Daniel Scudder is the co-founder of DormItem. Visit the DormItem blog here.

How many people are behind this project, and what are your backgrounds?

DormItem was founded by both Zack Coburn and I. Zack is a student at Olin College of Engineering, and I’m a student at Babson College. I met Zack over the summer when he founded Madhens (www.madhens.net) and was featured on Techcrunch…He told me he liked the DormItem concept and that he wants to use it when at Olin. I told him I go to Babson and that we should meet up (Babson and Olin campuses are right next to each other), and from there the rest is history – we went out and built the current version of DormItem that you see today, and launched it in November of last fall. I would say that since both of us are still college students, our backgrounds are pretty limited…Zack has been building websites for 10 years, and I’m in the Accelerated Entrepreneurship Curriculum at Babson, where they throw us into small startups and have us write business plans. I would say that we are both pretty ‘techie’, so running a web business meshes well between both of us.

Why did you choose to use Ruby on Rails?

Ruby on Rails is great for cutting down development time. Zack is the CTO, so he wanted to use Ruby to save him time. It only took Zack a month to build DormItem ready for launch, and that was working around his school and classwork. Ruby has been great for building quick, ready to deploy features. In a startup, when things move fast and you need to constantly be developing and growing, it’s a competitive advantage to be using a programming language that increases development speed. A site like DormItem may require 2-3 php coders, but one Ruby coder gets it done just as fast.

What is the state of your service, and how are you planning on expanding it?

Currently, DormItem aggregates content from over 15 college classified and textbook exchanges on the internet. We do syndication either with XML or by crawling sites, and we add listings into what we call our ‘microregional’ searching system. Microregional searching means that we bridge the gap between college marketplaces, so for example, Boston College students can search listings from Boston University and Northeastern University marketplaces at the same time. That’s never been possible before, as marketplaces used to be limited to ‘select your school’ and see only listings from your school. Of course, there is no reason to limit students to only their school when they are perfectly willing to drive 5 minutes to buy something at a nearby college.

For content partners, we offer them increased exposure – listings link right back to the partner’s site, giving them page views and helping them gain awareness for other services they offer, such as event listings or housing listings. We’ve so far reached out and syndicated over 5,500 listings from over 250 schools, so it’s working well for us. Some of our bigger partners include The Daily Jolt and College Swap Shop. Over time, we hope to get more and more content feeding into us, creating a large index of textbooks and used goods that college students can located on campuses nationwide.

How long did it take to develop DormItem, and what have you learned along the way?

It took about a month to build the current version of DormItem, but we’re constantly adding new features to the site. We have one day every week which we dedicate to coding, and in that short timeframe we roll out new features and functionality to improve the site and technology. I’d say that the biggest thing I’ve learned is that it’s important to build a business, not just a website. A lot of people, especially other college entrepreneurs who I see, spend their time just developing a site out and adding new features. But they never get a chance to launch and focus their time on business development and marketing. Building and managing the business is just as important as coding the site, so it’s great that I specialize in that area while Zack can focus on the technology. Also, I would say keep the site simple at first and then build to where your users take it. If you build out tons of functionality, you’re making a huge bet that all the time spent on those features will be worthwhile because your users will want them. Why not build simple first, and then let your users dictate what the next features will be?

What are your future goals?

We hope to bring as much content as possible onto the site from many different sources…Our microregion system will work best if we have great content filling up the microregions, making the system useful and intelligent to students. Although we are reaching critical mass in certain locations, it will be important to get that mass going in all ‘college town’ type locales.

As we bring in more content, we don’t want to be the only container of that content. So what we’re doing is working on ways to decentralize ‘microregionally’. This means that we distribute to major classified search engines and feed into college student portals, all with our microregion RSS feeds and dynamic RSS search that makes decentralization easy.