Roopit's Voice

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.

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

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.

Roopit is a meeting point for us to buy & Sell amongst ourselves. And because no middle men or businesses are involved, Roopit ends up being a lot nicer.

Roopit is crafted to be simple & fast.

Buying

You are somewhere in Central Bangalore (Say Majestic) and want to buy a mobile. One way is to go to the nearest  electronics store and pick a new one. The other is to buy online. The third, is to check with Roopit. And there are a couple of ways to check with us.

• Visit www.roopit.com
• Click on the “Your product” Tab and choose Mobiles. You are now seeing all the mobiles up for sale in Bangalore.

• You obviously dont want to go to Anekal to buy a mobile. At the same time, you don’t really mind if the seller is in MG Road. So, lets narrow it down to the central Bangalore area by clicking on the “Find your locality” tab and selecting “Central Bangalore area”.
• Now you see all the mobiles close to your area. They are arranged chronologically. That is, the latest post is on the top. All of them are short descriptions so you can quickly scroll through.

• Even as you scroll, if you like something. Click on the “Want it” button and put it your phone number.

• Continue to browse and find four or five mobile phones you like.
• Once you are done, your will have all the SMSes, with the seller’s phone number and the content you saw on the website to help you re-call who is selling what.

The other way to reach out to Roopit is to call +91-9916-ROOPIT (That’s +91-9916-766748).

• Tell us that you are looking for a mobile phone in and around the majestic area.
• We will then send you a few SMSes with the seller’s phone numbers along with a short description of the mobiles they want to sell. This will help you pick the ones you like.

Selling

Unlike buying, Selling is a lot harder and unpredictable. Your current options are to use one of the existing classifieds website (such as craigslist.co.in) or post an ad in a print journal (like News papers or Free Ads). The other is to reach out to Roopit.

• Visit www.roopit.com

• Click on the “Sell Something” Button.

• Click on “what are you selling” drop down choose Mobiles.

• Click on “where are you selling” and choose your area approximately (Say South Bangalore). It is fine to be approximate. Buyers dont want to travel across the city, but they dont mind travelling from one locality to another.
• Write a short description (140 characters) of your mobile. There is an example there to help you write the sale notice.

• Put in your mobile number and click “create sale notice”.
• Your Sale notice will now appear in the front page, in South Bangalore page and in the Mobiles section.

• If this your first time, ensure that you send a blank message from the same phone number you used while posting. We require you to do this to ensure that this phone number is yours.
• You can now manage this sale notice from your phone. Details on marking the notice as sold, and, if for some reason, deleting will be sent your phone once you verify.
• You will also find a “delete” button for a little while in your notice as well. You can use it to delete it in case you have written something wrong and would like to change/edit the notice.

• So now, we have our job cut out to find a buyer for you.

Presenting to you: roopit.com

Happy Shopping.

Roopit is a meeting point for individuals like you and me to buy and sell things between the two of us.

Retail Shops and e-commerce stores are bent upon selling you a new item. Say a refrigerator, a book, an ipod. And they do a very good job at it. But often, most of us are upgrading when we are buying something new. It is likely that you already have a Television in working condition when you are buying a new Flat screen LED TV. There is nothing wrong with your existing TV. You simply want to upgrade to a newer technology for better quality & experience.

Now, These retail and e-commerce shops typically don’t tell you what to do with your old TV. Actually, Most of them don’t care. Some may have an exchange offer, but, for a rock bottom price. You know that your TV is worth much more but you will have to settle for their price. Other retailers might give you the contact of a second-hand broker/dealer and the story is not very different with them either. For example, I gave my fridge in working condition to a dealer for 1500 Rs.. I didn’t know what else to do.

So, these second hand dealers will usually break your TV down and re-furbish and sell it’s parts. Have you ever seen a decent electronics shop selling second hand TV anywhere? This is also the reason why they wont pay your TV for what it is worth. Because, they are not going to use it. They are going to break it down.

At Roopit, we believe there is someone out there who will be very happy to buy your TV, take it home, and actually watch something on it. And because he is going to use it, it is worth as much for him as it is for you. Roopit’s mission is to connect you with him in the fastest and safest way possible.

It seems, 99% of the things we bought six months ago are no longer in real use today ^[1]. So, all of us have a lot of things to give away all the time. We hope you use Roopit to sell your TV, to rent your house or to give away a book free to someone and to put that entire 99% of the things you don’t want, to good re-use.

Using Roopit is ridiculously simple. Read more here: http://blog.roopit.com/using-roopit

[1] : storyofstuff.com

We have a long list of people (and things) who were responsible for helping Roopit see the light of the day. It is only fitting that we mention each and every one them. Furthermore, one word describing our feeling.

• status.net – Indebted.
• Open source. Particularly, Ubuntu & the LAMP stack – Freedom
• prettyPhoto – Pretty.
• Camtasia -  Wonderful.
• Google Analytics, Getsatisfaction, Twitter, Facebook – Between You and Us.
• Eclipse – Survival.
• Jquery – Style.
• Geonames – Data
• Wordpress – Communication.

And now to the people.

• Gaurav Bushan – crafty
• Vaidehi – artist
• Noor from Vodafone Store. – “Out of the way” Helpful
• Pathanjali, Pap, Collins & Farex – Generous
• Folks at Flipkart. – Advisory.
• Tapas – Sport.
• Sameer Sisodia – Devil(’s advocate).
• Sharan from Mobme – Prompt.
• Ashish Solanki – Attention to detail.
• Swaroop C H – Makes sense.

And finally to the four people on whose shoulders Roopit rests.

• Rajeswari T S – Heart
• Anand Ganesan – Thought.
• Moxada Singh – Mind
• You – Soul.

Happy Shopping.