is the description of your item on rent. Put in any valid 10 digit mobile number in your IM and I will understand it to be your mobile phone where nice people looking for a house on rent must call.

Here is another example:

laptop@shivaji-nagar 2 Years old Macbook in tiptop condition… 2.4 GHz, 160 GB HD, 2 GB RAM – Covered under Apple Care Protection Plan for 3 Years. Call 9916766748

With this, I understand that you have a “laptop” for “sale” (because there is no “rent”) at “Shivaji Nagar” (You have put a hyphen between Shivaji and nagar to let me know that it is name of your locality).

Also, I will try to adjust your description to fit the 140 character limit, but if I cant, please allow me to truncate or modify it.

Once I figure all of this out, your sale notice will go live and will be available for people who are on the internet or who call Roopit on the phone at 9916766748. Here is how it will appear on the www.roopit.com: (Note that your mobile number is not displayed on the website and hence will continue to remain safe and secure).

Note that you will still need to verify your phone before you can start managing this notice. Furthermore, unverified notices get pushed out of the system really quickly.

I hope this is not confusing, but even if it is, start messaging me. Because, whenever I don’t understand what you are saying I will pass it along to real people who work at Roopit.com and they will help you out.

Also, I am just beginning to do this stuff myself, so, if I behave a little weirdly, please excuse me. I will get better with time. If something goes wrong, call the Roopit people at 9916766748.

On Gtalk – Type hey@roopit.com as your buddy to add.
On Pidgin – Select hey@roopit.com as the buddy’s username on your GTalk Account.
On Gmail – Start typing in hey@roopit.com and choose “invite to chat”

Thanks,
hey@roopit.com
Your Reseller Bot on GTalk

Sorry, Roopit did not have search earlier. It does now.

This is just the beginning of our pursuit on a great search experience and we will keep improving it in the days to come. Visit roopit.com with Search or try the search form (without the styles) right here:

We would love it if you could tell us how it works over at @roopitwit, or at facebook.com/roopit or by leaving a comment here.

As sellers of stuff at home, we are continually forced to make the decision on how much to sell something for. Consider this Television. It is a real treasure from the olden days. The owner told us that a second hand dealer offered 500 Rs! for it. The owner knew (and we knew it too) that it is worth much more than 500. But how much?

Consider this drum kit that got sold out recently. How much is that actually worth? We don’t know. The seller did’nt know. But some experts do. Because they have dealt with buying & selling used products all through their life, they have a rough idea. So, we decided to bring in a few of them to help you.

Now, you can call up a Roopit expert to  get a rough idea on how much to sell your product for. We have introduced this service in a few product categories: Cars, Bikes, Cycles, Fridge, Washine Machine, Television. The information you need is available on the sell page of these categories, like this:

We hope you like the service. If you do, we would love to expand it to all categories.

Happy Selling.

We have released RSS feeds of the streams that you see at Roopit. Wherever you see a list of sale notices on Roopit, you will be able to find an RSS feed for it. Click on the icon on your browser and subscribe to it using your favorite reader.

A view of Roopit’s RSS feed on Firefox:

Why is this interesting? Roogirl, for instance, is very interested in books. Considering many people are offering their books for free or almost free, Roogirl has decided to subscribe to the feeds. With Roopit Feeds, She not only discovers books but also buys them before someone else finds it.

I am not too fond of RSS readers and would stick to emails instead. There are a number of Rss to Email converters around. My house is starting to become cramped and I am looking for a bigger house in the koramangala area. So, I went to the houses in koramangala stream, picked the RSS url and put it in an RSS to Email converter. Now, all the information I want about houses on rent gets delivered to my inbox as and when it happens.

Like Roogirl and me, I hope you find it useful too. If you end up buying or selling something because of Roopit, do let us know. Because, Nothing else excites us more.

Happy Shopping.

A lot of people loved the Roopit Hi Video.We are extremely glad. A number of you all also asked us who made the video and how it was made. Here it is.

Things used:

• A good friend with great sketching talent, Vaidehi.
• Camtasia studio – An excellent video editing software with 30 day free trial.
• Microsoft Powerpoint – For story board and micro animation.
• Gimp – The uber cool free software photo editing tool
• Creativity

The story:

We went hunting for a startup or a studio that can do a video for Roopit. It was time consuming and costly.  At the end of it, we decided (just like most other things at Roopit) that we are going to it ourselves. We looked around at a number of videos, notably this, this and this and learnt a lot from it.

We debated on the story and finally decided to narrate the true story behind birth of Roopit: One of us was unable to find a second hand refrigerator for him home. There was enough drama in this story that we did’nt need to make up another one. And because it was real, it sounded and felt honest.

We had no clue what a “Story board” was. And a friend of ours, Upesh, helped us understand what goes behind making a animated video. By the way, he is truly creative and makes some wonderful hand made products. Can you check it out please?

Early on, we decided that the hero (Karthik) is going to be a real person in color. We also decided to use only a face to avoid getting into costume and lighting issues. It was the emotions about the second hand buying experience that got us to Roopit and a face was enough to demonstrate just that.

All of us at Roopit are pretty  bad at sketching and so we asked around to find someone who can draw. A friend of ours suggested another friend who graciously listened to our story and agreed to make sketches. After a few days, she came back with a rough sketch of all the props we found in the story line. The rough sketch added a flavour of “startupness” to the story. So we decided to keep the rough sketches rather than re-do them in fair.

Then, we got all the images scanned. We were stunned by the fact that they charge 10 Rs per page of scan. We had 20 or so pages to scan. Incidentally, we are looking for a used printer/scanner for our office. Let us know if you have one.

Then we found another friend who was a sport and agreed to emote like all we asked him to. We did the photo shoot at his home at 4 AM in the morning days before the launch. Then, we used GIMP to cut/copy/paste our images into Powerpoint. We heavily relied upon Powerpoint’s curtailed, yet very nice animation capabilities to create motion.

We fiddled around with a few video editing softwares including camstudio, windows movie maker etc., but we couldnt be more glad to have found Camtasia. It came with a 30 day free trial and that was enough for us to complete the production. One of us sat and narrated the story with powerpoint and camtasia did all the hard work of recording the screen and audio. It was easy to figure things out with Camtasia and so editing was a breeze too.

And so, here we go, the powerpoint (with animation and images)

And the final Roopit “Hi” Video:

We will be glad to help you with your video, but only if you are a startup or a student.

Thanks for listening to the story.

Happy Shopping.