That’s what happens when an iPod auction starts at 1 Rupee.

When the auction started at 3pm, the first crowd of freshmen walked by incredulously. It can’t be, they said. But by the frantic bidding activity which soon followed, an online marketplace suddenly became as real as itwar bazar on steroids.

The activity was a live online auction at SZABIST for an iPod Shuffle. The objective was to capture user feedback for product improvement and also to get the buzz machines going. And boy, was there buzz. By 7pm, half the campus had seen our kiosks, including 1 journalist and 2 media professionals.

Sometime during the 3 hour activity i was whisked away by the SZABIST IEEE chairperson to speak at the entrepreneurship seminar they had organized. The highlight of the seminar was the bright student who got a Lootmaar t-shirt for correctly pointing out the similarity between Lootmaar.com and a singles bar. The rest of the session was shariat compliant, PG-13. Well, almost.

Lessons learnt:
1. Go out, meet users. They’re smarter than you are.
2. Take lots of squash tape.
3. Every entrepreneur is a sales man.

-Adnan

ps. A very special thanks to Zeeshan Arshad (BCS coordinator), Saim, Wafa and Fahad (IEEE SZABIST) for organizing the live auction and the seminar.

Picture: Nomi, co-founder (left) and Imran, the auction winner (right)

We’re still in beta, but we have a new and improved URL. We’re now at:

http://www.lootmaar.com/

We almost got a heart attack when doing the migration, but that story is for another day.

Reason for the migration?

In the next few weeks, we’ve planned some marketing activities and we wanted to build recognition for the main URL, rather than the temporary beta one. No conspiracy theories on this one.
-Adnan