Roopit's Voice

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.