Shaking Things Up
Until recently, the local buying and selling market was dominated by one behemoth: Craigslist. But San Francisco start-up, Zaarly, is shaking things up a bit. This Craigslist meets Location Based Service (LBS)+ actionable activity web tool is already live in over 200 cities.
Zaarly helps you match up a peer-to-peer purchase and sales opportunity with people in your local area. Posts to any of your social media-enabled devices read something like: “Deliver 10lbs of ice to LaunchRock office…for $18.” Maybe someone will do it, maybe not.
$1 Million in 30 Days
For Zaarly, things started off with a bang. Launched on May 18, 2011, the company topped $1 million in listings in the first 30 days. The top performing cities and aggregate sales are all tracked live on their leaderboard. Later that year, Zaarly raised $14.1 million in Series A funding and added Hewlett-Packard CEO and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman to its board of directors. And just recently, Zaarly was listed on FastCompany’s 2012 list of most innovative web companies.
Ideal for SMBs
Small to medium businesses (SMBs) can use this web social media tool to get new customers without having to really do anything. Sometimes, if the transaction is cash-based, they even pay no transaction fees. A win-win for supplier and consumer. And sometimes it’s just a whole lot of fun. These are some of my all time favorite Zaarly gigs:
- $300 for Dwarf entertainers. Must be under 4 and a half feet tall. Required for Tim Burton themed 5 year old’s party (approximately 3 hours work). Must be local. Must be entertaining. Juggling and/or skill at spinning plates a major bonus. All little people encouraged to apply. Costumes provided.
- $75 for Need to fish keys from sewer. I ended up dropping my keys down a sewer in Bucktown. Doesn’t look like too much muck, but I cannot see them. I hear if you have a fishing pole or maybe a pole with a magnet, they are easy to fish out. Help!
- $40 for Someone in Gumby costume. I need someone dressed up in a Gumby costume to make an appearance at an office in River North for 15-20 minutes on Wednesday morning around 9:30am
This site is great, a friend told me about this one a few weeks ago. A lot of potential here. Do you know if they will be adding more cities etc?
What a cool idea for a website. I’m checking it out right now.
This is it! I heard about this website from a friend a few days ago, but forgot the name. thanks for sharing.
Here comes something that had me in splits. But on a serious note the site seems to have a lot of potential. I hope they extend the service to other cities. Thanks for sharing this. Good work indeed.
Haha! Those are great. The “costumes provided” line on the first gig had me laughing out loud.
The site itself definitely sounds like a potentially valuable resource, too. Thanks for the info. I’ll be sure to check it out.
Great Post! I already can see the benefits of this site. This levels out the playing feel and a great way to help fill needs for those desperately needing a solution. You can become a hero in your local market.
Zaarly rocks. I think anyone can jump in to help a desperate crowd and make money to boot.
Zaarly really is a useful website. I recently used it to find help to clean out my garage. It took a little while longer to find someone, but I guess that’s because it doesn’t have the same kind of exposure as similar websites like Craigelist.
This is just a great website. Haha Great idea! lots of potential